Halloween Kills Uses Footage From Sequel it Made Non-Canon

When 2018’s Halloween was being developed they made a crucial decision, one that made some fans pretty upset, they removed every other sequel in the franchise from continuity and acted solely as a follow-up to John Carpenter’s 1978 movie. No longer are Laurie Strode and Michael Myers long lost siblings, no longer did she fake her death and leave a daughter behind, and no longer is the Cult of Thorn secretly behind it all. Even with all of that in mind however the sequel to the 2018 film, the newly released Halloween Kills, does an unexpected thing by using footage from one of this no-longer-canon sequels. Spoilers below!

Halloween Kills introduces several legacy characters from the original movie who are returning for this 40-year-later bout with the Boogeyman. In addition to Jamie Lee Curtis once again starring as Laurie Strode, Halloween Kills features Kyle Richards as Lindsey Wallace and Nancy Stephens as Marion Chambers as their original characters, plus Anthony Michael Hall as Tommy Doyle and Robert Longstreet as Lonnie Elam. The film also features the return of veteran actor Charles Cyphers as Leigh Brackett, former Sheriff of Haddonfield turned security guard at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, and here’s where that footage comes in.

In the film’s introduction to its returning characters Hall’s Tommy is telling a local watering hole all about what happened on Halloween Night in 1978, introducing himself as well as the other survivors of Michael Myers to the crowd. When speaking about Richard’s’ Lindsey he mentions that her babysitter was executed that night, in doing do we see flashes of Annie from the 1978 film but also a snippet of footage from 1981’s . The footage used is the moment when Cyphers’ character sees the body of his daughter on a stretcher, a critical moment for Brackett in that sequel and one that we now can consider “canon” within this new timeline, despite much of that movie as a whole being thrown out.

Regarding the reference, franchise producer Malek Akkad told Showbiz Cheat Sheet: “Well, we reference so many nice little moments in the franchise I would say. That’s really down to David and the writers just being huge fans. I know the fans love it, the die hard fans go crazy when they see one of these references.”

Halloween Kills is now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock. If you haven’t signed up for Peacock yet, you can try it out here. 

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