This October, we were supposed to get Halloween Kills, the follow-up to David Gordon Green’s sequel/reboot of the John Carpenter classic. Green and company bumped back a year while strongly suspecting American movie theaters will still not be safe places to watch a film. But Green will still tease us with details about what we won’t see for another year-and-a-quarter. For one thing he said the movie, like its title, is a little bit more intense than its predecessor.
In a new interview with Total Film, the filmmaker talked about taking the series in a new direction. For one thing, it won’t be a rote slashers, like many of the original 1980s and ’90s sequels, merely bringing Michael Myers back for another round of murders. Nor will it mostly focus on Jamie Lee Curtis’ long-traumatized Laurie Strode.
“If the first film was somewhat retelling the origin of Myers and getting us up to speed with where Laurie had been all those years, then part two is about the outrage of Haddonfield,” Green told Total Film. “Mob Rules was our working title for the film. It’s about a community that is united by outrage, and divided in how to deal with evil.”
With 2018’s Halloween, Green and his cowriter (and fellow Eastbound & Down alum) Danny McBride took an unusual approach, making it a direct sequel to the 1978 original and ignoring every other movie, including 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, which killed off Strode. (Of course, that also means it’s a sequel to a movie that has the exact same title, which surely won’t be confusing to future horror-ologists.)
We may have to wait a long time to see what he’s talking about, but we’ll have to wait even longer for Green and McBride’s threequel, Halloween Ends, though Green says that one will stand on its own, too.
“It’s a very different movie than Kills, and both Halloweens,” Green says. “The script feels very fun. For me, it was essential to say, ‘Here’s a conclusive episode to my trilogy.’ I’m trying to bring closure to my ‘Laurie Strode versus Michael Myers’ storytelling.”
Halloween Kills hits theaters on October 15, 2021.
(Via Total Film)