Why Halloween Ditched The Sibling Subplot Between Laurie And Michael

“No, it was not her brother – that’s a thing people made up.”

That thing in question is the sibling subplot involving Laurie Strode and Michael Myers, which was explored intermittently throughout Halloween‘s many sequels.

But this October, there’s a real feeling that Blumhouse and David Gordon Green are going back to basics with their retro-inspired horror flick. Not only will it ignore all other Halloween movies in the timeline – save for John Carpenter’s seminal classic, of course – but it ditches that admittedly contrived subplot between Laurie and Michael, as it wasn’t until Halloween II that audiences learned of their family history.

And so, now that the first and suitably creepy teaser trailer is out in the wild (see here), co-writer Danny McBride has outlined the reasons why Laurie and Michael are no longer brother and sister during an in-depth interview with Cinema Blend:

I was pushing for that removal right off the bat. I just felt like that was an area where he wasn’t quite as scary anymore, it seemed too personalized, I wasn’t as afraid of Michael Myers anymore because I’m not his fucking brother, so he’s not coming after me. And also, you’ve seen it. So wouldn’t it be interesting just to see what would happen if it wasn’t that?

He concluded:

And what does that open up for us? If it was this random killing that has affected this character. So it just seemed like new territory to bite off. Maybe we’ll look back and say ‘It was such a mistake not to make them siblings,’ but I don’t know. It seemed, as opposed to just duplicating, it would be cool to see if it gives us anything else.

Also of note, it seems McBride and David Gordon Green have tweaked the franchise’s timeline so that Michael Myers would wind up in custody at the tail-end of Carpenter’s 1978 classic, paving the way for a 40-year interlude between Michael’s original killing spree and the one he’s about to embark upon this October – October 19th, to be specific, when the unmistakably shrill soundtrack of Halloween will be playing across theaters near and far.