Danny McBride on bringing the Halloween franchise back to basics

Last Updated on July 31, 2021

Several months ago it was announced that David Gordon Green would be directing a new HALLOWEEN film which he would co-write with Danny McBride. Certainly not the pairing I would have expected, but fans seemed quite pumped by the idea, especially as John Carpenter would be involved in the project as well. We haven't heard all that much about where David Gordon Green and Danny McBride will be taking Michael Myers, but McBride appeared on Empire's podcast recently to discuss how they were hoping to bring HALLOWEEN back to basics and make it scary once again.

Look at where the Halloween franchise has gone. There's a lot of room for improvement (laughs). David and I are coming from it as, we are horror fans, and we are humongous fans of John Carpenter and of what he did with the original Halloween, so I think from watching this and being disappointed by other versions of this series, I think we're just trying to strip it down and just take it back to what was so good about the original. It was just very simple and just achieved that level of horror that wasn't corny and it wasn't turning Michael Myers into some supernatural being that couldn't be killed. That stuff to me isn't scary, I want to be scared by something that I really think could happen. I think it's much more horrifying to be scared by someone standing in the shadows while you're taking the trash out as opposed to someone who can't be killed pursuing you.

It's always difficult to recapture those original scares, and the HALLOWEEN franchise is no different. The sequels which followed could rarely hope to be as shocking or frightening as John Carpenter's original, but perhaps the time has come for another attempt. After Blumhouse Productions CEO Jason Blum approached David Gordon Green about directing a new HALLOWEEN, Green came to Danny McBride because he knew that he was a fan of the franchise and asked if he would help him crack the story.

So we worked for about three weeks on our take of what we would do, because we weren't even sure if we wanted to do it. I'm the same way, I'll be the first person to go online and bitch about someone rebooting something, like "why are you doing this?" So for us, we were like we have to make sure that this is something we actually would want to see or else it's not worth doing. We came up with a take that we thought was cool, and then we actually went and pitched to John Carpenter, and he loved it, he was into it. It was like insane to have his seal of approval and to have him respond to where we were talking about taking Michael Myers next.

Despite having movies like PINEAPPLE EXPRESS and YOUR HIGHNESS under their belts, Danny McBride reassures fans that they will not be making HALLOWEEN a comedy. "It's not like we're taking this and we're going to try to put some weird comedic spin on it," said McBride. "I'm not acting in it or anything, I'm producing it and writing it with David. We just want to get back to what was scary about the first Halloween." Sounds good to me.

Sortly after the project was announced, McBride indicated that the film would NOT be a remake, but rather carry on with the story of Michael Myers which John Carpenter set up all those years ago. This led some to ponder, myself included, whether David Gordon Green and Danny McBride's HALLOWEEN film would be a period piece taking place in the late 1970's. However, McBride told Empire that their HALLOWEEN would be "contemporary." HALLOWEEN is set to hit theaters on October 18, 2018.