The banality of evil
Oh, great. I hadn’t noticed that someone got the bright idea of remaking Halloween . And, this being 2007, the major change is that we now have way more backstory about Michael Myers. John Carpenter and Debra Hill kept it blessedly simple thirty years ago–the child had some inchoate evil in him that was crystallized by his sister’s sexual experience. He was a just plain wrong’un.
But that’s not good enough anymore. Now we have to have the over-worked and under-attentive stripper mom, the abusive step-dad, and the bullying meanies at school depicted in exhaustive detail so we Get the Message: What’s scary isn’t primal, unknowable evil. What’s scary is that Child Protective Services doesn’t perform more interventions.
And yes, I’m trashing a movie I haven’t seen. Perhaps it’s well-executed. That doesn’t make the concept any less tiresome.