Halloween‘s Michael Myers has been chasing, terrifying and carving up teenagers for 40 years now, so it’s not surprising that he has an off-night every so often. At least, that’s the idea behind D.M. Cunningham’s He Waits, a hilarious and well-shot fan film that imagines what Michael Myers might be like with a couple more years under his belt.
We open with a classic Halloween set-up: the masked Myers menacing a terrified teenage girl. She locks herself inside a garage, shaking in fear as the knife-wielding maniac rattles the handle, desperate to get in and do his whole stabbing thing. But it seems that this garage door isn’t going anywhere, leading to a stalemate. With nothing to do but wait for his prey to emerge, Myers pulls up a lawn chair and, somewhat embarrassingly, falls asleep.
Now, before you tut at this dereliction of slasher villain duty, I’d like to see you keep up the same high standards for four decades, especially after you’ve been shot, set on fire, shot again (and subsequently fell down a mine shaft), beaten unconscious with a plank of wood, pumped full of drugs and walloped with a pipe, decapitated, and burnt to death. Despite all these setbacks, Myers refuses to let circumstances prevent him from following his dreams – and for that, we should applaud him (well, not so much for the murdering part, I guess).
Of course, we’ll soon see Myers back in action terrorizing his most famous victim, Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode in Danny McBride and David Gordon Green’s soft reboot of the franchise, with the aim of recapturing the stylish, streamlined, vicious terror that made John Carpenter’s 1978 film an undisputed horror classic.
The pic is set to open October 19th, but in the meantime, let us know what you think of He Waits in the comments section down below.
