Though David Gordon Green’s Halloween reboot recently encountered an unexpected setback (spoilers: filming has been delayed into the new year), there’s still a tremendous amount of excitement echoing around the horror community for what is, essentially, Laurie Strode’s final run-in with the masked Michael Myers.
For one, it’ll ignore all other sequels in the Halloween timeline in honor of John Carpenter’s original classic, which is very much considered to be the jumping-off point, creatively speaking. Not only that, but we should also be very, very scared about the story that Green and Danny McBride have rustled up.
Speaking of which, the latter scribe recently spoke to the Charleston City Paper (via Bloody Disgusting) about all things Halloween, and why it’ll pay more attention to creating an authentic sense of dread, rather than relying on gratuitous gore to spook its audience.
The original is all about tension. Laurie Strode doesn’t even know that Michael Myers exists until the last minutes of the movie. So much of it you’re in anticipation of what’s going to happen and the dread that 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.
It’s about the closest thing to a blank canvas that one can hope for, and considering that Carpenter’s classic is fast approaching its 40th birthday, this retcon is a bold move by McBride and Green – so it’s no wonder horror fans have stood up and taken notice of 2018’s Halloween.
McBride continued:
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.
Michael Myers stalks Haddonfield (and our dreams!) when Halloween opens on October 19th, 2018.
