We all know that no horror franchise with any kind of name recognition stays dormant for long, and given that it was the one to basically launch the slasher genre back in 1978, Halloween is certainly no different. Last year, we got a sequel/reboot hybrid from the unlikely duo of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride which was a real return to form for the series, going on to bring in $255m at the box office after finding favor with both fans and critics.
And while a sequel was all but inevitable after those results, Blumhouse surprised us by announcing that we’d be getting not one but two follow-ups in the form of Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, which will be with us in 2020 and 2021, respectively. Though the two entries were supposed to shoot back-to-back, the studio ultimately decided to film Kills and Ends separately, with the former now in production. And this week, some new set photos have emerged which appear to tease a scene that’ll be a flashback to the 1978 original.
Down in the gallery below, you can glimpse Michael Myers himself on set in Wilmington, North Carolina. And if you look closely enough, you’ll also notice that the mask he has on is pretty clean and looks quite different from what we saw in the 2018 effort, which has fans theorizing that this could be a flashback scene to the 1978 original. In fact, a couple people on Twitter have even said that this is indeed what’s going on, but of course, Blumhouse has yet to confirm it.
That being said, we already know that Kills is bringing back a ton of characters from John Carpenter’s iconic classic and as such, some sort of flashback to that fateful night doesn’t seem out of the question. Not to mention that Jamie Lee Curtis has also said that the upcoming sequel will “unpack the original,” explaining:
“What I love that David and Danny and company did is they connected the dots for forty years, now they’re going back to really unpack the first movie, bringing back all those characters whose lives were affected by what happened in 1978.”
That’s certainly interesting to hear and only strengthens the argument that the film will be revisiting the events of 1978’s Halloween. But flashback or not, we know for certain that Halloween Kills arrives in theaters on October 16th, 2020, with Halloween Ends set to premiere one year later on October 15th, 2021.