An icon of the horror world will return to the silver screen this year when Michael Myers begins another rampage through Haddonfield in David Gordon Green's Halloween. The film is moving away from the sequels to focus solely on the continuity established in John Carpenter's original film back in 1978, but it turns out that the reboot/sequel/revival almost focused on the other sequels until the creative team behind the movie decided that they wanted to cut to the core DNA of the franchise. In a recent interview, Green explained:
We started incorporating all the follow-ups and then it got overwhelming trying to engineer something that made sense. Some of the plot points became a little stretched thin as the franchise went on. And so ultimately finding those frustrations, McBride came to me and just said, 'What's the Michael Myers movie that you really want to see?' Halloween I was, to me, the most pure and, in a lot of ways, the most simple. I get the real connection with the terror of a movie that isn't so lost in its own mythology.
The Halloween series has one of the most convoluted timelines in the entire horror genre, which created a number of problems as David Gordon Green and Danny McBride attempted to break the story. Per Green's remarks in his recent interview with THR, the team went through 80 different drafts of the script before ultimately deciding that the best course of action would be to simply go back to the original and use that (and only that) as a jumping off point for 2018's Halloween.
Going this route has involved doing away with a lot of the other elements of the franchise. For example, Michael Myers and Laurie Strode are no longer brother and sister in this take on the series, and the events of films like Halloween H20, the Jamie Lloyd films, and the Paul Rudd-fronted Halloween 6 have all been ignored. The result is a movie that's far closer to the original tone and style of the first Halloween, with far more emphasis on the mystery of Michael Myers.
Halloween takes place forty years after the events of the original film and picks up with Michael in captivity for his 1978 rampage. However, on the anniversary of his initial rampage, The Shape once again escapes and heads to Haddonfield where an older and more prepared Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has anxiously awaited his return.
Horror movie audiences will get a chance to see that "pure" Halloween mythology on full display later this year when David Gordon Green's Halloween hits the big screen on October 19. Until then, make sure to take a look at our movie premiere guide to get more information on all of 2018's most notable release dates!
