The Big Picture
- Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers almost had a drastically different plot, featuring a twelve-foot-tall Michael Myers.
- The original idea involved a town that banned Halloween due to the previous murders and the effects on the community.
- The script by Dennis Etchison was accepted and sent to investors but ultimately did not make it to production due to circumstances beyond his control.
John Carpenter‘s Halloween is one of horror’s most important films for how it transformed the genre, birthing the slasher craze of the 1980s. Halloween II in 1981 is a fun film with its fans, but after the disastrous response to 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a film that upset audiences due to its lack of Michael Myers, the franchise fell into despair. Jason Voorhees and Friday the 13th was the king of the slashers now. For most of the decade, Halloween sat dormant, letting those it influenced take over.
In 1988, that changed, thanks to Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. It worked partially because of the simplicity of its subtitle. This new film promised that Michael Myers was back. It’s all we wanted, even if meant just repeating the same thing over and over again. The original script for Halloween 4, however, tried something new. Michael Myers was still front and center, but in this film, he was going to become a twelve-foot-tall hulk. If you thought future cult plotlines got crazy, imagine a Boogeyman the height of two men. While that film never came to be, it almost did. If it had happened, the Halloween franchise would have never been the same.
Halloween 4 (1988)
Ten years after his original massacre, the invalid Michael Myers awakens on Halloween Eve and returns to Haddonfield to kill his seven-year-old niece. Can Dr. Loomis stop him?
‘Halloween 4’s Original Screenplay Had a Giant Michael Myers
There was a time, especially in the 1980s when novelizations of horror movies were very popular. It gave fans a way to reexperience the movie they loved, but now with additional details. The man who wrote the novelizations for Halloween II and Halloween III was Dennis Etchison. In a 2017 interview with Blumhouse, he spoke about how he was offered the chance to write the screenplay itself for Halloween 4. “I got a call from John, and he said, ‘Debra [Hill] and I would like you to write the script for Halloween IV.’ Etchison shared his idea for the film, saying, “The idea is that the town, after all those terrible murders ten years earlier, has banned Halloween. They don’t recognize Halloween as a holiday; they don’t allow Halloween masks and costumes or Halloween candy. And you know Hunt, the deputy from the first two films? Hunt is now the sheriff. And ten years of repression and suppression have boiled to the surface and there are some hints that He’s back!”
That doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all. It would have shown how Haddonfield, and not just Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), was affected by Michael’s crimes. At the forefront of his script would be the little kids, Tommy and Lindsey, whom Laurie had been babysitting on that Halloween night in 1978. They would be teenagers now, the ideal age for a slasher flick. Etchison didn’t stay safe in his script though. In the climax, Michael attacks people at a drive-in theater. When the town fights back against him, a very peculiar thing happens, as this passage from the script shows:
“The SHAPE is nailed in the crossfire. Twitching like a puppet between the cars… Then–The SHAPE starts to grow. As if feeding off the bullets and becoming stronger with each shot! The SHAPE swells to eight…ten…twelve feet tall.”
This ‘Halloween 4’ Screenplay Almost Made It to Production
It was a ballsy choice, one that you think would automatically get the script thrown in the trashcan. This was the ’80s though, where it was not just Jason dominating the multiplex, but the supernatural Freddy Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street films as well. Michael Myers needed to be able to keep up with them.
Etchison turned his script into Carpenter and Hill, and it was somehow accepted and sent off to investors. The only thing that stopped it from becoming an actual movie was something that went beyond his control. Etchison said, “Sometime later, I got a call from her, saying, ‘I just wanted to tell you, John and I have sold our interest in the Halloween franchise and unfortunately your script was not part of the deal.’ Who knows why? The partners hired something like ten other writers to work on it after me, and I lost a Writer’s Guild arbitration over the credits, even though I was the first writer on the project. So my name’s not on the picture.”
The ‘Halloween 4’ We Got Was a More Believable Slasher Movie
Halloween 4‘s screenwriting credit goes to Alan B. McElroy. Some of Etchison’s themes remain like Haddonfield rising to face the Boogeyman, but there are no Tommy and Lindsey, and there certainly isn’t a twelve-foot-tall Shape. The strangest thing about Michael Myers in the final film is how weird his mask looks.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers went for a more realistic plot. While the fifth and sixth films would begin to veer off to the cult craziness, this entry stays focused and simple, as Michael Myers is now after his young niece, Jamie (Danielle Harris), who is on the run and being protected by her adopted sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) and an also returning Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence). Michael is scary, and the kills are gory, but it’s one of the better sequels not by trying to outdo other horror icons, but rather by focusing on its characters and making us care about them so that we root for them when evil enters their life. The craziest thing about Halloween 4‘s plot is that Michael and Dr. Loomis are alive at all after being blown up in Halloween II. Still, how crazy would it have been to see the Shape growing into a twelve-foot-tall giant?
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is available to stream on AMC+ in the U.S.
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