What I like most about the new “Halloween” is that its message could be boiled down to something as simple as “Don’t Fuck Around with Evil.” Don’t try and study it, or understand it, or do a podcast about it, or whatever—just kill it. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) learned this lesson the hard way the night she survived an attack by Michael Myers, who has been incarcerated for the 40 years since (this movie pretends all of the sequels never happened, even number two, and even has a character make fun of the stories about Michael being Laurie’s brother and things like “revenge” and “curses” in a way that comes off as snarky more than clever). Laurie has lived as her own kind of prisoner since that night, completely terrified of the day Michael would come home, basically becoming a doomsday prepper, turning her home into a heavily armed bunker. She also obsessively taught her daughter (Judy Greer) how to fend off the ultimate attacker, so much so that she’s nearly estranged from her.

“Halloween” opens with a pair of podcasters going to meet Michael and Laurie for a piece they’re doing, allowing for a lot of the last paragraph’s “what have they been up to” exposition. Michael has been completely silent for four decades, never saying a word, but the podcasters think it a good idea to bring him his mask on the day of the interview, meaning they (and it) will be nearby when Mike later escapes and beats them to death. As he makes his way back to Haddonfeld on Halloween, a dozen or so victims stand in his way, including Laurie’s granddaughter and some of her teenage friends, some hapless cops, and a few other locals. There’s an excellently staged sequence as Michael’s killing spree starts and Green’s camera stays mostly outside of homes, watching the icon go about his work through windows.

And yet even this moment feels almost too precious. Green makes a number of explicit references to Carpenter’s film with dialogue and even shots, but there’s a difference between referencing something and actually incorporating it into a new vision. The former is just an echo, and that’s often what I felt watching “Halloween”—the echo of the original is loud, but that’s ultimately hollow compared to sequels that truly build on what came before instead of just expressing how much they love it.

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