There's nothing musty about John Carpenter's Carter-era spook show, which capped a vintage year for horror movies (Romero's Dawn of the Dead and De Palma's The Fury among them). It pretty much established the vernacular of the modern horror film POV stalking shots, the fake-scare-real-scare double whammy, the multiple ending and despite countless imitations and rip-offs, it still pulverizes an audience. Nevertheless, it was made 20 years ago, and the movie has sequels that are older than its target demographic. H20 doesn't play like the continuation of a franchise; in spirit, suspense, and execution, it's more like attending a 20-year reunion.

When last we saw victimized baby-sitter Laurie Strode and I'm not sure which sequel this was, since the series has gone through enough guest victims for a banquet of Soylent Green she was cowering in the flaming corridors of a hospital. Meanwhile, the bogeyman, her heretofore indestructible brother Michael Myers, presumably broasted down the hall. The subsequent sequels continued without her, and now we know why: Laurie faked her own death to escape Michael's clutches. She married and divorced, changed her name, and took a job as headmistress of a boarding school in California. She now has a teenage son (Josh Hartnett), a drinking problem, and an understandable paranoia which turns out to be justified when Michael turns up one deserted weekend on the school grounds.

The director, Steve Miner, whose credentials include a couple of Friday the 13th sequels, doesn't have freshness on his side. The original Halloween came out after a spate of post-Watergate demonic-possession flicks, and its externalized menace and campfire-simple escaped-maniac plot came as a crisp shock. That shock wore off long before Halloween II. Furthermore, Carpenter booby-trapped every side, corner, and background of his wide Panavision screen with nasty surprises a technique that's standard operating procedure now.

Miner never delivers any of the body-blow jolts that made the original a sensation, perhaps because he doesn't spend as much time as Carpenter did establishing the characters and the nature of the small town in peril. The bulk of the action consists once again of people being chased through dark corridors, which isn't as innately compelling as the filmmakers seem to think. To Miner's credit, though, he relies more on atmosphere than splatter: The body count is admirably low, which is good the stalk 'n' slice scenes are the dullest in the movie. He even manages one deliciously creepy moment: Laurie shuts a heavy door only to find herself staring right into Michael's face on the other side.

Miner is helped a lot by Jamie Lee Curtis, who's a good enough actress to suggest the kind of toll 20 years of constant fear would exact on your nerves. In the late '70s, Laurie was a remarkably strong heroine (a Carpenter trademark): clearheaded and brave in times of crisis, tough enough to fight a muscle-bound killer to a draw using her wits. (A personification of sexual threat, he reaches for her with a steely, phallic knife; she lashes back with a coat hanger.) I can't believe after 20 years she'd drop a knife at a crucial moment good God, didn't she see Fatal Attraction? but Curtis nonetheless makes Laurie an engaging underdog, both as a potential victim and as a single working mom.