If there’s one complaint about the later Halloween movies (though, realistically, there are several), it’s how damn indestructible Michael Myers became. The masked killer escaped death so many times, he basically turned into a god. Well, writer Danny McBride has promised this won’t be the case in his planned Halloween reboot.
Image: Compass International Productions
In an interview on the EMPIRE podcast, McBride revealed that he and co-writer/director David Gordon Green plan on undoing most of Michael Myers’ supernatural tendencies that were established in previous films and books. Instead of making the guy a mythic figure “of superhuman strength who cannot be killed by bullets, stab wounds, or fire,” as Nicholas Rogers described him in his 2003 book Halloween: From Pagan Ritual to Party Night, McBride thinks it’s scarier to have him be some weird dude who likes to murder people.
I think we’re just trying to strip it down and just take it back to what was so good about the original. It was just very simple and just achieved that level of horror that wasn’t corny. And it wasn’t turning Michael Myers into some supernatural being that couldn’t be killed — that stuff to me isn’t scary. I want to be scared by something that I really think could happen. I think it’s much more horrifying to be scared by someone standing in the shadows while you’re taking the trash out as opposed to someone who can’t be killed pursuing you.
During the interview, McBride mentions how they wanted to bring the character back to John Carpenter’s original vision, having it take place around and after his first two films. But to be honest, I’m not sure exactly what the means. In his 1978 debut, Michael Myers is stabbed through the neck with a knitting needle and shot several times and the second one ends with him getting blown up.
Since the movie takes place after the first two, this means all those near-death experiences would still be canon. Carpenter himself has called Michael Myers “almost a supernatural force.” So, wouldn’t that mean the character, at his core, is supernatural?
It also becomes weird when you look at the 1979 novelisation of the first film, where the prologue detailed this ancient Celtic man named Enda who murdered the Druid princess Deirdre and her lover for revenge, and got cursed by a shaman to relive his crime for eternity. Both Michael Myers, and his murderous great-grandfather, have nightmares about Enda and Deirdre. If that doesn’t seem supernaturally inspired, I don’t know what does.
I’m guessing what will happen is the movie will be taking away the Curse of Thorn and other overly supernatural elements that were established in later films, but leaving ambiguity over Michael Myers’ strength and vulnerability. After all, if Michael Myers is only a regular guy, there’s no way he’d survive a giant fire. Carpenter will serve as an executive producer for the film, and maybe provide the score.
The Halloween reboot is set to come out late 2018.