When it was announced that Danny McBride would be co-writing a new Halloween movie, I was skeptical that he was the right man for the job. Since then, however, two things have happened to ease my concerns. First, Jordan Peele, a man known primarily for sketch comedy, made one of the best horror movies of the decade, Get Out. Second, McBride appeared in a dramatic role in Alien: Covenant and we learned that he’s actually a big fan of horror (and an even bigger fan of director John Carpenter.)
During a recent appearance on The Empire Podcast, McBride talked about how he and David Gordon Green are hoping to make the nearly 40-year old Halloween franchise scary once again.
There’s a lot of room for improvement. David and I are coming from it as, we are horror fans, and we are humongous fans of John Carpenter and of what he did with the original Halloween, so I think from watching this and being disappointed by other versions of this series, 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. That stuff to me isn’t scary, I want to be scared by something that I really think could happen. 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.
So we worked for about three weeks on our take of what we would do, because we weren’t even sure if we wanted to do it. I’m the same way, I’ll be the first person to go online and bitch about someone rebooting something, like “why are you doing this?” So for us, we were like we have to make sure that this is something we actually would want to see or else it’s not worth doing.
We came up with a take that we thought was cool, and then we actually went and pitched to John Carpenter, and he loved it, he was into it. It was like insane to have his seal of approval and to have him respond to where we were talking about taking Michael Myers next. It’s not like we’re taking this and we’re going to try to put some weird comedic spin on it. We just want to get back to what was scary about the first Halloween.
Will McBride’s vision of Halloween be realized? We’ll find out when it’s released on October 18, 2018.
