The basic trait that makes Halloween’s Michael Myers scary is the mystery that surrounds him. He barely ever makes noises, he covers his face with a mask, and he’s always able to shrug off whatever Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence throw at him. Because of all of that, he seems like a human guy who should have some sort of exploitable weakness, but he’s such an emotionless brick wall that it’s impossible to figure out what that weakness is. Later movies in the Halloween series spoiled that by making him into a supernatural killing machine who literally cannot be stopped, but Danny McBride says the Halloween movie he’s co-writing with David Gordon Green will ditch all of that unrealistic bullshit.
In an interview on the Empire podcast (via io9), McBride explained that they’re going to “strip [Halloween] down and just take it back to what was so good about the original,” adding that they want to make it scary without it being “corny.” To do that, McBride wants to avoid “turning Michael Myers into some supernatural being that couldn’t be killed,” because he says the thing that made Myers scary in the first place was that it seemed like something that could really happen. “I think it’s much more horrifying to be scared by someone standing in the shadows while you’re taking the trash out,” McBride says, “as opposed to someone who can’t be killed pursuing you.”
Previously, McBride has implied that his Halloween might take place immediately after Halloween II, even though Michael Myers had already survived some pretty horrific stuff by that point. He says it’s not a remake, though, so it seems like it will acknowledge the past in some way, but we still don’t really have any idea what that will actually look like yet.
[Note: io9, like The A.V. Club, is owned by Univision Communications.]