The Halloween franchise has gone on way too long. The first movie, back in 1978, is a horror classic and made Michael Myers a cinema icon. Since then, there have been over 12 Halloween movies, including one of the sequels that didn’t even have Michael in it.
In 2018, a sequel/soft reboot came out and the fans seemed to like it. Since it did well, we then had Halloween: Evil Dies Tonight, I mean, Kills, and then Ends, which were laughably bad. I would say that Halloween Ends was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a while.
Michael had ‘retired’ into the sewers, I’m guessing living off leftover pizzas from the Ninja Turtles. A new bad guy took over the mask, Corey Cunningham. We saw Michael take him under his wing and train him up as the new killer. The only thing missing was a training montage. One of the writers of this newest trilogy, Danny McBride, was asked what he thought about the fan’s response to Kills and End. McBride said:
“I’m a massive Halloween fan as well so you just want to give something that would make the fans excited and not make the fans angry with you. It was fun to try to pull that off for better or worse, and to get to meet John Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis. It was kind of surreal to be participating in furthering that story. It was awesome.”
That sounds like he wanted to get John Carpenter’s autograph, and then things started spinning out of control, and boom, he’s now accidentally made a new Halloween movie. It begs the question though: If you are a fan of something like this, should you add to it or leave it well alone?
The audience reaction to Halloween Ends
McBride was then asked about how Corey overshadowed Michael in Ends:
“I think that is a valid criticism. All three of these movies was really Green’s sort of brainchild. He had a very distinct idea of what he wanted to do with this. And I just felt lucky that he brought me along for the ride to help him where I could and to try to give him anything I could on it. And when he told me his pitch for focusing on this Corey character, I thought that it was cool. I thought it was a smart take on it. I thought that it was a way to avoid repetition and sort of explore something a little different and still tying it into what Halloween’s ultimately about.“
We see this now with soft reboots, where the main character can just be swapped out. Scream, for example, isn’t about Sydney Prescott anymore. It’s about the new girl, whose name I can’t even remember. It looked like these new Halloween movies were just a way to swap out Michael with a new killer and let them carry on. Now that the new Halloween trilogy has finished and End was the end of Michael, McBride is still looking forward to how things will move forward:
“I feel like we had a blast creating this and making this and it kind of feels like we have put our thumbprint on it. And I think, I mean, never say never, but I would be interested to see what else is out there, what else somebody can do with this.“
We can all look forward to seeing Halloween 100 in 30 years’ time, Michael the cyborg battles the Jedi.
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