Throughout the ’80s slasher movie craze, franchises sprang forth not following heroic characters, generally, but following the hulking, often-demonic killers. Jason, Freddy, Leatherface, and Chucky all would rear their ugly heads, kill a bunch of unsuspecting nubile teens (and local yokel law enforcement), and then get dispatched, if only to return some other day. Michael Myers from the Halloween movies began that trend in 1978, and when he got up after being shot by Dr. Loomis, he became the boogeyman in earnest, but he was also just a guy, and the writer of the upcoming Halloween flick, Danny McBride, thinks bringing him back down to unassuming guy status will help the franchise immensely.
It was announced recently that McBride and David Gordon Green would be co-writing and co-producing a new Halloween movie–with Green directing–that would essentially follow on directly after the events of 1981’s Halloween II. There’ve been seven other Michael Myers-centric films since then, and yet–according to an interview with Entertainment Weekly radio–those movies went wrong by turning Michael into a god.
We just love that original Halloween. There’s something so scary about how simple it was. I had seen all the Halloween films. We really were studying all the sequels and stuff, just to see where it exactly it went wrong. It definitely kind of felt that, as the series went on, Michael Myers became like Frankenstein and he was like indestructible and I think the more indestructible he was, the less scary he became. And so David and I, our ambition is to strip it down and get it back to [being] grounded in reality, which I think makes it scarier.
While I wouldn’t necessarily say John Carpenter’s Halloween is “grounded in reality,” it is true that what made the Shape scary in the 1978 film is that he was sort of both mythical–he could be anywhere, and he’s always watching–and corporeal. At the end of the movie, we see Laurie pull off the iconic mask to reveal…just a dude, who’d probably be pretty handsome were it not for his recently punctured eyeball. Even in Halloween II, a tiny bit of supernatural is built in, but ultimately, he’s still just a crazy person who is slightly more difficult to kill than your average hulking douche.
What do you think about going back to basics with the new Halloween? Would you rather they go back to that whole Rune of Thorn thing from Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers? (If so, you’re a monster.) Let us know in the comments below!
Images: Compass International
Kyle Anderson is the Associate Editor for Nerdist and the host of the horror documentary series One Good Scare. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Twitter!
