10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers (1989)

In a surprisingly effective move, the film continuously features these unexpected subversions of slasher movie tropes.

Early in the film when Jamie has a vision about Michael attacking Rachel in the shower, Loomis calls Rachel and tells her to leave the house. And she does. She runs down the street in a towel, finds help, and calls the cops. It's a small touch, but it subverts the typical slasher formula by allowing its characters to be intelligent and capable of rational thought.

Similarly, when Jamie later has a vision of Tina getting attacked at a gas station, Loomis calls the police. Several cop cars swarm the gas station, Tina is saved, and Michael is forced to leave. It subverts the audience's expectations and in-turn builds even more suspense by delaying the pay-off to the build-up.

All of this flies squarely in the face of everything the slasher genre was doing at the time. While every other franchise, and even other installments of the Halloween series, were adhering strictly to the slasher-trope rule book, Halloween 5 chucked it out the window to compelling results.