Doctor Sleep Director Teases What His Plans for the Halloween Reboot Would Have Been

When news first broke that a new Halloween film was being developed, some horror fans looked towards Mike Flanagan, who had recently delivered audiences the slasher Hush, with Flanagan himself recently teasing that, while he had a phone call with producer Jason Blum, those talks were minimal and he only briefly considered what avenues his take on the mythology would explore. The filmmaker also pointed out that he was ultimately glad that he wasn’t trusted with the franchise, as he felt he wasn’t the right person for the job, based on his struggles to come up with a way to reinvent the franchise.

“Jason Blum called me once and asked me that,” Flanagan shared with Bloody Disgusting. “I tried to come up with a take for a minute when Blumhouse got Halloween.”

As far as what his version would have looked like, Flanagan noted, “The answer to that is, I would do Hush. In a lot of ways, Hush is my Halloween.”

In Hush, author Maddie Young (Kate Siegel) lives a life of utter isolation after losing her hearing as a teenager. She’s retreated form society, living in seclusion and existing in a completely silent world. But one night, the fragile world is shattered when the masked face of a psychotic killer appears in her window. Without another living soul for miles, and with no way to call for help, it appears that Maddie is at the killer’s mercy… but he may have underestimated his prey. As this horrifying game of cat and mouse escalates to a breathless fever-pitch, Maddie must push herself beyond her mental and physical limits in order to survive the night.

Flanagan did at least attempt to brainstorm some new approaches to the series, but these were only tenuous concepts.

“I found my notes for that very brief period of time when I was trying to come up with a take on Halloween because Jason had said, ‘Hey, if you want to do this we can probably figure something out,’” the director pointed out. “I’m glad that I didn’t and so glad it did not come to me because the only note that I had scribbled over three days of brainstorming was ‘Dr. Loomis a woman?’ That’s as far as I got on Halloween.”

The biggest new perspective with last year’s Halloween was the concept of ignoring the events of all films in the franchise other than the original, which largely offered the filmmakers a clean slate with the series’ mythology.

“They made the right call in not trusting the franchise to me,” Flanagan pointed out. “In a lot of ways, Hush was my riff on the beautiful, simplicity, silence, tension, suspense that Halloween is. All of my love for [original director John] Carpenter’s film is poured into that.”

Last year’s Halloween was ultimately a critical and financial success, earning the sequels Halloween Kills, which lands in theaters on October 16, 2020, and Halloween Ends, which lands in theaters on October 15, 2021.

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