Twin Terrors for Our Times: Playtime and Grosstime in Halloween Ends and The Curse of Bridge Hollow
Two current Halloween features, The Curse of Bridge Hollow (Netflix) and Halloween Ends (theaters), exemplify the different poles of our culture. The former is a kid-friendly spook fest, clean and manageable, with laughs and animated Halloween decorations leaving no dead bodies and tooting about the need for loving families.
The latter film, while the title has no question mark, suggests the greatest, goriest mainstream horror feast, John Carpenter’s Halloween trilogy, may have come to an end in a blood bath too stark for the little ones and sometimes too graphic for the elders. While Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie dominates the Halloween franchise as a woman survivor certifying gender equality in these gender-questioning times, Michael Myers still represents the durability of bad battling good to occupy the human condition forever.
Bridge Hollow’s annual celebration of Stingy Jack gets a boost when a new family arrives in town and proceeds to resurrect the old boy’s magical shenanigans, this time setting alive the myriad decorations around town. The film has plenty of racing around with decorations hounding civilians, giving pragmatic dad (Marlon Wyans) a chance to team with ghost-believer daughter, Sydney (Priah Ferguson), to put that bad boy back in his pumpkin. The adventure is almost bland, if not downright family-friendly by contrast with Halloween Ends.
The curious difference between the two horror shows is that Halloween’s End carries on the chef’s knife tradition by resolving through blood letting with little brainy work, notwithstanding Laurie’s smart way of luring Michael into her den. Syd and Dad, on the other hand, use his science-teacher knowledge and her curiosity to defeat Jack, a modern and almost bloodless resolution to a tricky problem.
Judging from these two popular scares at 2022’s Halloween time, the Bridge has the smarter moves while Halloween Ends is still dimwitted and blood-centered to guarantee its part of the genre is intact regardless of the smart modern tactics. In a meta way, as we look at disruptions world-wide, head competes with heart for resolution.
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts NPR’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics as well as podcasts Back Talk and Double Take out of WCBE 90.5 FM. Contact him at JohnDeSando52@gmail.com
