Halloween II (1981) - The Wake, Samhain, and the Hospital

I noticed that Cinemax was showing the second and third Halloween films on Saturday evening (with Halloween (2018) the showcase of the trio of films although it is not related to them nor wanted to be…), and I did have the Halloween series on the mind for the franchise to cover for a final time in 2020 after Friday the 13^th (1980). With a fun viewing of Halloween (1978) on Monday, I had planned for Halloween II (1981) to be my evening slasher for Tuesday night but instead I had a day off on Wednesday and used the morning to give it a go. It did afford me a chance to watch it without interruption, during a quiet winter day in January. Not an obligation as Octobers often made a viewing of Halloween II feel in years past. It was just a good chance to really watch it, collect some thoughts, and speak about it on the blog. I have always wanted to watch Halloween & Halloween II together in one evening, so I might speak about both of them one last time—maybe in the summer as that has been an option I’ve been considering—but with other lengthy posts about this sequel already in my Archive, there really isn’t much more to say on either film. I’ve covered them way more than I ever planned.

  If anything Halloween II has its own little slasher subgenre where the hospital is a setting for psychos to intrude such as Visiting Hours and X-Ray/Hospital Massacre (both of these I hope to watch in the coming days). I don’t necessarily mind the empty dark halls of the hospital, especially after reading about Rosenthal’s experience with one prior to the making of the film. But it was a matter of convenience for the film to be short-staffed so that Michael could haunt the halls and escape detection. And the moments where you see Michael in the monitor but no one there to see him  are damned effective. The hospital being uneventful during Halloween night seems a bit questionable, but again it was a matter of convenience. Especially freaky is the thought that a wing of babies without parents are left without a staff to take care of them.

In order to appease the gods, the Druid priests held fire rituals. Prisoners of war, criminals, the insane, animals... were... burned alive in baskets. By observing the way they died, the Druids believed they could see omens of the future. Two thousand years later, we've come no further. Samhain isn't evil spirits. It isn't goblins, ghosts or witches. It's the unconscious mind. We're all afraid of the dark inside ourselves.

If I’m honest it is the content outside the hospital that I groove to more that Michael’s handiwork inside the film’s central setting in Haddonfield. I love The Shape still moving through neighborhoods in Haddonfield, Loomis with Brackett before the news of Annie’s death separates them, Loomis visiting the school with Deputy Gary Hunt (Hunter von Leer) and the introduction of Samhain as a potential interest of Michael’s (providing Loomis with monologues about the unconscious mind actually being the evil in ourselves, far more scary than goblins and monsters, Celtic rituals of sacrifice, and Druids believing they could see the future if they adhere to Samhain) motivations, “Night of the Living Dead” the next film on the Dementia lineup (playing when The Shape takes the knife from the house as the elderly wife listens to the news broadcast about the victims found not far from where she lives), the early POV in the neighborhood and how Alice is unaware of what is in her midst (as Annie, Lynda, and Bob learned all too unfortunately), and Michael in the main town square when encountering a boy with a jukebox as he learns of where Laurie is. I liked that the film does alternate in and out of the hospital, allowing us to see Haddonfield some, even if it is late at night and early the first of November.

 He was my patient for fifteen years. He became an obsession with me until I realized that there was nothing within him, neither conscious nor reason that was... even remotely human. An hour ago I stood up and fired six shots into him and then he just got up and walked away. I am talking about the real possibility that he is still out there!

I hadn’t really realized it but Curtis really isn’t in this much until the end. I think I read she was in this a total of 25 minutes. A lot of her time in bed in the hospital or dragging herself around to stay away from being stabbed by a scalpel, Curtis doesn’t impact the film much at all. I don’t think it is a slight against her but it did seem Pleasence was given more to work with than almost anyone else in the film. Rossi, as the asshole paramedic always charming Shoop to have sex with him, gets to “talk dirty” and sing his own lewd version of “Amazing Grace”…but this part isn’t exactly as showy as Dr. Loomis. I think I did mention the last time I watched Halloween II how much I dug Loomis’ conversation with Gary Hunt as the two monitor the “wake” and how locals let out their rage at the Myers’ house.