John Carpenter Will Produce a New ‘Halloween’ Movie
It’s been seven years since Michael Myers last appeared to terrify teenagers on Halloween. But this is Michael Myers. He can’t be killed. He can’t be stopped. He always come back. And now he’s coming back again. (Cue creepy piano music.)
Blumhouse, the horror studio that gave the world Paranormal Activity, The Purge, and Insidious announced it’s secured the rights to the iconic Halloween series. Even more importantly, they’re also bringing in original Halloween director John Carpenter to oversee the project as executive producer and creative consultant (and while “negotiations are still in progress,” he may compose the film’s music too). Said Carpenter of the news:
HALLOWEEN needs to return to its traditions. I feel like the movies have gotten away from that ... Michael is not just a human being; he’s a force of nature, like the wind. That’s what makes him so scary.
Halloween spent the last two decades at Dimension Films, which distributed the final three films in the original Halloween series (The Curse of Michael Myers, H20: 20 Years Later, and Halloween: Resurrection) along with a recent reboot and sequel written and directed by Rob Zombie. Blumhouse says this new Halloween would be made on a “modest budget” like most of their projects, something that suits Carpenter fine (“We made the original Halloween for very little money.At heart it’s just a good, scary story,” he said in the same announcement.”)
I was never a huge fan of Rob Zombie’s Halloweens, and some of those later sequels are just terrible. But the original movie remains an all-time horror classic; one of the scariest ever made. There’s a reason it helped inspire an entire subgenre, and why people are still trying to recapture that spooky magic all these years later. That’s proven hard to do even within the Halloween series itself, but if anyone can guide this thing to the promised land, it’s Carpenter and Blumhouse.