It’s October, which means my wife is in full Horror Movie mode, and so we watched four(!) of them this weekend.

First up was Halloween (2018), which is a sequel to Halloween (1978), but not to any of the subsequent Hallowseen. The premise here is that Jamie Lee Curtis, having been menaced by Mike Myers in 1978, is now (as we all are) forty years older. She has spent her life living in paranoia that he’s going to come back and attack again; this did not endear her to her daughter, who quite reasonably wanted a life where she did not have to worry about ’70s slasher killers. Her teenage grand-daughter, though, thinks of her as a charmingly eccentric old lady.

Meanwhile, on like the day before Halloween, almost forty years to the day since the original Halloween, prison authorities decide that this would be an awesome time to put Mike Myers on a bus and transport him to another prison. Spoiler alert that he’s not going to make it all the way there.

What follows is the increasing realization that oh shit, this paranoid old lady wasn’t wrong after all, followed by plans going into motion and Myers and Curtis (and her family) basically facing off in an inter-generational showdown to the… well, I guess not the death, because they’re making a sequel (out October 15th, in theaters and streaming on Peacock)… but at least a finale for-now.

As an old person, I am basically a sucker for this genre of “what if this thing from this old movie had actually happened, and now it’s actually all these years later in real time?” movie, like the recent Terminator sequel and some other examples that I can’t think of right now. My main complaint is that I wish the final showdown had been a little more intricately planned out, but I guess the director didn’t want to make an elaborate Home Alone spiritual sequel, which okay, fair enough.

End of the day, this is a slasher movie (modern subtype — a distinction I’ll be talking about a little bit more as I write-up the next three movies), and is basically a competent execution of the premise. If it sounds interesting, you’ll find it a pleasant way to pass the time; if not, it’s not some transcendent thing that you must see despite that.