The Halloween Franchise Had A Multiverse Movie In The Works
The Halloween franchise almost had a multiverse way before Marvel thought of it, but there was a big reason it never happened.
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Halloween is a foundational piece of modern horror cinema, without a doubt. The 1978 film directed by John Carpenter on a shoestring budget and a script written in 10 days has gone on to influence more movies than maybe anything else that isn’t named Citizen Kane or Die Hard. But there is one unexpected way it might have had to chance to influence the current landscape of film: a Halloween multiverse. Yes, while multiverses are all the rage right now, with the MCU letting multiple Doctor Stranges and Lokis do their thing and Warner Bros’ DCEU testing out how people feel about having more than one Batman at once. But it turns out the idea of a Halloween multiverse was kicking around way before that, and there was actually a plan at one point.
Let’s break it down. As a refresher, Halloween, at its simplest essence, is about a man named Michael Myers who kills people on Halloween night. He does not seem to have a reason. He does not speak. He does not have an overarching plan. In some ways, he does not even seem to have a sense of cruelty or anger, simply brutally killing people and moving on without thought or remorse. Basically, he is kind of a land shark with a creepy white mask. But over the many decades of film, there have now been 12 movies in the franchise, directed by 10 filmmakers, one movie that doesn’t include Michael Myers at all, and several different attempts to reboot the series from the ground up. There’s been retconning, there have been attempts to mine the killer’s childhood for explanatory trauma, there’s been Busta Rhymes. In short, the continuity is a real mess.
The Halloween multiverse concept was an attempt to reconcile that. In a fallow period for the Halloween franchise after director Rob Zombie’s reboot of Halloween was tepidly received, writer Stef Hutchinson pitched the idea of a new trilogy that would make it all make sense. Essentially, there would be three chapters called Rise Of The Boogeyman, The Witching Hour, and Fires Of Samhain. They would involve a decades-long conflict between The Shape (as Michael Myers was originally billed in the first Halloween movie) and Dr. Sam Loomis, who was his psychologist at the mental institution he spent most of his life in. The Shape murders Dr. Loomis’ family and psychologically tortures him, with it all culminating in a supernatural ceremony and mass human sacrifice by The Shape. That would reveal a multiverse that would include all of the various iterations of Michael Myers seen in the movies through the years, and ones that had not.
Stef Hutchinson’s idea of a Halloween multiverse was intended to simplify the Halloween mythos by exploding it outwards, so all Halloween movies could be explained as just another branch of the infinite Shapes. Sadly, the studio was not up for such a radical idea at the time, and the idea was set aside. Probably seems like this would be the best time to pick it up again, guys. We just got done with one Halloween trilogy, it’ll be time for a new one soon.
