The new Halloween is filled with nods to the previous entries in this long-running series, but perhaps the most elaborate homage to the films that came before it is the movie’s climactic recreation of a scene from the 1978 original.
Be warned that some pretty big spoilers lie ahead…
If you don’t recall the haunting ending to John Carpenter’s Halloween, Laurie’s first frightful encounter with Michael Myers concludes with Dr. Loomis shooting the killer, causing Michael to fall from a second story window. But when Laurie looks down from the window, expecting to see a body, she instead finds that the masked killer’s gone.
Fast-forward to David Gordon Green’s movie and you see much the same situation, but with the characters reversed. Here, it’s Michael who sends Laurie falling out of the window after stabbing her, but when he goes to look, he sees no trace of his victim. One major difference between these two sequences, however, is that the newer release sees Jamie Lee Curtis’ character return to the action and finish off this conflict for real.
Ironically, in an early version of the sequel’s script, Green had intended to quite literally recreate the 1978 film’s ending, in order to catch modern audiences up on the events. Eventually, the team were talked out of the idea by Carpenter, who advised that they should have some faith that viewers will get what’s going on without the recap.
On a similar note, while Carpenter gave his work an open ending, the director recently admitted that he didn’t want the first Halloween to have any sequels, saying that he hoped to leave audiences on a note of ambiguity:
“Michael’s disappearance at the end of the first film makes you gasp, and I wanted to leave the audience that way. I didn’t want any sequels. Boy, was I wrong, huh?”
Evidently, things didn’t go as Carpenter planned, but at least he seems pretty happy with how this latest Halloween turned out.
Published: Oct 20, 2018 11:38 am