Mother Strode
HALLOWEEN I Blumhouse Productions re-tools Carpenter’s classic slasher…
Since its, ahem, piercing debut in 1978 – redefining horror and terrifying babysitters everywhere – Halloween has limped on through seven sequels over 40 years with diminishing returns, culminating in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection (with a reboot and sequel, in 2007 and 2009). A mortally wounded franchise, it hardly seems the type of material to catch the eye of lean-mean horror powerhouse, Jason Blum.
Blum’s famed business model favours bright new talent, high-concept premises and seriously low budgets. Yet the producer creating cultural firestorms with the likes of Paranormal Activity, The Purge and Get Out couldn’t say no to the idea of another gory merry-go-round on John Carpenter’s famed stalk ’n’ stabber.
“I think the way to reinvent a piece of IP [intellectual property] is with new creative blood,” says Blum, no pun intended. “I think what’s exciting about this is you get the best of both worlds. You’re combining the original, which is John [Carpenter] and Jamie Lee Curtis, with a younger, newer voice in David Gordon Green [director of the new film]. That’s why I’m excited.”
Invested in the idea – and, he’s not coy, the potential box office and backend slice of pie – Blum coaxed Carpenter
back on board (he’d been disappointed with the ongoing series and not involved in later films) to “godfather the franchise” and put the project out to tender with various writers.
It was Stronger director Green and his unlikely co-writer, Danny McBride, who came up with a concept that Blum felt was “cool, original and unique”, where Laurie Strode (Curtis), the original survivor of serial killer Michael Myers, is now a gran seeking to protect her family from the return of her nemesis – in a universe where films 2-7 do not exist.
As a direct sequel to the ’78 original, the project also required the return of the scream queen. Curtis agreed to come back (also as executive producer), lured by the bait of greater characterisation. “This is a movie about untreated trauma,” she says, recalling that the script “worked for me very quickly – like, page eight. Whatever it was. There was some moment where I was like, ‘Ohhhhh!’”
Perhaps page eight was the zeitgeist introduction of a pair of investigative journalists digging up the case of Myers for a TV docudrama, or the resonance in a #MeToo world of a woman’s warnings being unheeded, or the fan-thrilling idea of original Myers actor, Nick Castle, being behind the mask again. Either way, Blum is confident that now is the time for Halloween to scare the bejesus out of us again – after all, we’re living in bleak times, when frights traditionally do big business.
“Yeah,” nods Blum. “What really scares me? President Trump. When this comes out, there’ll be two horror shows happening.”
ETA | 19 OCTOBER / HALLOWEEN OPENS THIS AUTUMN.