John Carpenter’s 1980 follow-up to Halloween is a ghost story with overtones of Hitchcock (The Birds) and Hawks (The Thing). It’s also a disappointment, but only by the high standards Carpenter set for himself. For the first time, he’s trying to generate some emotion between his characters, instead of concentrating exclusively on the emotion generated between the screen and the audience. But with the increased complexity has come a weakened grip on the strategies of suspense that have been Carpenter’s forte. It’s a failure, but it’s a failure in the right direction. With Adrienne Barbeau, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Janet Leigh.