"Halloween Ends" (2022) #halloween #reading #readalong #readaloud

Prior to visiting my local cinema this afternoon with my two favourite people in all the world one of those glorious humans, my beautiful son, insisted we end Halloween at the beginning and the 1978 original, as well as leaping forward to the last two iterations of this mythological franchise, last year’s Halloween Kills and 2018’s 40 year anniversary of the original Halloween. I saw the 1978 original for the one and only time well over two decades ago and I didn’t care for it then and, heathen that I am, I don’t particularly care for it now. What I did enjoy though was the stark juxtaposition between the slowly crafted suspense and oddities of the original John Carpenter directed film that runs at its own deliberately slow pace, with the grotesquely over the top almost “slasher” type recent additions to this cinematic cannon under the direction of David Gordon Green.

Green returns in the director’s chair here alongside the beautifully evergreen Jamie Lee Curtis for her seventh (eighth if you include the uncredited appearance in Halloween III) outing as “Laurie Strode” and nearly four decades since I first fell in love with her and the infusion of love, fun and humanity she introduced beside Dan Aykroyd and Eddie Murphy in the John Landis directed Trading Places in 1983, an epochal film of my adolescent years. The original Halloween should have been similarly significant in my growing up and early tentative steps into the world of film appreciation but I simply can’t see past Friedkin’s The Exorcist from 1973 or Kubrick’s The Shining 7 years later. Both of these horror films had and still continue to hold, a significant vice like grip over my horror film loving heart with only A Nightmare on Elm Street (epochal) and The Blair Witch Project coming close to joining the horror films of my youth.

The above two paragraphs are taken from my spoiler free review of "Halloween Ends" I originally penned and published to my Medium blog site on 14th October 2022 and which can be read in full and for free via my Substack blog site linked immediately below:

https://ramblingmusings666.substack.com/p/halloween-ends-2022-a19c044076a1

This review also forms part of my 7 volumes of "essential film reviews collection" (£4.49 per volume) or all 7 volumes can be read for free should you have an Amazon Kindle "Unlimited" package:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B0C4HZSTTH?ref_=dbs_p_pwh_rwt_anx_a_lnk&storeType=ebooks

https://www.patreon.com/TheBlackfordBookClub
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