10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
He's dead. Michael Myers is dead...
Halloween H20 remains one of the more interesting entries in the Halloween franchise for a number of reasons.
Serving as Jamie Lee Curtis' first formal return to the franchise after the original two films decades earlier, it boosted the franchise back into the realm of event horror for the first time in forever. And while the film was a big hit both critically and financially at the time, the years have not been kind to H20's reputation.
In recent interviews, even Jamie Lee Curtis has been quick to dismiss H20 in terms of its relevance to the characters and the films, not just in terms of continuity, but also in terms of quality. But with the new Halloween film seeing the franchise taking another swing at the legacy/anniversary sequel a full twenty years later, what better film is there to watch to see exactly what does and does not work in this type of get-the-gang-back-together sequel?
Is Halloween H20 a blueprint to success for the new film or is it a lesson in exactly what no to do? Let's find out.
10. The Music Is... Off
After five films and several decades, composer Alan Howarth bid adieu to the Halloween franchise, leaving Miramax to find a new composer to fill the position.
They settled on John Ottoman, a talented composer who has gone on to do great work since then on scores for films like The Nice Guys, Superman Returns, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. But Ottoman's score for H20 was... different.
He steered away from the synth-heavy aesthetic that Carpenter and Howarth had crafted in the early days of the franchise, while also mercifully staying away from the guitar-driven atrocity that was Halloween 6's score. Instead, Ottoman went for a fully orchestrated symphonic score that was much more Danny Elfman than it was John Carpenter.
There's something to be said for the way his work is clearly attempting to recapture the magic of Bernard Hermann's work, but it doesn't really work here.
And sadly, the producers thought so as well. Mere days before the film's release, the Weinsteins (*shudder*) completely redid the score. This resulted in Ottoman's work being "bastardized" (his own words) much to his chagrin, with pieces of Marco Beltrami's scores from Scream, Scream 2, and even Mimic being hastily copy-and-pasted into the edit.
The end result is a film whose music feels jarringly disjointed and disconnected from the actual film.