Quentin Tarantino's Halloween Movie Would've Given Michael Myers a Partner (2024)

In the early 1990s, as one Hollywood phenom began to fall, another one was rising. And for a brief moment, they crossed paths. John Carpenter's Halloween is one of the most influential horror films ever made. It may not be the first slasher movie ever made, but it popularized the subgenre and gave way to the slasher boom of the 1980s. After five movies, each worse than the one before, the franchise started off the decade on life support. As Michael Myers fell, Quentin Tarantino was on the rise as Hollywood's new "it" boy. In 1992, Tarantino wrote and directed his first feature, Reservoir Dogs, and the following year he penned the screenplay for Tony Scott's True Romance. Around this time, Tarantino was turned to as a choice to bring back the Boogeyman forHalloween 6. Tarantino took a stab at it, with an idea so wild that it's probably a good thing it never got made.

Halloween (1978)

R

Horror

Thriller

Fifteen years after murdering his sister on Halloween night 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois to kill again.

Release Date

October 27, 1978

Director

John Carpenter

Cast

Donald Pleasence , Jamie Lee Curtis , Tony Moran , Nancy Kyes , P.J. Soles

Writers

John Carpenter , Debra Hill

The Franchise Was in a Bad State After 'Halloween: The Revenge of Michael Myers'

The first Halloween, released in 1978, set the template of the classic slasher. Sure, there had been influential slashers before like Psycho, Black Christmas, and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but John Carpenter's vision is the blueprint for the subgenre as we know it today. Halloween was also a uniquely chilling horror experience because it felt too close to home. While you could survive those other movies if you just stayed away from roadside motels, sorority houses, and weird Texas hitchhikers, Halloween was terrifying because the Boogeyman was in the shadows of suburbia, right at your back door. Halloween also worked because its villain, Michael Myers, wasn't some raving lunatic with mommy issues, but a faceless entity in a mask who moved like a ghost without a single word or motivation.

Halloween's success led to the 1980s being led by crazed men hacking up teenagers. To stay with the frenzied pace of the Friday the 13th and later the Nightmare on Elm Street franchises, Halloween couldn't be a slow-burn horror film anymore, but something shocking with a high body count. In Halloween II, many more people die in bloodier ways, and John Carpenter made the fateful choice to give Michael Myers a reason for his madness. As it turned out, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) wasn't just an unlucky young woman picked at random, but the sister sister of Michael. That stripped away the fear, because now, as long as you weren't related to the Boogeyman or friends with someone who was, you were safe.

Many fans didn't like the shocking twist, with even Quentin Tarantino telling Consequence in 2019 that it was a horrible idea that ruined the franchise, adding, "I think they just yanked some idea out of their ass, alright, and they just talked themselves into 'Hey, well, this is why…' and now part two has a reason." This choice left the Halloween franchise stuck creatively. After Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a sequel without The Shape, flopped, Myers had to return, but he spent two straight movies, 1988's Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and 1989's Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, stalking his young niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris). The plots were boring, the mask had become hilariously awful, and worst of all perhaps, the fifth film ends with a mysterious man in black breaking Myers out of jail, a character created without even knowing who he was, leaving it to be someone else's problem to figure out for Halloween 6.

Quentin Tarantino Would Have Taken 'Halloween 6' in a Wild Direction

Halloween 5 was a box office disaster, making just $11 million at cinemas. As the '80s came to an end, the slasher fad was over, later to be reignited in 1996 with Wes Craven's Scream, but one year earlier, the Boogeyman made a comeback with 1995's Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. Notable only for being the first movie Paul Rudd ever filmed, and the last performance of Donald Pleasence, who passed away during reshoots, the sixth Halloween failed just as badly as the previous one, taking in only $15 million. You can blame much of that on the bizarre plot of Michael being controlled by the man in black and a cult, with The Shape no longer being a boogeyman, but a force powered by a supernatural trigger. Part of this even meant Michael trying to kill his own infant son, who was birthed by a held hostage Jamie (yeah, don't ask). Halloween had gotten so out of control that three years later, Jamie Lee Curtis came back for Halloween H20, a movie that erased all the bad sequels after Halloween 2.

If you thought that was an insane plot, when Quentin Tarantino was offered a chance to write the film, his idea was just as far out there. He told Consequence that it was his job to figure out who the man in black was, long before it was decided that he was the head of the Cult of Thorn. Tarantino said, "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 sh*t and wherever Michael Myers stops, he kills everybody. So, they’re like leaving a trail of bodies on Route 66." And if you're wondering, yes, Michael Myers would have done all of this while wearing his painted white William Shatner mask.

You Can See Quentin Tarantino's 'Halloween' Ideas in 'Natural Born Killers'

Quentin Tarantino told Consequence that the Halloween sequels and Halloween 2's sibling reveal were "horrible," saying, "He’s just The Shape. There’s something far more scary that he’s going through Haddonfield and it’s just her." Not understanding what Halloween is really about is why nearly every sequel has failed. Rob Zombie's reboots gave Michael a motive as well, with his madness created by being a bullied kid from the worst family ever. Halloween H20 and Halloween (2018) were the only big successes because they went back to basics, stripping away nearly everything except a silent madman in the shadows stalking the ultimate final girl. It's about the atmosphere, the realism, and the fear of the unknown, not the wild plots and gory kills. Michael Myers on a road trip killing people would have been insane to see, but it would also have gone against everything Michael Myers is. Could you ever see him with a friend, going on a buddy trip together killing people? As brilliant as Tarantino is, if this movie had been made, it would have been the worst idea yet and may have derailed his career before it even got started. Even cults are pretty normal compared to the Boogeyman seeing the country in his friend's car.

If that plot sounds familiar, though, it's because it's very reminiscent of another film Tarantino wrote the initial story for, 1994's Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone, about psychopaths Mickey (Woody Harrelson) and Mallory (Juliette Lewis), who go on a cross-country killing spree, including at a diner. Stone's film goes beyond the blood to deliver a message about the media's glorification of violence, but we can only guess what the message of a Halloween 6 with Michael Myers on a murder spree road trip would have been, other than to say that Hollywood will do anything to make a few bucks off an existing IP. Thankfully, we'll never know. Instead, Michael Myers had himself a cloned baby with his niece and then tried to kill it. Who would have ever thought that it could have been worse?

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers is available to watch on Paramount+ in the U.S.

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