The Halloween franchise knows its place in the horror franchise lexicon, having Fast and Furious-ishly announced the back-to-back release dates for its next two entries.
Friday, John Carpenter unveiled 2020 and 2021 drop dates for the compellingly titled Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. Kills will kill starting Oct. 16, 2020 and Ends will end starting Oct. 15, 2021. The promise is that Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode and Michael Myers aren't done with each other.
David Gordon Green and Danny McBride teamed with Scott Teems for the Kills script, while Paul Brad Logan and Chris Bernier join the writers' team for Ends. Green directs both.
Carpenter, an inarguable GOAT of the horror world, spoke with Complex last October about returning to the franchise in both a consulting and scoring capacity. Speaking on the state of the genre as a whole, Carpenter expressed cautious excitement about the inevitability of new generations always coming up with fresh ways to frighten audiences.
"Well, there's a bunch of good movies but horror has pretty much always been the same," he said at the time. "There's a bunch of bad movies, very few fair movies. A handful of good movies and then one or two classics. It's always the same, and horror gets reinvented every generation by new guys or new girls who come along and say 'I want to do this' or 'put a new fear into this'. So horror is doing great."
2018's Halloween successfully revived the franchise to its original stature, largely winning over critics and fans alike to the tune of just under $256 million at the global box office.
At Wednesday's TCA's, Green and McBride offered some additional info about what fans can expect from the upcoming sequels.
“It’s just a continuation of it. It’s telling the story, moving forward. It’s not another reinvention, or anything like that," McBride said. "It’s this world that we’ve established, and then it continues beyond the events of the first one.”
Green added that the final film will bring the Michael Myers/Laurie Strode saga to an end, once and for all. "They’re never done telling the Frankenstein story, and at this point, Michael Myers is a classic movie monster," he said. "But our Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode/Michael Myers saga will be done. The fun of it is also seeing it end and knowing that it can. If you just keep trying to elongate it and milk it for all of the money, then that’s boring.”
