Since the announcement of the upcoming Halloween film, I’ve been excited to see what the film is going to be doing with Michael Myers that hasn’t already been done. Director David Gordon Green spoke with Entertainment Weekly about how this reboot seeks to bring the original terror back to the film, and as shown from the previous trailer, that means getting rid of some things that were once considered canon.
“Wasn’t it her brother that murdered all those babysitters?”
“No, it was not her brother. That’s something that people made up.”
The trailer removes the reveal made in Halloween II that Laurie Strode is the younger biological sister of Michael Myers, who was adopted after Michael brutally murdered their elder sister. It was then set up that Michael was hunting down members of his family, and when Laurie was reported to have “died” in Halloween IV, he began hunting down his niece, Jamie.
Now, all of that has been stripped away in order to allow Michael to once again be the Boogeyman who is the subject of nightmares for all, and not just those who unfortunately share his DNA.
“We watched all of them, and I can actually enjoy all of them,” Green told EW, “but there just felt like such a simple truth to the original. I think by the time you add Michael and Laurie’s relationship, being family, or he’s only hunting his family, it takes that ‘Boogeyman’ out of it. I want everyone to be afraid of him. The first one really had that anonymity to who he was. [We are] stripping down the backstory, and philosophy, and motivation, and, you know, themes of cults, and things like that. In this one, we’re trying to go bare bones and tell a horrifying story of questions that have no answers. It’s just bad s— that happens.”
I think Green’s intention is noble, and I agree that knowing too much about Michael has done more harm than good in making him the embodiment of pure evil, but at the same time, we have already spent almost 4 decades seeing Michael and Laurie as siblings. Still, getting rid of the cults and curses, I have to say, I’m in full support of.
What do you guys think? Is getting rid of Myers’s backstory helpful, or is it too late?
(via EW, image: Screengrab)
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