Movies
Here’s How Dr. Loomis Was Going to Die In an Early Version of This Year’s ‘Halloween’ Screenplay [Exclusive]
Earlier this week, John Carpenter revealed that David Gordon Green had planned to kill off Dr. Loomis in the opening scene of his forthcoming Halloween (2018), opening in theaters tomorrow night. While he didn’t offer any details, he did explain that he had to talk the filmmakers out of the “revision” that he felt was a “mistake” audiences wouldn’t like.
I’ve had my hands on an early draft of the new Halloween for over a year now, but haven’t reported on it since there had been multiple revisions (I wasn’t sure what was being changed through multiple rewrites and reshoots). Minor spoiler warning: Now that we know the new Halloween opens modern day, and that Carpenter has openly referenced the omitted sequence, I feel like it would be fun to share what Green and co-writers Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley had planned.
ALSO READ: The Lasting Legacy of Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Sam Loomis
In the finale of Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, Michael Myers is attacking Jamie Lee Curtis‘ Laurie Strode. After being unmasked for a brief second, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) shoots Michael and sends him stumbling into a bedroom. He takes aim and unloads into The Shape, sending him out the window and flying off the balcony. Laurie, who is curled up and crying, looks up at Loomis and exclaims, “It was the Boogeyman.” Loomis replies, “As a matter of fact… it was,” and then looks out the window to learn that Michael is still alive and has escaped.
The 2018 Halloween was going to open with a recreation of this sequence, only with the drastic revision of Dr. Loomis getting killed. The film would have picked up with the scene from Carpenter’s in which Laurie tells the children to run down the street and call for help.
Loomis, searching for Michael, sees the children running out of the house. Ignoring the children, his concern is more with the house they left behind. Entering, he runs upstairs and sees Laurie struggling with Michael, removing his mask. It offers him a clean shot. Bang. Michael stumbles into the bedroom, exactly as it plays out in the original film. Here’s where everything changes: when Loomis enters the room, instead of shooting Michael off the balcony, the Dr. finds himself attacked by The Shape. Michael grabs him by the throat and pins him to the wall, choking him to death.
“The Shape GRABS LOOMIS’ THROAT and throws him to the wall. Loomis drops the gun on the floor wheezing for breath. The Shape CHOKES Loomis, who struggles against the wall. 2. The Shape’s thumbs crush Loomis’ THROAT. He drops to the ground, DEAD. The Shape looks down at Loomis’ lifeless body.”
As Loomis goes limp, a bullet just misses Michael. It’s Laurie, sobbing, “No…” She fires over and over, sending Michael out the window and over the balcony. Here, Laurie peers over and sees the Boogeyman laying on the ground and continues to pull the trigger:
“Laurie shivers, holding the gun in the shadows. She moves to the edge of the balcony and aims the gun at The Shape’s body. She pulls the trigger but the gun is empty. She keeps pulling the trigger…”
Here, the cops arrive and swarm all over Michael as the camera follows Laurie back into the house.
“Laurie sobs, shivering against the wall, still holding the gun, still pulling the trigger over and over again in the dark…”
It’s unclear why the writers felt the need to revisit the original, but what I like is that it turns Laurie Strode into the clear protagonist. A modern take on the source material would find Laurie shooting Michael out the window and Dr. Loomis would have sacrificed himself for her. It actually makes a lot of sense, although the new film now perfectly juxtaposes Laurie from Carpenter’s film with the newly reborn and strong-willed grandmother Laurie has become in Green’s “sequel”.
In the end, it appears that Carpenter was right on the money. And if you’re curious how they were going to pull this off, Green explained it to us a few months ago.
What do you all think?
Judging from the unprecedented box office success of Kane Parsons’ Backrooms adaptation, you’ve likely already seen the liminal horror hit that managed to make audiences afraid of empty hallways and bad wallpaper. And now that so many of us have already entered the yellow labyrinth (some of us more than once), the time has come to discuss the spoiler-filled details that make the movie so fascinating in the first place.
And if there’s one element here that makes the Backrooms movie stand out from any previous lore/mythology, it has to be the genius addition of the Still Life entities. Warped recreations of real people that somehow wandered into the Complex, these misremembered creatures are responsible for some of the most disturbing imagery of 2026 – as well as laugh-out-loud memes created by one of the film’s very own concept artists.
However, true to Parsons’ word that the movie would rely heavily on practical effects, each of these distorted monsters was brought to life by real actors under heavy layers of makeup and prosthetics (with the occasional splash of CGI enhancements). While Anora and If I Had Legs I’d Kick You actress Ivy Wolk wasn’t among these performers, despite what Letterboxd might have you believe, the creature cast did benefit from veteran players with plenty of genre experience.
For starters, Alien: Romulus alumni Robert Bobroczkyi (who previously brought that film’s horrific Offspring to life during its most memorable sequence) plays the flick’s main antagonist, the Still Life version of Captain Clark. And though there was some obvious CGI involved in making the character’s peg-leg and nightmarish face more believable, Bobroczkyi’s monstrous performance and his natural 7’7″ frame helped to make that final chase sequence a clear highlight among this year’s genre offerings.
The film’s Texas-Chain-Saw-inspired “dinner” scene also features a freaky collection of less-aggressive Still Life creatures in the form of the Bearded Man, the Red-Headed Woman and, strangest of them all, the cheekily named “Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life” (who earned this title among fans and crewmembers as a reference to his apparent affinity for lamps).
While this was the first major horror outing for both Patrick Baynham (The Bearded Man) and Dana Mahmood (Archibald), Rhiannon Roberts has worked as a stunt performer in everything from Yellowjackets to HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation – which is probably why The Red-Headed Woman is the most active out of Clark’s impromptu “family.” That being said, the Archibald Leland Sutter Still Life is my personal favorite of the bunch simply because his anachronistic outfit suggests that the Backrooms phenomenon might be a lot older than the Async Foundation. I also love how hard he tries to be helpful with that little light of his!
That might be it for the Still Life entities, but I think horror fans will also be pleased to hear that the film’s Found Footage prologue stars none other than Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City star Avan Jogia as Naren Warne – and American Mary herself Katharine Isabelle also shows up in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo at Mary’s house party towards the middle of the story (though I have a feeling that she originally had a bigger part that was likely cut for time).
At the end of the day, Parsons’ Backrooms may have been an auteur-driven project motivated by the young director’s unique take on the classic creepypasta, but film has always been a collective artform, so it’s fun to see just how many talented performers it takes to bring this kind of supernatural nightmare to life in a way that connects with so many people.
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