10 Things You Learn Watching Halloween (2018)

Halloween 2018 was very much sold to audiences as the horror equivalent of Star Wars: The Force Awakens. A legacy sequel to a classic film that was going back to the basics audiences and fans loved, that would tell a new story with some familiar beats.

And it is that, to an extent. But much like The Last Jedi before it, Halloween 2018 also weaponizes the audience's expectations against them. Several times throughout the film, parallels are set-up to the original film, only for the pay-off to be a subversion of what the film has lead audiences to believe.

For an easy example of this, take the early scene where Allyson is in class at school hearing her teacher give a lecture about fate as she looks out the window. The framing, the lecture's content, everything about this scene is calling back to the scene in the original where Laurie similarly sat in class and saw Michael's car out of the window. So the audience is fully primed to see Michael outside of Allyson's window as well. But instead, it's Laurie.

Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and David Gordon Green's script does this a lot and actually gets increasingly clever with it, often staging entire sequences to subvert expectations and chart bold new courses rather than rehashing old plot points.