The Halloween franchise has had a long, storied history and a whole bunch of sequels over the years. Those sequels are of varying quality, but it’s largely agreed thatHalloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myersis right near the bottom of the barrel. However, things could have been a whole lot different, as it was recently revealed that none other than Quentin Tarantino nearly wrote the movie before he became the filmmaker we all know today.
As revealed in the recently released bookTaking Shape, Miramax offeredQuentin Tarantinothe chance to writeHalloween 6in 1994. Ultimately, thePulp Fictiondirector didn’t end up taking the job, but it got far enough where he kicked around some ideas. In a recent interview, Tarantino opened up about it a bit. Here’s some of what he had to say when asked about being offered the job.
“Yeah, yeah, well, way before I’d ever done anything… it would have been if I had done it, I never got hired but it would have been my job to figure out who the guy in the boots is.”
“The guy in the boots” Tarantino is talking about is known as theMan in Black. At the end ofHalloween 5, a mysterious man dressed in all back who shows up to break Michael Myers out of jail. It isn’t revealed who that person was and, as it happens, the team behindHalloween 6, which was directed by Dominique Othenin-Girard, didn’t know who it was either. It would have been the writer’s job to figure that out.
That ultimately feel on writer Daniel Farrands' shoulders, with Joe Chappelle going on to direct the movie. We come to find out that this man is Dr. Terrence Wynn, who ran the Smith’s Grove SanitariumMichael Myersescaped from in John Carpenter’s original slasher classic. Things get weird from there, as the franchise’s sixth entry ends up dealing with a crazy cult and goes pretty far off the rails. As Quentin Tarantino explains, he didn’t get too far, but he did have a rough idea of how things would start.
“Yeah, I was like, ‘Leave that scene where [the Man in Black] shows up, alright, and freeze Michael Myers.’ And so the only thing that I had in my mind, I still hadn’t figured out who that dude was, was like the first 20 minutes would have been the Lee Van Cleef dude and Michael Myers on the highway, on the road, and they stop at coffee shops and shit and wherever Michael Myers stops, he kills everybody. So, they’re like leaving a trail of bodies on Route 66.”
That’s certainly an intriguing start with a rather high body count. And it almost sounds a little bit like what happens in hisNatural Born Killersscript with Mickey and Mallory Knox, which was directed by Oliver Stone. For what it’s worth, in the same interview, Quentin Tarantino explained that he’s not a fan of the Halloween sequels. Though, he has since come around to Rob Zombie’s divisive movies. Following the release ofHalloween 6, Miramax did a soft reboot of sorts by bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis in for Halloween: H20. Tarantino went on to makeJackie Brown,Kill Bill,Inglourious Basterds,Django UnchainedandThe Hateful Eight. This news comes to us viaConsequence of Sound.
