One of the most talked about elements of the new Halloween film from director David Gordon Green is its treatment of the franchise continuity. Rather than trying to build on the six Michael Myers stories told since the 1977 original, the choice was made to bin all those details and proceed with a direct sequel. It's a bit of a controversial choice among die-hard fans, but Jamie Lee Curtis recently explained why it was totally necessary.
We wouldn't have been able to make a 40-year sequel when you've given the sequel-ing to random people for the last 40 years - because there is no bible. There is no Halloween bible that those however many sequel filmmakers followed. Each one came up with their own wacky idea for the next movie. And so there was no continuity. It was scattershot, if anything, and didn't make any sense!
In the pre-Rob Zombie era of Halloween movies, Rick Rosenthal was the only director to make two of the sequels (Halloween II and Halloween: Resurrection), but the rest, as Jamie Lee Curtis points out, all had different writing and directing teams involved. As a result, the continuity was really all over the place - and Curtis had a front row seat. After all, she starred in three of them.
I had the immense pleasure of hopping on the phone with Jamie Lee Curtis last month to talk about her work in the new Halloween, but part of our talked dipped into her history with the franchise. While discussing the previous movies, including the ones she was involved in, she was quite blunt in recognizing their narrative shortcomings, but also made it clear that she understands there is still a lot of love out there for them:
There may be people who love any one of the numbers of Halloween at any time, and they the beauty of streaming is that they can watch any of them. Rinse and repeat; they can watch it over and over and over again. The clever choice [with this new film] was to omit any other movie except Halloween. But that was the clever choice here, because you can't tell a story of generational trauma except to go back to the original trauma.
And that it does. Based on a script by David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, Halloween is set 40 years after the events of John Carpenter's original film, and finds Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode still trying to recover. She has spent decades just waiting for Michael Myers to break out and return, the 1978 experience ever haunting her and affecting all of her relationships, and she finally sees him again on Halloween night.
It can be said without hesitation that the new Halloween is the best Halloween sequel we've seen -- but if you think the treatment of the continuity is changing, think again. I followed up with Jamie Lee Curtis if there is a bible now currently being established, and she practically laughed at the question:
No! No. I don't think there is a bible in... you know, once in a while in a TV show you hear, and by the way, I've never worked on one of them, that you hear that the creator of the show really wrote a bible that said this is going to happen year one, this will happen to year two. This'll happen year three, and they stuck to it. I don't think anything is built that way. No, there is no bible.
Fans will be able to witness the showdown between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers very soon, as Halloween will be hitting theaters everywhere on October 19th. You can buy tickets now, and be sure to stay tuned on CinemaBlend, as we have a whole lot more interview and feature content coming your way in the next few weeks.
