John Carpenter Convinced David Gordon Green Not To Alter The Original Halloween’s Ending

Though the upcoming Halloween scraps several decades’ worth of slasher sequels from the series timeline, the Blumhouse production leaves the 1978 original relatively unscathed, picking up the action forty years on from Laurie Strode’s traumatic first encounter with Michael Myers.

Early versions of the script, however, saw the new Halloween overlapping more directly with the John Carpenter classic, with director David Gordon Green recently sharing that he originally intended for his movie to begin with a recreation of the 1978 film’s climax.

“Even in the script going into production, we were going to refilm the end of the original film from a different perspective,” Green said.

“We had this very complicated overhead view of Loomis shooting the gun, Michael going over and then the apprehension, assuming everybody was going to need a little bit to get back up to speed with where we are and we haven’t seen the movie in a long time or we’ve never seen the movie, had to invite everyone to the party and that kind of thing. We kept pushing it off.”

At the movie’s Los Angeles press junket, Green went on to explain that they even had the idea of depicting a young Laurie Strode with a blend of actress Jamie Lee Curtis and a teenage body double. Similar plans were also in place to bring back Dr. Loomis with a double, but after a period of planning, this digital trickery all seemed a bit much.

“There was that conversation,” Green said. “There was conversation of utilizing footage from the original film and digitally altering it so we got some other interesting elements. All this stuff starts to cost money and when you look at what we’re trying to do, do you need the gimmick? Do you need the exposition? Do you need the setup?”

In the end, it was director John Carpenter himself – who was involved in the new movie in a scoring capacity – who talked his successor out of this elaborate scheme.

“This was Carpenter actually calming me down on set,” Green said. “I’m like, ‘Nobody’s going to know what’s happening and where we’re coming from.’ He’s like, ‘Just trust ‘em and leave ‘em alone and let ‘em figure it out.’”

But though the idea was eventually scrapped, Green’s film does contain one eerie reminder of the sequence that never was.

“We rebuilt the bedroom from the climax of the original film so we have the bones of this room,” Green said. “Budgets are getting tighter, schedule’s getting tighter. We’re trying to jam this movie and finish it up. Then we’re like, ‘Screw it. Let’d not do that. If we need it later, we can always rebuild it.’ So we turned the set of the house into Laurie’s bedroom. So the scene in the climax with all the mannequins is to the square inch a rebuild of that room. The closet’s in the same place, the balcony’s in the same place. All those things landed so it became, out of cost necessity, this incredible subconscious (because I don’t think anybody would pick that up) rebuild of an environment from the original film.”

So ironically, the new Halloween ended up with a much subtler recreation of the 1978 original.

While Green’s film has so far gained the approval of Carpenter himself and most critics, you can decide for yourself whether Halloween earns its name when it hits theaters on October 19th.