Danielle Harris's connection to the HALLOWEEN franchise is quite interesting, since she has played two different characters in two separate timelines within the series.
With original star Jamie Lee Curtis unavailable in the late '80s, Harris took over as the franchise's heroine to play the young, orphaned daughter of Curtis's Laurie Strode in HALLOWEEN 4 and 5. When Curtis decided to return to the world of HALLOWEEN for HALLOWEEN H20 in 1998, the sequels she wasn't in were wiped from existence. In H20, Laurie didn't have a daughter, but a teenage son played by Josh Hartnett.
Curtis is coming back to HALLOWEEN again for the next film in the series, which will again be wiping sequels from existence – the screenplay by Danny McBride and director David Gordon Green is ignoring every HALLOWEEN movie except for the original film. That means that not even some of the films Curtis was involved with – HALLOWEEN II, H20, and HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION – will count.
Returning to the story of the original film also means that Rob Zombie's HALLOWEEN remake and its sequel are being filed away in their own little corner of HALLOWEEN history. In those films, an adult Harris returned to play the role of Laurie Strode's ill-fated friend Annie Brackett.
Having starred in four HALLOWEEN films, Harris was hoping she might be able to come back and either co-star with Curtis in the new one, or even just make a cameo in the film. Unfortunately, that's not happening, and Harris is bummed. As she told fans during a Facebook Live chat:
What I am bummed about is… [Laurie Strode] has a daughter. I was okay with it when she had a son… but they’re saying it’s the last one and… she has a daughter. And it’s not Jamie. It’s just kind of a bummer, I guess. I think somebody had said, it wouldn’t have hurt the movie to have Jamie reunited with [Laurie]. But that didn’t happen. We did put in a call, thought it’d be kinda cool even just to have a little flashback… they were not interested. So. I tried."
Judy Greer will be playing Laurie's daughter Karen in Green's film, which has the following synopsis:
Laurie Strode comes to her final confrontation with Michael Myers, the masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night four decades ago.
Original HALLOWEEN director John Carpenter is executive producing the new film and will be providing the score. Malek Akkad is producing with Jason Blum.
The new HALLOWEEN, with Curtis and Greer but not Harris, is scheduled to reach theatres on October 19, 2018.