Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers
After both the box office failure and predominantly negative (and unfair) critical reviews of Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, the future for the Halloween franchise seemed unsure. Original creators John Carpenter and Debra Hill never intended or wanted to do Halloween II. They would have preferred their Michael Myers story be a single film and instead they wanted to continue the franchise as a series of stand alone horror tales that all took place on Halloween. But when Halloween III failed to launch this version of the franchise, producer (and Godfather) of the Halloween franchise Moustapha Akkad decided it was time to go back to the basics and bring back Michael Myers.
The opening of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is not only one of the most beautiful introductions of the entire series, but it perfectly captures the odd underlining uneasy feeling of the fall season. It’s a series of primarily landscape shots setting up Halloween, the holiday. Decorated pumpkins are set up at stoops, a gust of wind blows through the fields and the overall sense of dread that comes with the Halloween is palpable.
Continue ReadingHalloween II
It’s pretty interesting to look back now in retrospect at Halloween II knowing what we do about other successful horror franchises and realizing that at the time of its release there had never really been any previous attempt in horror history to continue a story involving a modern day bogeyman. Back when John Carpenter unleashed the original Halloween into theaters in 1978 to an unsuspecting audience, it became not only the most successful independent feature of all time (and held that record up until The Blair Witch Project came out in 1999), but also became easily the single most influential film of the entire '80s “slasher” craze that would follow. (Even if Carpenter did lift quite a few bits from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, the predecessor to Halloween). No one, including the filmmakers, the producers or investors could’ve ever predicted just how vast the success of Halloween would be, and so, they never, ever intended on doing a sequel.
But just as the '80s came, suddenly sequels didn’t seem like such a bad idea. Hell, Jaws had a sequel just a few years shy of the start of '80s and that did really well, so with the new crop of baddies showing up in such films as Friday The 13th, The Burning and My Bloody Valentine, why wouldn’t the studio want to bring back Michael Myers? And so, much to the reluctance of John Carpenter and Debra Hill who instead wanted to turn the Halloween franchise into a series of unrelated horror stories that took place around the famed holiday (and which they would attempt to do with Halloween III: Season Of The Witch), instead Halloween II became a direct sequel to their original, picking u...
