Quentin Tarantino had some wild ideas for Halloween 6, which he almost directed
Quentin Tarantino has long touted his plan to direct ten feature films, then call it quits when it came to moviemaking (already an iffy proposition, seeing as how he’s kinda bent his own rules with the two-part Kill Bill and one-half of 2007's Grindhouse). In any case, the auteur still swears his next outing will be his last meant for the big screen, and while he’s previously expressed interest in helming a Star Trek entry, it’s looking like a foul-mouthed Captain Kirk won’t be Tarantino’s swan song. As it turns out, the Final Frontier wasn’t the only pre-existing franchise he previously considered exploring—specifically, that time he wanted to make a buddy road film starring a machete-wielding Michael Myers and Dr. Terence Wynn, aka that weird-as-hell Cult of Thorn leader from Halloween’s “4-6 Timeline.”
In a lengthy retrospective Q&A with Consequence of Sound, Tarantino at one point brought up a moment early in his career when he was being considered to direct Halloween VI, of all things, which would have seen him taking the reins after both the odd, convoluted Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers and his own carefully plotted, career-making, Pulp Fiction.
“Yeah, I was like, ‘Leave that scene where [the Man in Black] shows up, alright, and freeze Michael Myers,’” Tarantino recalled of the faceless stranger who arrived at the end of Revenge to spring The Shape out of jail for no explicable reason. (It’s also worth mentioning that apparently even the director of Halloween V didn’t know who the hell the guy he inserted into his own film was).
“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,” said Tarantino.
We imagine a scene like the opening of Pulp Fiction, in which Dr. Wynn and Michael Myers make lovey-dovey eyes at one another while discussing the intricacies of mass murder over cups of diner coffee, only to have the cult leader scan the place before whispering, “Let’s do it here. Right now,” to a bemused-but-game Myers.
Tarantino then went on to extoll the under-appreciated virtues of Rob Zombie’s divisive, two-part Halloween reboot, so really, who can say if the Academy Award-winning director should ever be let near a franchise series in the first place?