Editorials
Everything We Know About David Gordon Green’s ‘Halloween’
“It’s not a reboot. It’s not gonna be a rehash. It’s a continuation of Michael Myers.” – Danny McBride
Let’s attempt to paint a clear picture of what we should expect next year, shall we?
On May 23, 2016, the bombshell announcement dropped that Blumhouse, Miramax and Trancas International Films were partnering to bring the Halloween franchise back from the dead in the wake of Dimension losing the rights, with John Carpenter on board as executive producer, creative consultant and potential composer.
“38 years after the original Halloween. I’m going to help to try to make the 10th sequel the scariest of them all,” Carpenter said at the time. “Halloween needs to return to its traditions. I feel like the movies have gotten away from that. Michael is not just a human being; he’s a force of nature, like the wind. That’s what makes him so scary.”
Cut to February 9, 2017, when it was announced that a writing/directing duo had been brought onto the project. On that date, we learned that David Gordon Green (Pineapple Express) would be directing the new Halloween film, with Gordon Green and Danny McBride (Alien: Covenant) together writing the Carpenter-approved script.
It was also announced on the same day that the movie would be arriving October 19, 2018, which remains the film’s release date.
“So you say you want a revolution? You want to shake things up and bring back Halloween and make it rock again? Well so do I,” Carpenter said in a Facebook statement back in February. “David and Danny both came to my office recently with Jason Blum and shared their vision for the new movie and… WOW. They get it. I think you’re gonna dig it. They blew me away.”
McBride even chimed in about the project for the first time on that very same date, assuring that the film would be a huge departure from his comedic roots.
“David and I are thrilled to step outside of our comedic collaborations and dive into a dark and vicious horror,” said McBride. “Nobody will be laughing.”
Early sales art for ‘Halloween’ 2018
Naturally, the horror community was abuzz that whole week, as we all began speculating on the concept that made Carpenter so excited about the Halloween franchise for the first time in so many years. Many assumed Gordon Green was intending on remaking the original classic… but those rumors were quickly shot down.
“You know, it’s not a remake. It’s actually, it’s gonna continue the story of Michael Myers in a really grounded way,” McBride told CinemaBlend back in February. “And for our mythology, we’re focusing mainly in the first two movies and what that sets up and then where the story can go from there.”
In the same interview, McBride echoed Carpenter’s comments that the new film would get back to the “simplicity and efficiency” that made the original so effective. And during a chat with Empire Film Podcast around the same time, McBride strongly suggested that Michael Myers will not be a supernatural being in he and Gordon Green’s vision.
“I think we’re just trying to strip it down and just take it back to what was so good about the original. It was just very simple and just achieved that level of horror that wasn’t corny and it wasn’t turning Michael Myers into some supernatural being that couldn’t be killed,” he noted. “I think it’s much more horrifying to be scared by someone standing in the shadows while you’re taking the trash out as opposed to someone who can’t be killed pursuing you.”
Additionally, McBride seemed to even suggest earlier this year that making Michael scary again may mean erasing his familial connection to Laurie Strode.
“The moment that they made Laurie and Michael Myers siblings – it also makes it not quite as scary,” he said on the Jim Norton & Sam Roberts Show. “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.”
Alas, even when we learned all this exciting new information about the project, it was still unclear exactly what McBride was saying in regards to the plot. The assumption was that the new film would be picking up sometime after the events of Halloween 2 (1981), essentially proceeding as if the original franchise never continued past that point.
Of course, we were hit with another massive bombshell just last week, which seems to have confirmed that Halloween 4 through Halloween Resurrection never happened in this particular version of the timeline. Jamie Lee Curtis will be reprising the role of Laurie Strode in the new film, revealed to simply be titled Halloween.
“Same porch. Same clothes. Same issues. 40 years later. Headed back to Haddonfield one last time for Halloween,” Jamie Lee Curtis tweeted this past Friday.
A press release sent out over the weekend also gave us our first plot details, along with a first-look photo at Curtis back in the outfit she wore in 1978…
Jamie Lee Curtis returns to her iconic role as Laurie Strode, who comes to her final confrontation with Michael Myers, the masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night four decades ago.
Even more interesting was this tidbit in the aforementioned press release…
“Inspired by Carpenter’s classic, filmmakers David Gordon Green and Danny McBride crafted a story that carves a new path from the events in the landmark 1978 film.”
So then, what do we make of all this? Well, it seems clear that the main goal from everyone involved is to evoke the spirit of Halloween 1978 with the 40-years-later Halloween 2018, which aims to be simple, terrifying and free of the silliness that tanked the franchise as it grew longer in the tooth. Oh and there’s still a good chance John Carpenter is scoring the film, though nothing has been confirmed yet.
As for the story, Halloween ’18 will seemingly be set in Haddonfield on Halloween in the present day, centered on the final clash between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers.
And if the new movie is indeed “carving a new path from the events of the 1978 film,” it seems safe to assume that only the original Halloween happened in this alternate timeline. This would explain how Laurie Strode is still alive (she died in Resurrection, after all), and it also lines up with McBride’s previous suggestion that he and Gordon Green have erased Halloween 2‘s reveal that Michael and Laurie are siblings.
My best guess, based on everything we know? It would seem that they’re continuing the story 40 years after the original movie… and disregarding everything that came after.
What has Laurie been up to since 1978? We’ll find out on October 19, 2018.
Editorials
Not Another ‘Scary Movie’: Revisiting Forgotten Parody ‘Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th’
After Scream (1996) made a killing at the box office, as well as won over critics and audiences, a lot of folks in the movie biz thought they could do the same thing (and yield similar results). That thing, of course, being a slasher. Most of these opportunists wound up being pretty straightforward; they were low on humor or commentary. Yet others, like Scary Movie (2000), saw the potential for spoofing Scream, and acted on that impulse with both haste and excitement.
A few months after the Wayans’ comedy first hit theaters, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th landed on the USA Network, as part of the channel’s “Shriek Week” programming. That straight-to-cable (then home video) destination is possibly why many people still don’t know about this one. Or they simply chose to forget. Whatever the reason, only one of these two horror parodies came out on top—and it’s certainly not the movie where Coolio channeled Prince, and Tom Arnold saved the day.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th previously went by the name of I Know What You Screamed Last Semester. That Trimark acquisition then settled on a wordier title, just so it could avoid the litigious wrath of Miramax Films. Folks may or may not remember that Columbia Pictures was sued over the “implied connection” between I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Scream. So, yeah, there was no way that this competing Scream parody wasn’t going to be kept on a tight rein.
A Heavy Reliance on Late ’90s TV References
Simon Rex, Julie Benz, Majandra Delfino, Harley Cross, Danny Strong, Tom Arnold and Tiffani-Amber Thiesen in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Naturally, there would be similarities between Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th and Scary Movie—their scripts are built on the backs of the same two movies. It goes without saying that the other big slasher of the 1990s, I Know What You Did Last Summer, was as much of a target as Scream. However,the film pads itself with more TV references than Scary Movie did.
Half the cast coming off of (and in some cases, returning to) a WB show could be a reason why. Dawson’s Creek is particularly zeroed in on, based on how there’s a central character named “Dawson Deery“, and how the teen drama’s teacher-student affair plotline is satirized to the nth degree. As if there weren’t enough nods to television, Baywatch, VH1’s Pop Up Video, and even those cheesy Mentos commercials all serve as joke prompts.
Shriek director John Blanchard and writers Sue Bailey and Joe Nelms all hailed from television, so it’s understandable that they would stick close to home. The movie’s humor in general makes more sense, in light of learning that Blanchard worked on SCTV, Kids in the Hall, and MADtv. The writers, on the other hand, were each fairly green, with Bailey being the most experienced of the two; she wrote and produced the game show BattleBots. Nevertheless, they, plus Blanchard, churned out a passable, joke-a-minute movie. The whole thing is staggeringly of its time, but no one here was aiming for longevity.
Having seen enough of these kinds of movies, we know to expect jokes of the low-hanging fruit variety. That’s the parody’s whole prime directive. From the characters having names like “Screw Frombehind” and “Doughy Primesuspect”, to stereotyping that feels taboo nowadays, this is a movie from a different era of comedy. Its coarse, corny, and unapologetic sense of humor won’t sit well with everyone in these more enlightened times. In which case, Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th can be treated as a time capsule.
Does Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th Humor Still Hold Up Today?
“You may already be a victim”—Someone receives a most peculiar threatening piece of mail in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th.
Although Shriek doesn’t live up to its own claims of being so funny that you’ll die of laughter, its bawdier parts could still lead to some nervous laughter. For instance, after this movie’s parallel to Drew Barrymore’s Scream character is done in—not by the killer but by a bug zapper—the movie throws a newspaper next to the victim’s fresh corpse. The headline? “Popular slut killed! Football team mourns”.
We then move on to the wacky and inappropriate goings-on at Bulimia Falls High School, home of the Hurlers. At this nexus of constant absurdity, indecency, and surrealism, students are seen fornicating on the lawn, cheerleading squad applicants are advised to be comfortable with partial nudity, and terrorists openly prepare for an anthrax attack. It can be a tad jarring to watch, especially if you didn’t grow up witnessing this style of comedy firsthand. Hell, even if you did, you may still have a “what the hell were they thinking?” reaction.
It’s not just the aggressively edgy humor here that can make you chuckle—the slapstick, the sight gags, and the ribaldry all have a decent chance of landing. The movie’s own villain, whose hockey mask was instantly transformed into a crudely Ghostface-esque one after coming in contact with an open flame, commits more cheap laughs than kills. His and his victims’ chase sequences, most of which are cartoonish in nature, left this writer grinning. The Scooby-Doo fan in me also totally ate up that clever unmasking joke.
Final Thoughts on This Forgotten Horror Parody
Shriek If You Know What Did Last Friday the 13th
Now, the jury is still out on whether these comedies are to blame for the death of the first slasher revival. There is more to consider than some parodies. At the very least, the likes of Scary Movie didn’t exactly encourage big studios to put their money on a trend that was being derided to death (and not as profitable as the spoofs). These sorts of movies also felt unnecessary at the time, given how their principal inspiration is already a deconstruction of the genre. But like anything else that quickly becomes popular, mockery is unavoidable.
Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th is indeed a movie nobody asked for, much less needed. As a sample of pre-millennium humor and cultural attitudes, it’s not always precise. But as I’ve laid out, your mileage may vary. Horror parodies typically don’t have the best track record, so managing one’s own expectations here is recommended.
Upon rewatching, I for one laughed a bit more than I did back then. Only this time, I responded to the jokes that my younger self didn’t notice or find all that amusing. So it just goes to show that the movies don’t change—we do.
Harley Cross and Majandra Delfino must unmask the killer a number of times in Shriek If You Know What I Did Last Friday the 13th before learning their true identity.
You must be logged in to post a comment.