“Halloween” is back 40 years later with a teaser before the official full-length trailer hits on Friday. Blumhouse and Universal aren’t saying much about this film besides the fact that it will ignore all those other sequels after the original Halloween II sequel.
“It picks up after the first one, but it’s sort of an alternate reality. It’s as if the first Halloween ended in a slightly different way,” co-writer Danny McBride said.
Jamie Lee Curtis returns for her fourth time facing off against brother Michael Myers (well fifth time if you count her credit in the awful “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” as the curfew announcer) who has escaped from the prison yet again. As in “Halloween: Resurrection” (even though that film didn’t take place in this new “Halloween” universe) Laurie has been prepping for his return which means protecting her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) for Michael’s next bloody rampage through the town.
David Gordon Green, the brilliant director of “George Washington” and “Undertow” is helming this installment from a script he co-wrote with Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley. Making sure to bring back original fans along with a new generation, Blumhouse is trying to please everyone (which sometimes results in no one getting pleased) so he brought John Carpenter (who hasn’t done a really great film in quite some time) back to Executive Produce and compose the score. If you are a diehard fan of the film, you know that Carpenter originally took his finished “Halloween” film in to a studio executive who found it boring. That inspired him to add music, and thus his famous iconic score was born.
“I am an executive producer and it looks clear to me that I’ve made a deal to do the music,” Carpenter said. “There are many options. I’ll be consulting with the director to see what he feels. I could create a new score, we could update the old score and amplify it, or we could combine those two things. I’ll have to see the movie to see what it requires.”
The original Michael Myers actor, Nick Castle, will also return to don the new mask along with actor James Jude Courtney
“David [Gordon Green] was really sensitive and generous when he said, ‘We’re inviting Nick Castle to come back to do a little work. Do you have a problem with that, because you’re the Michael Myers now?’,” Courtney said. “And I was like, ‘Oh my God. Are you kidding? What an honor it would be, first of all to meet the guy, but secondly to work with him. How good does that get?’”
Courtney went on to add:
“So we started work, and I can’t remember if it was the second or third week that Nick came in and did kind of a cameo. He did a couple of scenes, and I’m in the scenes with him, which is really beautiful. He and I were hoping that would happen, because he even said, ‘This is the passing of the torch.’ We met with foreign journalists on the set, and Nick was so super gracious and just saying, ‘Look, I’ve come in to do a cameo. Jim is our Michael Myers now.’“
Shortly after new images (below) were released the above teaser trailer hit showing the marketing might that’s being put behind the film which hits theaters on October 19. Everything is looking great, and that iconic Michael Myers mask looks perfectly weathered and abused after 40 years.
Fun fact: When trying to find the perfect mask for his monster, John Carpenter grabbed a William Shatner mask from a costume store, but no one ever noticed the resemblance until the director talked about it in an interview.
An interesting note is that this film will also forget that memorable fact that Lauri Strode and Michael Myers are brother and sister. This plot twist was added in “Halloween II,” and at the time, it was rather controversial since it took away some of the Michael Myers mystery.
David Gordon Green and Danny McBride felt strongly about bringing Jamie Lee Curtis back for their film but weren’t sure if they would be able to do that.
“I think everyone was kind of on the mindset of it’d be a grab to get her,” McBride said, “but no one really knew if we would be able to. So Dave and I just busted our ass on this script to really make that Laurie Strode character something she wouldn’t be able to say no to. When we finished the script, we sent it to her, and she said she was in. So we just flipped out. We were over the moon about her involvement.”
“As soon as I read what David Green and Danny McBride had come up with, and the way that they connected the dots of the story, it made so much sense to me that it felt totally appropriate for me to return to Haddonfield for another 40th-anniversary retelling,” Curtis said.
Everyone has been kind in not mentioning Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” reboot attempts. While they weren’t horrible, they did manage to put the entire franchise into a death cycle that remained dormant for some time. It wasn’t until 2016 that Blumhouse and Miramax announced the new film with John Carpenter on board.
“Thirty-eight years after the original Halloween…I’m going to help to try to make the 10th sequel the scariest of them all,” Carpenter said.
Mike Flanagan was originally floated to direct, then along came Adam Wingard, but out of the blue, David Gordon Green’s name came up, and all was set. While many fans known him mainly from “Your Highness” and “Pineapple Express” you must watch “Undertow” to see how he can add creepiness and suspense in his work.
“I’m a humongous Halloween fan,” McBride said, “so when David and I got approached about doing this from Blumhouse [the studio behind Get Out], the first thing David and I said was, ‘We’ll come up with a take, but we have to pitch it to [franchise creator John] Carpenter. If he’s not interested, we’re definitely not into making this.’ And [executive producer] Jason Blum was totally on board with that. That’s exactly what he wanted to do anyway,” McBride says. “So we came up with our pitch. We pitched to Carpenter, and he was into it, which kind of blew David and me away.”
The teaser does exactly what a great one does. Without revealing anything aside from Michael Myer’s mask, it is able to create some excitement. The minute the “Halloween” theme kicks in, you can feel the goosebumps, and it made me immediately want to watch the original one again, and you can check it out here very cheap.
So, they’ve done their job in getting some great interest in the new “Halloween” film, and you can count on more buzz surrounding the film that looks to be a serious remake of the original. This is one that looks like it should deliver the goods with David Gordon Green leading the way.
Halloween opens in theaters on October 19th and also stars Will Patton, Virginia “Ginny” Gardener, Dylan Arnold, Drew Scheid, and Miles Robbins, and features the return of Nick Castle as The Shape (stuntman and actor James Jude Courtney is also helping bring the role to life).