Turns out the new Halloween film won’t be a straight-up remake after all. It’s going to take place after the first two, keeping the story of the original “Night He Came Home” intact.
In an interview with Cinemablend, co-writer Danny McBride confirmed that the version of Halloween he and David Gordon Green is working on is more of a sequel than a remake, picking up after the mythology set up in 1978’s Halloween and 1981’s Halloween II.
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.
Of course, there already was a third Halloween film, the fan-favourite Halloween III: Season of the Witch. However, that film famously departed from the Myers story for a single movie and is largely considered a standalone.
Going this way with the new film feels very natural. It allows the filmmakers to not retell a Michael Myers origin story and to keep the legacy of those original movies firmly in place. There’s also a ton of precedent. Bryan Singer tried the same thing with Superman Returns in 2006, where the world of the 1978 original happened in that movie. More recently, lots of sequels are also doubling as reboots for franchises (Star Wars, Blade Runner and so on).
The first two Halloween movies tell one continuous story, that of Michael Myers returning to his hometown on Halloween night. Part one ends with him being shot and disappearing. Part two picks up with Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) going to the hospital, only to find Michael is still chasing her. It’s as good a connection between stories as you’ll find when it comes to that kind of thing. Plus, though Michael “died” at the end of the second film, it wasn’t some kind of totally irreversible death in horror terms. Bringing him back, whenever McBride and Gordon Green decide to, should be fairly simple.
“Green and I are definitely going to [do] a straight-up horror,” McBride also told Cinemablend. “Halloween has always been one of my favourite 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.”
The film opens in the US 18 October 2018.