This is Halloween

Age of the Geek Column: It's been a while since we've seen Michael Myers.
Specifically, it's been nine years since "Halloween II," the tenth movie in the Halloween franchise, but that dry spell finally been alleviated with the release of "Halloween," the 11th movie in the franchise.
Confused yet?
Before we dive into this, let's get a few things out of the way because the continuity of the Halloween franchise is among the most convoluted in cinema.
"Halloween" came out in 1978 and introduced the world to Michael Myers, silent stabber of Midwest babysitters. "Halloween II" followed in 1981, taking place immediately after the first movie and introducing the twist that slasher survivor Laurie Strode was actually Michael Myers' long lost baby sister.
Then came "Halloween III: Season of the Witch," a movie completely unrelated to Michael Myers at all. At the time, the idea was that the Halloween franchise could grow to be an anthology series of unconnected horror movies. Obviously that idea didn't pan out very well.
1988's "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers," was aptly named, bringing back the masked murderer to stalk his way through a trilogy of increasingly supernatural themed movies that ends with "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers."
In 1998 the franchise got its first soft-reboot. "Halloween: H20" brings back Jamie Lee Curtis for a follow up to the first two Halloween movies that ignores the previous three entries in the franchise. The movie was followed-up in 2002 with the ironically named "Halloween: Resurrection," which was so panned that it ended up shutting down the franchise all together.
But of course, the aughts were a time of reboots and Halloween was no exception. Rob Zombie reimagined Michael Myers with a 2007 remake of the original movie, followed by a lackluster sequel that again put the franchise on hold for nearly a decade.
So now we have 2018's "Halloween," a sequel to 1978's "Halloween," not to be confused with 2007's "Halloween" remake.
"Halloween" (2018) is the 11th film in the franchise but if you're a newcomer, you're in luck because this sequel ignores all nine of its predecessors. No going after long lost family members. No druid cults. No Busta Rhymes.
This jettison of the franchise lore makes jumping into the new movie easier, but it also introduces an interesting narrative challenge.
In "Halloween" (2018), Michael Myers isn't a semi-supernatural avatar of evil with a double digit body count spanning decades. He's a quiet guy that killed a grand total of four people in one day in the late 70s. As is noted in the movie, by today's standards that's not exactly the biggest thing to worry about.
The movie kind of cheats here. It gets away with playing up Michael as the all-encompassing avatar of evil because even though the other nine movies are out-of-continuity, the audience is still going to bring that history with them into the theater. Even if this Michael has spent 40 years locked away since his first Halloween stabbing spree, the audience will still see him as the guy that's been slashing for decades.
This discrepancy allows the audience to still see Michael as a scary monster, but it also inadvertently exposes a sobering reality.
Think about it for a second. If you totaled Michael's lifetime body count by the end of the most recent movie, it wouldn't break the top-five of deadliest US shootings, all of which have happened since 2007. It wouldn't even be close.
Michael racks up an impressive kill count for a guy that prefers a knife over a semi-automatic rifle, but if the "Haddonfield stabbings of 2018" happened in the real world, it would get the standard run through the news cycle, probably extended by the NRA using it an example of how it's not just guns that are dangerous weapons, and then be largely forgotten. Resigned to a Wikipedia entry alongside Stoneman Douglas and San Bernardino.
We are living in a horror movie.
In just the last decade, multiple people have committed mass-murders that dwarf any horror movie you can think of. They weren't inhumanly focused incarnations of pure evil. They weren't supernatural. They were just unwell and had access to weapons capable of dealing out death on a large scale.
This realization leads to two thought.
The cynical part of me wonders how a franchise like Halloween can be expected to survive in a world where its star slasher is a relatively mediocre threat. Five out of ten of the deadliest shootings in the US have happened between the last Halloween movie and this one. In 2018 the idea of a guy snapping and stabbing a dozen random people seems almost quaint.
The less-cynical part of me wonders what we can do to put the genie back in the bottle. We'll never get there, but wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where Hollywood didn't have to compete so hard with reality when it comes to horrifying people.
Travis Fischer is a news writer for Mid-America Publishing and would prefer his monsters stay on the other side of the screen.