Halloween Kills Brings Back Another Cast Member From the Original Film

The David Gordon Green-directed Halloween Kills, sequel to Green's 2018 horror hit franchise revival Halloween, will see Halloween 1978 star Nancy Stephens reprise her role as Nurse Marion, HalloweenMovies.com has revealed. Stephens is the latest alum from John Carpenter's '78 original to board the sequel franchise, joining returning Laurie Strode star Jamie Lee Curtis and returning Lindsey Wallace star Kyle Richards in Kills. Also returning from the first movie is Tommy Doyle — played here by Anthony Michael Hall, replacing Brian Andrews — and Lonnie Elam, Tommy's schoolyard bully, played here by Robert Longstreet.

Stephens first reprised her role in 1981's Halloween II, set on the same night as the events of the first film, and again in 1998's Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, following Curtis' Laurie exactly two decades after narrowly surviving her encounter with masked murderer and brother Michael Myers on Halloween night 1978. Stephens' Marion, an associate of Michael's former psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), was among Michael's first victims in H20.

That continuity has since been abandoned. Last year's Halloween ignored all franchise entries except Carpenter's original, making Green's sequel trilogy part of a four-movie saga to conclude with Halloween Ends in 2021.

"What I love that David and [co-writer] Danny [McBride] and company did is they connected the dots for forty years, now they're going back to really unpack the first movie, bringing back all those characters whose lives were affected by what happened in 1978," Curtis recently told Collider.

Halloween Ends, Curtis added, will examine "the sort of cultural phenomenon of violence."

"That's what the third movie ultimately is, a very powerful examination of violence," Curtis said. "It comes at it from a slightly different way. You'll like it… If you believe in me at all, I promise you what David Gordon Green has come up with as a way to complete this trilogy is sensational."

These next two movies are intended to bring an end to the original continuity established in 1978, but co-writer McBride expects famous movie monster Michael Myers to live on in future takes on the franchise.

"I think, ultimately, Michael Myers is such an iconic character that no one besides Carpenter is ever gonna have ownership over him," he previously told Collider. "This will be our chance at the table to play with these characters, and I'm sure that, when we're done, other people will come in and do the same thing, or have their own reinvention. Michael Myers is iconic enough to allow that, too. He's like James Bond, where you can have different actors and different filmmakers. He represents something so simple and scary that he can be translated by lots of different people."

Halloween Kills opens October 16, 2020. Halloween Ends follows on October 15, 2021.