As one of the most influential filmmakers that horror cinema has ever seen, John Carpenter is no stranger to seeing his movies being remade, which extends to several of his works that aren’t even part of the genre that built his reputation. As well as modern updates for Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog and The Thing, reboots for Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China have also been stuck in development for years.
Of course, Carpenter is arguably best-known for the Halloween franchise, which was already remade in disappointing fashion with Rob Zombie at the helm in 2007, but the brand found a new lease of life when David Gordon Green and Danny McBride disregarded canon and made a direct sequel to the 1978 original, which became the highest-grossing installment by a massive distance and also received the most enthusiastic reviews that any of Michael Myers’ killing sprees had seen in 40 years.
Carpenter wasn’t involved in Rob Zombie’s time at the helm of the franchise, but he returned to the fold in 2018’s Halloween as executive producer and composer, a role he’s once again fulfilling on upcoming sequel Halloween Kills. We still haven’t seen a trailer for the movie despite Blumhouse still crossing their fingers for an October release, but in a recent interview the 72 year-old horror icon was full of praise for twelfth installment in the long-running slasher series.
“The cut is done. They’ll mix it in New York in the next week or so. Then it will be in the can. My work is all done. The movie is something else. It’s fun, intense and brutal, a slasher movie times one hundred, big time. It’s huge. I’ve never seen anything like this: the kill count!”
We can now add John Carpenter to the list of people who have only had great things to say about Halloween Kills, and while the vast majority of them have been heavily involved in the movie, based on the last outing, there’s no reason to doubt that the franchise’s recent creative and commercial renaissance is set to continue whenever it ends up arriving in theaters.