Since it picks up 40 years after the events of the original film, Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Loomis is naturally no longer alive in Halloween 2018, but Danny McBride and David Gordon Green had at one point toyed with the idea of bringing Loomis back by essentially rewriting the ending of Halloween 1978 at the start of this year’s sequel. As Gordon Green explained to us last month, it was actually John Carpenter who talked him out of messing with the original film’s ending, and Halloween 2018 now begins in 2018 rather than first revisiting the events of 1978.
As it turns out, that scrapped “re-imagining” of the original film’s ending was at one point going to include the on-screen death of Dr. Loomis, using a Donald Pleasence body double.
Again, it was Carpenter who talked Gordon Green out of doing that. He tells Collider this week, “Originally they were going to have Donald Pleasence’s character get killed. And I thought, ‘That’s a mistake. The audience won’t like that. That’s a revision I don’t think we should do.’ So that was my one big contribution… I thought the fans are gonna get pissed off at that.”
Carpenter continued, “I don’t think you have to even deal with the ending of my movie; just start the movie where they did. I think that he did great.”
Loomis does at least have a presence in the new film, you’ll be happy to know.