Movies
‘Halloween’ Reboot Shooting This Fall; More On Making Michael Scary Again
Everything we’ve heard thus far about the upcoming David Gordon Green-directed reboot of the Halloween franchise has sounded pretty damn good to us. Gordon Green is penning the script with Danny McBride (Alien: Covenant), and we finished out last week with comments from McBride about making Michael Myers scary again. Today, we bring some more McBride insights.
On yesterday’s episode of the Jim Norton & Sam Roberts Show, McBride revealed that the Halloween reboot will be shooting this Fall, and he also spoke more about how he and Gordon Green intend to fix some of the franchise’s past mistakes and make Michael Myers as scary as he was in the original two films. For starters, he won’t be invincible and he won’t have a sister!
“It’s not a reboot, it’s not gonna be a rehash. It’s a continuation of Michael Myers – where we’re choosing to continue it from, you’ll have to see when the movie comes out,” McBride explained. “I’d already seen all these movies but I’ve really been studying them now, and just thinking about all the people that have been hired to make a Michael Myers movie. Just trying to avoid any mistakes that those people might’ve made. The first Halloween is scary as shit. And the second Halloween is scary, but not as scary. And then from there, it isn’t as scary. And I really think that what happens with it is that he basically becomes Frankenstein. No matter what anyone hits him with, he’s not gonna die. There’s no suspense.
McBride added, “We’re just trying to play with that. Make him real. Not make him real by giving him some crazy backstory either. Just getting back to the basics. Even the moment that they made Laurie and Michael Myers siblings – it also makes it not quite as scary. So all that kind of stuff to us… those are the things that took an amazing idea and took it somewhere it wasn’t quite as effective.”
He just keeps saying the right things, doesn’t he?
John Carpenter, who may be providing the film’s score, will executive produce with Malek Akkad producing for Trancas and Jason Blum producing for Blumhouse. Gordon Green and McBride will also executive produce under their Rough House Pictures banner.
Michael Myers returns to life on October 19th, 2018.
The trailer for Ti West’s upcoming adaptation of A Christmas Carol raised a lot of eyebrows when it dropped earlier this week. While plenty of folks initially dismissed Ebenezer as a derivative project meant to cash in on the recent wave of unnecessary prequels that expand the backstory of beloved characters (such as 2023’s Wonka), Charles Dickens’ original novel already made a point of exploring Ebenezer Scrooge’s origins in detail – meaning that this new film is likely just a particularly faithful adaptation of the source material under a different name.
Couple that with the fact that the movie is being helmed by a genuine horror auteur and I think it’s safe to say that the latest iteration of the first modern ghost story is in good hands.
That being said, one detail that immediately jumped out at me during the brief teaser (other than a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it nod to Johnny Depp’s iconic bedroom death scene from the original A Nightmare on Elm Street) is the fact that many of Ebenezer’s ghosts appear to have been directly lifted from the iconic John Leech illustrations that accompanied the first edition of Dickens’ novel.
Here are a couple of stills from the trailer compared to the original artwork:
The Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
The Phantoms in ‘A Christmas Carol’ and ‘Ebenezer’
Marley’s Ghost in ‘Ebenezer’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’
Mainly working with old-school wood and steel engravings that would later be transferred to print, Leech was instrumental in crafting the iconic look of history’s most influential phantoms – especially since Dickens is said to have been deeply involved with the creation of these so-called “comic illustrations.”
And since the novel is commonly said to have popularized spiritualism in Victorian England, much of the ghostly iconography that we still see in genre media to this very day (including some of Ti West’s previous films) can be traced back to the author’s partnership with Leech.
Ebenezer won’t be the first A Christmas Carol adaptation to borrow heavily from these designs, but I can appreciate how Ti West is incorporating an important part of horror history into his latest film.
Ebenezer will be available in theaters starting November 13.
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