Halloween Reboot Will 'Bring Back The Creep Factor' Of The Original
The upcoming Halloween reboot won't rely on gross-out gore to spook its audience to the core. Instead, it will use what made the original flick so powerful: a hefty dose of spine-tingling tension.
Speaking in a recent interview with Charleston City Paper (via Bloody Disgusting), Danny McBride, who co-wrote the revival, discussed how he and director David Gordon Green plan to bring the hallowed series back from the dead. Their biggest focus has been on shifting away from the blood and guts that has saturated the modern horror scape and harken back to the thrills and chills John Carpenter established when he first began the franchise in 1978.
"The original is all about tension," McBride said. "Laurie Strode doesn't even know that Michael Myers exists until the last minutes of the movie. So much of it you're in anticipation of what's going to happen and the dread that Carpenter spins so effortlessly in that film... I think we were really trying to get it back to that. We're trying to mine that dread. Mine that tension and not just go for gore and ultra-violence that you see some horror movies lean on."
He added that the way he and Gordon Green, who worked on the film's script with McBride, the project is will bring back the "creep factor" of Carpenter's classic. When explaining how the pair established the tone in the scripting process, McBride noted that it was all about "trying to find the horror in your own backyard, in our own homes."
McBride has been quite open about how the new Halloween pic will eschew current film stereotypes, previously discussing how the updated version of Michael Myers won't be a supernatural slayer as seen in a handful of past series entires.
"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," said McBride.
He also mentioned that cutting around cheesy horror and approaching the narrative from a more realistic angle makes things feel genuinely terrifying. "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," he stated.
By and large, it seems that McBride and Gordon Green are crafting a pitch-perfect (or as close to perfect as they can get it) new iteration of Halloween that will both satisfy old-school horror fans by zeroing in on tension over bloodshed and serve as a sort of tribute to Carpenter by righting the wrongs of certain Halloween sequels that came after his beloved work.
Plot specifics haven't been released as of yet, but we do know that the new Halloween will pick up 40 years after Laurie Strode's final fight with Michael. Jamie Lee Curtis is set to reprise her role as Laurie, which she played in Carpenter's original, 1981's Halloween II, 1998's Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, and 2002's Halloween: Resurrection. Ant-Man actress Judy Greer is reportedly in consideration for a role in the film as well.
Halloween will bring the scares to theaters on October 19, 2018.