Last year when it was announced that John Carpenter would be directly involved with the next installment in his landmark horror series, Halloween, probably no one could have guessed that Carpenter would pass the knife to David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, best known for Pineapple Express, Eastbound & Down and evolving the Seth Rogen manbaby into the much harsher mulletcock. It’s one of those ideas that will look either brilliant or completely moronic when the new Halloween comes out in 2018.
So what do McBride and Green have planned for Michael Myers?
In an interview with CinemaBlend, McBride (Vice Principals, Alien: Covenant) promised that their Halloween would be “straight-up horror,” going on to say, “Halloween has always been one of my favorite movies of all time. There's a simplicity and an efficiency to that first one that I think allows the movies just to be scary as hell. And so Green and I, our approach is to get back to that.”
Sounds good so far, particularly for a series that went from stark to ludicrous as fast as Halloween. After John Carpenter’s Halloween and Halloween II, the series tried an anthology format with Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a phantasmagoria of androids, evil toymakers and Stonehenge, for some reason. It’s a psychotronic classic but the series never recovered (even Halloween H20 doesn’t approach the first two movies), devolving into shamanic curses, telepathy and stupid cults.
McBride seems to agree:
“You know, it's not a remake. It's actually, it's gonna continue the story of Michael Myers in a really grounded way. And for our mythology, we're focusing mainly in the first two movies and what that sets up and then where the story can go from there.”
Who knows what this actually means for the plot, especially since Halloween II has a definitive ending: Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) immolates himself and Michael Myers (Dick Warlock), while Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) survives. But when it comes to honoring those most basic elements of the series, then the Myers, Loomis, Strode trinity is the Halloween equivalent of Spock, Bones and Kirk: the bare essentials.
If the new Halloween is to be modern day, well, Curtis is exactly as amazing as ever.
If it’s to be period, we’re looking at a new cast. Who could capture Pleasence’s (Wake in Fright, Raw Meat) simultaneous poise and mania? Brad Dourif? Lance Henriksen? Laurence Fishburne? Hugh Keays-Byrne?
Just so long as they don’t prop up his corpse like the CGI Peter Cushing monstrosity Disney unleashed on the world in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. Anything but that.
