Two decades after Laurie Strode was first terrorized by her own personal boogeyman, "Halloween: H20" attempted to explore how her initial run-in with Michael Myers might permanently impact her emotional growth and mental wellbeing. After faking her own death, adopting a new persona, and continuing to raise her teenage son John (Josh Hartnett, because 1998), Laurie Strode is still struggling with a suffocating (and, as it turns out, justified) paranoia of her murderous brother that exhausts and infuriates her restless son. Strode has nightmares, takes medications, chugs vodka like its La Croix, and refuses to let her son so much as go on a highly-supervised field trip. Nobody but Laurie Strode understands the depth and real-time relevance of what she experienced, not her son, not even her skilled and sympathetic counselor boyfriend. Both men tell her "it's been twenty years," as in, "shouldn't she be over this by now?"
That number is important. It acts as a reminder that when it comes to traumatic events, time works differently. The "Post" in Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is often an unintentionally cruel misnomer. For the trauma survivor, the mind and body can remain frozen in the space and time in which the trauma took place for years, if not in perpetuity. Trauma is not a wound time alone can heal, the film tells us, because reminders like, "it's been (x) amount of years" only serve to further invalidate an emotional and physical response for which the victim is not responsible. the notion that time alone should "cure" this affliction is its own brand of victim-blaming. As in the original, "Halloween: H20" suggests that you really "can't kill the boogeyman," neither in his physical nor in his existential/emotional form.
