It's been nine years since Rob Zombie rebooted John Carpenter's Halloween franchise, and seven years since the most recent sequel. Neither did much to introduce the iconic slasher Michael Meyers to a new generation of viewers, and while there was some buzz about another attempted reboot, that pretty much came to an end last year when Dimension Films lost the rights. So where to go now? The franchise is going back to its roots with Carpenter back in the saddle.
Carpenter is teaming up with Blumhouse and Miramax for a new Halloween film. Details are scarce, but as of now Carpenter is expected to be an exec-producer and possibly score the movie, although you can bet he'll have input on a director and creative approach. Here's what Carpenter had to say (via Collider) on the project and his outlook on it...
“We’re probably going to go back to the original traditions that we started with early on. It’s kind of gone astray a little bit. I thought maybe the remakes went off somewhere that I didn’t want ‘em to go. Michael Myers is not a character. He is a force of nature. He is not a person. He is part supernatural, part human. He’s like the wind. He’s an evil wind. When you start straying away from that and you get into explaining, you’re lost. So hopefully we can guide it back in that direction.”
Of course, these are things that everybody says when taking on a revival such as this. "Go back to what worked...go back to basics"...yadda yadda yadda. In fact, Jason Blum says exactly this in his own comments, while making it clear this is very early on in the process.
“We’re not being vague because we know and we’re not telling. We’re being vague because we don’t know. We’re talking about different things. But I do feel like all of us kind of want to go back to that – I don’t know. I’m going out on a limb here... I don’t think we want to make it too meta, you know what I mean? We want to make it like it was – back to the basics – and not get into too much backstory which we don’t need.”
We'll see what happens. You can probably tell that I'm highly skeptical. Carpenter hasn't done much worth talking about in a long time, and whether he or Blumhouse like it or not, the horror genre has changed so much that going back to basics may not be the right path to take.
