‘FIELD OF SCREAMS
Call a film Halloween Kills and you’d better deliver. Over 43 years, four separate timelines and 10 blood-soaked rampages, masked maniac Michael Myers has slaughtered over 120 unsuspecting residents of Haddonfield, Illinois on the spookiest night of the year, utilising everything from a trusty chef’s knife to an especially pointy tripod in his single minded pursuit of Laurie Strode. Myers, then, is no slouch when it comes to butchering the innocent, but his body count is set to skyrocket when Kills hits screens later this year.
“It’s intense and brutal. Just brutal,” says Jamie Lee Curtis of the follow-up to Halloween (2018), itself a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s original, trailblazing slasher. “There’s an incredible amount of killing in this movie,” adds Danny McBride, the film’s co-writer. “It’s so bloody. It’s wild. David [Gordon Green] just went for it. This is such a vicious sequel. It’s relentless.”
Green completed work on Halloween Kills in July 2020, right around the time the decision was made to push the film back by 12 months to avoid a “compromised theatrical experience”. He hasn’t watched it since; both to resist any temptation to tweak things here and there and “cause trouble for everyone”, and also so he has a second opportunity to watch it fresh, with an audience. “That’s why you make horror movies,” says Green who, along with McBride, is currently in production on the second season of HBO series The Righteous Gemstones. “You make them for the crowds. You make it for those reactions. You make it for that community which is just so loving. It’s exhilarating as a filmmaker to be a part of that connection.”
MICHAEL’S 10 MOST HAUNTING KILLS...
No moment proved more exhilarating for Team than the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018, not least because success was far from a sure thing. By that point it had been nine years since Michael Myers last terrorised Haddonfield in Rob Zombie’s - a film that producer Moustapha Akkad, had plenty of opportunities to bring The Shape back to screens; there was only one problem.
