The Slasher Sequel Election

You can’t kill the Boogeyman, especially when he has a PAC.

In the fall of 1978, two terrifying creations were unleashed: John Carpenter’s Halloween, and me.

It is impossible for me to imagine a world before Halloween or without it. The shadowy presence of Michael Myers has loomed in the background of my life, rising and waning in popularity, reemerging in sequels that — with one exception — got worse with each installment.

I have seen the first Halloween so many times, I can recite it. I saw the other Halloweens out of a sense of obligation that turned, over decades, to dread. Not scared dread. Bored dread, insulted dread, self-inflicted sucker-punch dread.

The dread of watching yet another sequel in a worn-out franchise that cheapens death. The dread of knowing the villain always wins, because after his initial success, he is no longer a villain but a star — and stars, they can do anything, they could shoot someone on 5^th Avenue, and no one would intervene. The sheepish shame of expecting something better when the dreck was baked into the ticket.

You make excuses: the first one was a masterpiece, you’ve never not seen a new Halloween, you want to see how the story ends. But you know that, by design, it can never end. Billionaires will trot out the same old monsters until they’ve drained every dollar, quality control be damned.

This is how it feels to watch the 2024 election.

I take that back. Watching the 2024 election is far worse. “Coup 2: Now With Legal Precedent”, the unwanted sequel to the 2020 race, starring the same people and featuring the same plots — dictatorship, denial, dereliction of duty — is so vile I cannot even address it overtly. I did that already in three books and countless essays overflowing with evidence of why this should not be happening.

This sequel should not exist. That it does is the real horror story.

*          *          *

For those who do not know, Halloween is the tale of Laurie Strode, a teenage babysitter who warns everyone that something menacing has come to her quiet little town of Haddonfield, and everyone thinks she is being ridiculous. As Michael Myers, a psychotic killer who escaped from an asylum, proceeds to murder her friends one by one, it is watchful Laurie who survives.

Laurie, the Girl Scout, always prepared. Laurie, who prioritizes protecting children from harm. Laurie, who manages to kill Michael Myers, only to find he has risen from the dead, after which she learns she’s stuck tracking this asshole forever, and bursts into tears.

Laurie is what horror fans call “The Final Girl”: the female character who understands what is happening, displays proper abject terror, and ends up fighting alone.

It is no fun being the Final Girl.

Laurie’s only confidant is Doctor Loomis, Michael Myers’ psychiatrist. Loomis says Myers embodies an otherworldly evil. But no one believes him either.

“I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience,” Dr. Loomis notes of Myer’s mental state. “No understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong.”

I watched Halloween a lot during Trump’s presidency.

*          *          *

In the first Halloween, you care about the heroes and the villain equally. You are intrigued by Michael Myers, who says nothing and disappears in and out of the shadows, and you root for Laurie and her ditzy friends.

But by the time you’ve watched nearly a dozen Halloween sequels, the villain is all you remember. You expect everyone else to die, and you have been conditioned to feel nothing when they do. The other characters exist solely for Michael Myers to murder them. They are no longer people, but fodder for cheap thrills and kills.

This is, again, the plotline of 2024: not only the election, but our lives. Politicians and media focus on Trump and treat the rest of us as disposable.

If it feels like you are living in a horror movie, it is because you are.

You live in a world in which one of the deadliest plagues in human history, one still killing and disabling thousands a week, is treated as a trifle, and its victims are portrayed as burdensome and undeserving of empathy. You are living through a live-streamed genocide in which the mutilated bodies of children are hung from hooks as their murderers mock their grieving parents.

You are living through the hottest year of your life, which will be outdone by every subsequent year of your life.

You are living through an election in which a career criminal candidate who already attempted a coup tells us that he will be Dictator, and the other candidate — the one funding the live-streamed genocide — does nothing to stop him, even though his own 2020 presidential platform promised to hold this criminal candidate accountable.

You live in a time where politicians run against “existential threats” and then do nothing to solve them, not seeming to grasp that fundraising off existential threats will be by its very nature short-lived, due to everyone being dead.

You are watching a sequel that pundits are pretending is an original, proclaiming “we’ve never had a candidate like Trump” (except for, you know, Trump) and behaving as if his first term never happened. They act like his attempted coup did not take place either. They ignore that the lack of consequences from Biden’s DOJ normalized sedition and possibly created legal precedent for a second Trump coup.

And legal precedent for stealing classified documents, obstruction of justice, abuse of migrants, abuse of the pardon power, threatening to murder public officials and private citizens, financial deals with transnational organized crime, and countless other offenses — because those also went unpunished.

Since the crimes of Trump and his network are unpunished, they largely go unmentioned, because the Democrats cannot run against problems that they refused, for four years, to confront.

Pundits rightfully note that Trump and the GOP pose a tremendous threat to the United States. But they do not name who enabled that threat to grow for four years: Biden, the nice guy accomplice, who revealed his true face like the killers in Scream, a movie that parodied Halloween and its endless sequels but ended up being scarier, because it was so familiar.

You don’t expect the guy who says he’ll protect you from the killer to be the one who tries to kill you. But maybe you should.

*          *          *

Between 1978 and 2018, nine Halloween sequels or reboots were released, all of them various degrees of terrible. They had plot holes so big you hoped you would fall in, just so you could stop watching the movie.

In 2018, director David Gordon Green wisely decided to clear the slate and create a Halloween sequel true to the spirit of the original. (So true that it is called, simply, Halloween.) They brought back a 60-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis to play Laurie Strode, who is a now an alcoholic suffering from severe PTSD, as one might well be when one is stalked by a psychotic killer.

The 2018 Halloween was released in September, as Brett Kavanaugh was being appointed to the Supreme Court and the MeToo movement dominated headlines. Angry, armed Laurie was a poignant presence. She was not the hero who women would like to be, but what victims of trauma actually are.

The humanity of the 2018 Halloween was shocking. It was of a piece with its time — a time that felt ominous then, but now seems quaint, even hopeful: full of protests and devoid of pandemics. In the 2018 Halloween, Laurie forces everyone to listen to her whether they want to or not (they do not). Eventually they give in, because she’s right. The people of Haddonfield do indeed have to stop pretending that everything will just work itself out with a known murderer on the loose.

Michael seems to kill Laurie at the end of the movie. But then he sees that her body is missing, just like his was in the original. The Final Girl got the Final Word.

I’m not going to dwell on what happened next, which is the twin shitshow of Halloween Kills (2021) and the alleged grand finale Halloween Ends (2022), both of which are so awful it’s hard to believe the same creative team made them.

In this way, these films resemble the years in which they were released, in which a large number of crises — covid, climate change, corruption — grew exponentially. Yet instead of this being acknowledged and rectified, we were either told that everything was fine or that an existential threat could not be stopped because the solution would violate some obscure bureaucratic rule.

Our actual lives, though — those are fungible, throwaway things to those who hold power.

*          *          *

And so here we are, in 2024, with a rematch between the two least popular candidates in US history, in a nation with citizens besieged by fanaticism and deprived of compassion.

Like the Halloween sequels, Biden vs Trump is a worn-out franchise that cheapens death. Like the original Halloween, it is terrifying.

Michael Myers has loomed in the background of my entire life. So has Joe Biden, first elected to Congress before I was born, and Donald Trump, first investigated by the DOJ before I was born. They both spent the next five decades doing terrible things for terrible people.

You can’t kill the Boogeyman, especially when he has a PAC. Or dozens of them, along with a cadre of evil billionaire friends.

Trump, whose pathologies resemble a subject of Dr. Loomis, is more dangerous than Biden. But when Biden is abetting people objectively worse than Trump — people like mass murderer Benjamin Netanyahu — how do you evaluate him as anything than a collaborator? (Trump, a lifelong dictator aficionado, also backs Netanyahu.)

What kind of nightmare election is this? The fair choice is the one we are not being offered, which is for the terrible sequel candidates to depart, and people who don’t embrace mass death and mass murder to replace them.

We are supposed to believe that the Halloween franchise ended for good in 2022. We are also supposed to believe that if Trump wins, the United States ends for good in 2025. I don’t buy either story. You can’t kill the Boogeyman, and the Final Girl never goes down without a fight.

The truth of our trajectory lies somewhere in the middle. Bleeding but breathing, in development hell, plotting revenge, struggling for survival.

It is that ambiguity that scares people. The future can go in any number of directions, none of them easy, none of them set in stone. The trauma of the past and present will inform it. What lies ahead of us will be determined by far more than one day in November.

You should look to a week before then — to Halloween, to the darkness that animates our choices, and the lack of them.

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My beloved Halloween shirt that my husband bought me at a truck stop on my birthday.

When I was in LA, I saw the real Michael Myers house! So exciting!