One, two, Michael’s coming for you…wait, that’s not it. Doot do-do, doot do-do, doot doot dee-do, doot do-do, doot do-do, doot doot dee-do. Is everybody ready for another entry in the life of movie monster Michael Myers? Because it’s coming – very slowly, mind you, as knife-wielding maniacs are wont to travel. A brand new sequel is rumored to be in the works, and it’s reportedly being called Halloween: The Next Chapter. I’m guessing Dawn of Michael Myers or Age of Halloween didn’t get upvoted enough during Dimension Films’ board meetings.
News of this new title comes to us from SchmoesKnow, whose source says the script for Halloween: The Next Chapter won’t be coming until the fall of 2015, which is kind of mind-blowing. I’m fairly certain that Rob Zombie cranked out the screenplays for his two Halloween films in mid-sneeze. (Or maybe that’s just how it felt.) Perhaps Dimension wanted to overshoot with a date, hoping that they can get a writer able to bang the story out a little quicker.
Over the last few years we've heard a number of stories about an in-development new Halloween movie, but obviously nothing has materialized. At one point we were looking at a more direct sequel to Zombie’s films called Halloween 3D, with screenwriters Patrick Lussier (Terminator Genysis) and Todd Farmer (Jason X) penning the screenplay. But when The Weinstein Company announced back in April that they were heading back to Haddonfield with a new direction, it became clear that both writers were no longer involved. And Zombie is currently in pre-production on his own Halloween (the holiday) horror, 31, so he'll almost definitely be absent from this next flick.
Assuming The Next Chapter is indeed the film’s subtitle, what does it mean? Is this "chapter" from the book of Scout Compton’s Laurie Strode, who was last seen inside of a psych ward? Or is it a completely unrelated chapter in this twisted saga, freed from the continuity of both John Carpenter’s original storyline and Zombie’s trashified update? Personally, I think it would be a-ma-zing if this were actually the sequel to Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which didn’t feature any of the franchise’s notable characters and was sincerely just a ridiculous piece of cinema. Fingers crossed.
We all know that sequels with "chapter" in them are never the best entries of a franhcise, so maybe it’s best if they just find a new way to handle Michael Myers’ violent tendencies without bringing the Strodes back into it. It seems like a cheap way to make a new movie, but it’s not like anyone seems to be shooting for high art with this series anymore. Perhaps after the script for this new story is written, someone at Dimension can read it and give this movie a better name. Halloween 3: Electric Boogalee, maybe?
