MOVIE NEWS – Like Michael Myers himself, the Halloween franchise refuses to stay dead, and now it is moving toward another creative reset. David Gordon Green, who revived the series with 2018’s Halloween before closing his trilogy with Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, has now explained what filmmakers need to remember when they step into this kind of fan minefield.

Much like the murderous Michael Myers himself, the Halloween franchise refuses to die. John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s original 1978 movie, Halloween, is still considered the blueprint for a successful slasher, and it remains as highly regarded today as it was when it first arrived. Its sequels, however, produced increasingly uneven results through the ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s, even when Rob Zombie stepped in to reboot the concept. David Gordon Green then arrived with 2018’s Halloween, which earned some of the strongest reviews the franchise had seen since its launch. The rest of his trilogy, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, both killed off Michael Myers definitively while also renewing interest in the character.

After his time in Haddonfield, Illinois, Green moved into another major horror franchise, borrowing from his Halloween handbook to make The Exorcist: Believer as a direct sequel to The Exorcist. That film did not connect with audiences or critics as strongly as his Halloween did, and his planned trilogy was scrapped. Now Mike Flanagan is delivering a new The Exorcist, while in 2023, Miramax secured the TV rights for a Halloween show that has been described as a creative reset.

Speaking with MovieWeb in support of his new Apple TV series Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed, Green reflected on his work in horror and gave advice to filmmakers trying to deliver new entries in franchises with passionate fan bases. His answer was not about ticking off fan-service boxes or mechanically feeding nostalgia, but about finding a personal reason to enter the story: “Very good question … The advice is: find something personal as your entrance into the franchise. Find the reason that you need to tell that story, not just be a part of the algorithm of a fan base, but make it meaningful to you. And I think that that’s what I try to set out to do in any movie I make, but particularly when franchises have this formidable fan base that can be very daunting to confront. If you don’t believe in every moment of your storytelling, then you’re just going to get eaten alive.”

At this point, it is still unclear when momentum will truly return to the Halloween franchise. For Green’s trilogy, Jamie Lee Curtis returned as Laurie Strode for the first time since 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, while Carpenter himself came back after decades away to serve as producer and composer on the film that retconned all previous sequels. Curtis, Carpenter, and many other figures involved in Halloween Ends have said their time in the franchise is over, so it remains to be seen whether future stories will start entirely from scratch or branch off from the main timeline in some way.

The Exorcist: Believer similarly brought back original star Ellen Burstyn and even included a Linda Blair cameo, while also retconning the sequels that had come before it. Unlike Halloween, though, the The Exorcist films have moved through different protagonists and have never been held together by as much direct narrative tissue from one entry to the next. Plot details for Flanagan’s The Exorcist have not been released yet, but Scarlett Johansson and Laurence Fishburne are already part of the cast.

Source: MovieWeb