Halloween director David Gordon Green and his fellow writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley ignored the nine other installments to the franchise and just made a direct a sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 original simply to make their narrative much more straightforward.
That’s exactly what Green told me over the phone recently, recalling, “Danny McBride, Jeff Fradley and myself were just sat around going through different narratives and what we should include.”
“Over the years of each sequel having to justify Michael coming back or being alive or when they thought he was dead or having to find the mask again, it got very convoluted if we were going to accept and appreciate all of the other narratives that preceded us.”
“Whereas when we thought of the original film, it is a man that has escaped from a mental institution, has a crazy Halloween night and then disappears again, and we wanted to pick up from there.”
“That made the narrative much more straightforward. And by stripping away the narrative clutter I was able to focus on the genre specifically and the characters.”
Andi Matichak, who plays Allyson Strode, the grand-daughter to Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie, also broke down how Green, McBride, and Fradley explained this decision to her and the rest of the cast.
“Something that David, Danny and Jeff really talked about when it came to going back to the original was, one, to simplify it.”
“Because when you look at everything from all the other movies you have everybody’s mythology, especially Michael Myers, and things aren’t as scary.”
“For 40 years this has been, everyone knows what the mask looks like. Everybody knows his story, everyone has seen it done so many times, so how do you make it scary again? Go back to simplicity of what John Carpenter did with the original.”
Rather than going back and analyzing all of the franchise, this decision meant that Matichak could just focus on watching the original film, which she subsequently rewatched around 10 times.
“That was something I was just interested in doing. I learned so much from John Carpenter’s filmmaking. And the way David and Danny talked about ‘Halloween’ from the beginning was that they were going to go back to the roots and go back to the original in a lot of ways and build from that.”
“So I just wanted to be as versed in that as I could be. But then after I was cast I didn’t go back and watch the other sequels because our film picks up 40 years from the day after the first one. I figured I would do the film first and then not have other things interjecting in my head.”
“Halloween” is now in cinemas.
