John Carpenter Came Up With The Halloween II Sibling Twist When He Was Drunk

While the sibling twist from 1981’s Halloween II has plenty of defenders, apparently the man who came up with it, John Carpenter, isn’t one of them.

Earlier this month, the director of the original 1978 Halloween admitted that he didn’t want his game-changing horror flick to have any sequels. Nonetheless, the filmmaker would later become involved in the follow-up in a writing capacity, and it’s here that he introduced the famous reveal that Laurie Strode and the murderous Michael Myers are in fact siblings. Speaking to The Daily Beast, however, Carpenter claimed that he looks back on this idea as a mistake born from a night of heavy drinking.

“Well, okay. Here’s how it was. I made Halloween, and then Halloween was sold to NBC to show it. But it was too short—they needed it to be a certain length. So I had to go back and shoot some more footage to make it longer. And I was absolutely stuck. I didn’t know what to do. I mean, the movie is the movie—I don’t want to touch it. But everybody will be happy with me, and they’ll make money, and that’s great. So I had to come up with something. I think it was, perhaps, a late night fueled by alcoholic beverages, was that idea. A terrible, stupid idea! But that’s what we did.”

Carpenter apparently isn’t the only one who doesn’t think much of this twist, with the team behind the new Halloween choosing to scrap this development from the franchise timeline completely, along with the events of every other sequel this property has brought us. The film’s co-writer Danny McBride has argued that by removing the family connection, Michael’s killings become more frighteningly random.

So far, director David Gordon Green’s fresh take has been well-received, with the upcoming release receiving better reviews than any other sequel from the series. And with a franchise high projected for the flick at the box office, it seems that not too many fans are turned away by the idea that Michael and Laurie are no longer related.

Even Carpenter himself seems happy with this latest entry, calling it the best Halloween movie since the first one. Nonetheless, you can decide for yourself whether this Blumhouse production rewrites history for the better when the film hits theaters on October 19th.