For straight-forward slasher flicks, the Halloween franchise could have one of the most convoluted lores in modern cinema. Now, with the latest Halloween movie scheduled to release this October — which also happens to be the third Halloween movie named simply ‘Halloween’ — the series is being retconned again.
In an interview with Yahoo, series mainstay Jamie Lee Curtis explained that the Danny McBride-penned Halloween will be a direct sequel to the original that came out 40 years ago. It seems to be a generational retelling of the original story, or if you’re a Star Wars person, it features a George Lucas “echo and rhyme.”
“There was the idea of, ‘What do you call it?” If I had had my druthers, I probably would’ve called it Halloween Retold. Because it’s being retold. It’s the original story in many, many, many ways. Just retold 40 years later with my granddaughter.”
So both of Laurie Strode’s children have been retconned out, but now she has a third (actually her only) child who has her granddaughter and now Great Uncle Michael is here to get stabby. Confused by the above statement? Let me explain:
In 1998’s Halloween H20, the events of Halloween III-VI are wiped from the canon. That means Jamie Lee Curtis’ daughter, introduced in Halloween IV, was thrown out with the witches in the standalone Halloween III. As were the epic battles between the perpetually-stressed Dr. Loomis, played by the late, great Donald Pleasence, and the lumbering Michael Myers. The movie follows original babysitter-in-peril Laurie Strode grown up and with a college-aged son, whom Uncle Michael is looking to butcher.
Halloween H20 got its own sequel in 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, which was as good/bad as Halloween III-VI depending on who you ask (IV isn’t that bad). It’s also ultimately inconsequential, as Rob Zombie rebooted the series completely in Halloween, his gritty 2007 take on The Shape. That series got a sequel, but now everything there is getting chucked out in order for John Carpenter, the series’ original writer and director, to make Halloween‘s 11th entry as the original’s only canonical sequel.
Will this film eventually be thrown out for a retelling surrounding Strode’s great-grandaughter in 20 years? It seems like the quality of this film could keep it official for a long while: “As soon as I read what David Green and Danny McBride had come up with … and the way that they connected the dots of the story, it made so much sense to me that it felt totally appropriate for me to return to Haddonfield, Ill., for another 40th-anniversary retelling,” Curtis said.
(Via Yahoo)
