After too many false starts and bad ideas over at Dimension, it appeared as though Halloween was going to stay dead a while longer. Dimension lost the rights to the famed slasher franchise last December, after canceling Patrick Melton and Marcus Dunstan’s Halloween Returns.
Now, the rights have gone to Miramax, and they’re partnering with Blumhouse (the makers of Insidious, Sinister, and Paranormal Activity) to make a new Halloween. Will it be a sequel? A prequel? A total reboot? Well, here’s where John Carpenter, the director of the seminal classic, steps in.
“We can’t tell you yet . . . because we don’t know,” explained Carpenter at yesterday’s announcement event. Also announced at the event (covered by Dread Central) was the news that Carpenter will serve as executive producer, and may also compose the film’s score. That’d be terrific — the guy’s making great music these days.
Producer Malek Akkad, who’s been with the franchise since 1995, will also return. His father, producer Moustapha Akkad, was with the franchise since the beginning.
So what else do we know about this new Halloween?
Well, if it’s at Blumhouse, it’ll be low budget. This is a good thing. Slasher movies are best when they’re small and personal. Low budgets force innovation and clever filmmaking. Carpenter’s philosophy about this was right on the money: “Tell a simple story. Tell it right. The original Halloween was made for very little money and it was a little, scary tale. That’s what we should be doing.”
We also know that the film won’t be a continuation of Rob Zombie’s remakes, so we can breathe a sigh of relief. Carpenter threw some well-deserved shade on those films at yesterday’s event, saying that they had “gone astray,” and “went off somewhere that I didn’t want them to go.”
“Michael Myers is not a character,” Carpenter explained. “He is a force of nature. He is not a person. He’s part supernatural, part human . . . If you start straying away from that, and you get into explaining, then you’ve lost. So hopefully we can guide it back in the original direction.”
Blumhouse has this project on the fast track, and will begin meeting with filmmakers soon to figure out what the movie will be. But whatever the new Halloween ends up being, we at least know that it’s in good hands.