As a lover of the Halloween film franchise, even I’m willing to admit how screwy the timeline has become and how confusing it must be to the average moviegoer. Granted, people who keep abreast of the latest movie news such as you and I aren’t as lost when we flock to the theater, but you’ll likely find some validity in the point I’m making.
Believe me, I’m going to elaborate on this momentarily, but first, let’s take a look at a quote from Danny McBride, who co-wrote the latest Halloween flick. As you may have heard, the film will ignore every sequel to have followed the 1978 original. But in a recent discussion with Flickering Myth, the scribe said that he and his colleagues still honored what was sandwiched in between:
“This picks up after the first one. The Halloween franchise has kind of become a little bit of like choose your own adventure, you know like there’s some many different versions, and the timeline is so mixed up, we just thought it would be easier to go back to the source and continue from there.
“We do [reference the other movies]. For fans, we pay homage and respect to every Halloween that has been out there.”
How that’ll play out remains to be seen, but McBride’s “choose your own adventure” comment plays into what we were talking about earlier, so let’s get back to that, shall we?
Now, there’s the original timeline which consisted of the first six films, barring Season of the Witch. After that, H20 came along and ignored all but the first two, piling its own sequel, Resurrection, on top of that. Then, director Rob Zombie rebooted the whole thing with two movies of his own.
Taking all that into account, this’ll make for the third major shakeup to the series, thus creating the possible confusion that we spoke of earlier. But, as McBride said, there’ll be various nods to those others we need to look out for. What those will be are anybody’s guess at this point, but that’s all the more reason to keep our eyes peeled when the first trailer possibly drops in six weeks or so.
Halloween opens in theaters on October 19.