The Halloween franchise has undergone a lot of changes over the years, with various sequels and reboots all attempting to capture different elements of what made the first film such a success. Danny McBride, co-writer of the upcoming installment, claims that his take on the film will focus on tension and dread instead of blood and guts.
“The original is all about tension. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) doesn’t even know that Michael Myers exists until the last minutes of the movie,” McBride told the Charleston City Paper. “So much of it you’re in anticipation of what’s going to happen and the dread that [director John] Carpenter spins so effortlessly in that film, I think we were really trying to get it back to that. We’re trying to mine that dread. Mine that tension and not just go for gore and ultra-violence that you see some horror movies lean on.”
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Compared to many other slashers that attempted to recreate Halloween‘s success, the series has never leaned too heavily into graphic depictions of violence, but with films like the Saw series gaining prominence in recent years, audiences have grown accustomed to buckets of blood.
“To us, it was all about bringing back the creep factor and trying to find the horror in your own backyard, in our own homes,” McBride pointed out.
The upcoming sequel is reportedly taking place after the events of the original film, effectively erasing all the details of the other nine films in the franchise.
In the original film, Michael Myers breaks out of a mental institution 15 years after killing his sister on Halloween night. Once he arrives in his former hometown, he begins picking off teenagers one by one, ultimately setting his sights on Laurie Strode.
The second film in the series introduced the concept that Laurie was Michael’s long-lost sister, introducing the idea that Michael wanted to kill off all of the members of his bloodline. Were this new film to erase this element of the narrative, it would instead focus on the unsettling feeling that someone is terrorizing you for no real reason.
The new Halloween sequel is slated to hit theaters on October 19, 2018.
[H/T Charleston City Paper]
