Movies
‘Happy Halloween: A Halloween Kills Fan Film’ Brings the Terror and the Brutal Kills [Video]
Presenting itself as a “lost scene” from David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), the 13-minute short Happy Halloween: A Halloween Kills Fan Film has been unleashed, coming along as a special fan-made treat on the very weekend Halloween Kills was originally supposed to be released in theaters. And to its credit, it’s a highly satisfying way to tide us all over.
A great example of squeezing high production value out of *no* budget, Happy Halloween was written & directed by Courtlan Gordon and Jimmy Champane, with Never Hike Alone/Never Hike in the Snow filmmaker Vincenti DiSanti in the role of Michael Myers. He makes for a terrifying and imposing Shape, slashing his way through a new group of characters.
“In this lost scene from Halloween 2018, a police officer, a trick-or-treater and three high school friends have a deadly encounter with THE SHAPE.”
“We all went through so much effort to make sure every costume you see in this movie is as close to the ones you saw in Halloween 2018 as possible,” Champane had said in a teaser video earlier this month. “We worked super hard to make sure this movie can exist in the same universe as Halloween [1978], Halloween 2018, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends.”
Tense, well shot and with a few absolutely brutal kills, Happy Halloween does indeed feel like it’s ripped right out of David Gordon Green’s vision of Haddonfield, and it’s an incredibly impressive effort that once again reminds how far fan films have come in recent years. It’s also proof that you don’t need a budget to make a kickass horror movie, fan film or not.
Check out Happy Halloween: A Halloween Kills Fan Film below!
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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