It Took Almost 80 Drafts Before Blumhouse Cracked Halloween’s Script

You have to hand it to David Gordon Green and Halloween co-writer Danny McBride – resurrecting Michael Myers and his horror legacy is not something they’ve taken lightly.

Case in point: early on the sequel’s development, Green and McBride explored every possible story angle, resulting in “eight months [and] 80 drafts” of Halloween‘s plot. Some of those drafts even harkened back to the original sequels – sequels that were ultimately rendered non-canon by Blumhouse’s creative team.

But as writer-director David Green tells The Hollywood Reporter, that wasn’t always the case, and it was only when Halloween welcomed the return of Laurie Strode that those admittedly superfluous plot points – Michael and Laurie’s sibling subplot – fell by the wayside.

It was probably eight months of 80 drafts, exploring different ways we could go and following different characters. Then we started casting it and we learned Jamie Lee [Curtis] wanted to be in it. So then we geeked out and wanted to beef up the Laurie Strode character. All of a sudden people started showing interest and so our opportunities started to expand even while we’re shooting the film. Every Saturday was rewrites for Sunday rehearsals so that I could feed off of what we learned that week or for what an actor’s idea might have been or a skill set that we didn’t know we had in front of us. So we were writing up until the very last week of production.

Once the pieces began to fall into place, and Blumhouse’s Halloween sequel entered production in earnest, David Gordon Green soon realized that the best way to handle Michael’s second coming was to strip everything down to the bare bones – all the while adding a slight departure from the 1978 classic.

We started incorporating all the follow-ups and then it got overwhelming trying to engineer something that made sense. Some of the plot points became a little stretched thin as the franchise went on. And so ultimately finding those frustrations, [Danny] McBride came to me and just said, ‘What’s the Michael Myers movie that you really want to see?’ Halloween I was, to me, the most pure and, in a lot of ways, the most simple. I get the real connection with the terror of a movie that isn’t so lost in its own mythology.

In short, Blumhouse’s sequel operates on the basis that Michael Myers was arrested at the tail-end of Halloween, ultimately leading to the moment when, after 40 years spent locked behind bars, he escapes confinement, and begins hunting Laurie Strode once more.

Green continued:

Once we kind of had a concept of eliminating Halloween 2 and beyond, that’s when we went over to Carpenter’s house, which was a lovely picnic, and nervously presented our ideas to him. Through the course of that very suspicious conversation, [we] saw him go from cross-eyed to big smiles and then that gave us the confidence to move forward pretty quickly and then try to get Jamie Lee Curtis, [original star Nick Castle] and Carpenter himself to do the music. The next wave of ambition kicked in once we, as I like to say, we kissed the ring of the Godfather and he gave us the thumbs up.

Halloween haunts theaters on October 19th, but not before a special showcase at San Diego Comic-Con later this week. Stay tuned for more on that one.