phantom limb /ˈfan(t)əm’lim/ n. an often painful sensation of the presence of a limb that has been amputated.
Welcome to Phantom Limbs, a recurring feature which will take a look at intended yet unproduced horror sequels and remakes – extensions to genre films we love, appendages to horror franchises that we adore – that were sadly lopped off before making it beyond the planning stages. Here, we will be chatting with the creators of these unmade extremities to gain their unique insight into these follow-ups that never were, with the discussions standing as hopefully illuminating but undoubtedly painful reminders of what might have been.
With this entry, we’re taking a look at Halloween 8: Lord of the Dead, the unproduced follow-up to 1998’s Halloween: H20. Penned by Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers screenwriter Daniel Farrands, Lord would have acted as a sequel to both Curse and H20, marrying the disparate continuities of each film while providing audiences with a shocking new take on The Shape.
Joining us is Mr. Farrands, who discusses the origins of this intended eight installment, the story it would have told, and why it never came to pass.
“In my youthful naivete, exuberance, whatever you want to call it, I just wrote this epic thing where it was like 35 pages and it was just lots and lots of stuff going on,” Mr. Farrands begins, noting how he tackled his original Halloween 6 treatment for franchise godfather Moustapha Akkad. “When he read it, I didn’t know what to expect in terms of his reaction. I thought, ‘Well, I’m either going to get this job, or I’m going to blow it.’ But he read it and said, ‘I think this is fantastic, but you have way too much here. We need to cut this in half, and the first part of it should be 6. And now we have kind of a roadmap for what 7 is going to be.’ He was, I think at the time, pretty serious about that.
“So the beginnings of this were that original Halloween 6 treatment that was just too big. too expensive to make into one film. I think this was before the days when they would greenlight back-to-back productions. In retrospect, had things been that way back then and they’d said, ‘Let’s do two’, we would’ve had a Halloween 6 and 7 and maybe closed out that story. But that was the origin of my continuing story, above and beyond, Halloween 6.”
Fans will remember the end of Halloween 6 found survivors Tommy Doyle and Kara Strode making off into the night with Kara’s son and Jamie Lloyd’s baby, but Farrands reveals that his original ending had Kara Strode dying, with Tommy being blamed for her murder. “That was the original scripted ending. Not them driving off in a Jeep. There was a kind of coda to all of that, where they go to the same bus depot where we saw Jamie Lloyd make the phone call in the middle of the night, the night before. In this ending, which I thought was a nice bookend, the heroes were going to stop at the same bus stop. Tommy, Kara and the children get out. It’s raining, it’s pouring. It’s the same kind of scene that we saw previously. Tommy runs to the same old fashioned phone booth to make a call to 911 and can’t get through.
“As he’s making that call, Kara has taken the kids down into the restroom. We hear a scream, and he goes running down into the restroom area. He opens each one of the stalls. He finds a pool of blood coming out, and there’s Kara bent over, her throat slashed, reaching out for him, and the two children are gone. Then you hear sirens, and the implication is, ‘Oh, fuck. Tommy’s in a lot of trouble.’”
From this point, Tommy would have gone on the lam, avoiding the authorities and Michael in equal measure. “I was a little inspired by The Hitcher, so it becomes ‘Tommy vs. Michael’ on this dark highway kind of idea, until they arrived back in Haddonfield. The second part of the movie, the Halloween 7 treatment that I had inadvertently written, takes place in Haddonfield where the murders are happening. People are a little bit like in [Halloween Kills], where people are just kind of engaged in their Halloween stuff, they know something’s happened, then people are locking their doors. There’s not a mob, but kind of like that. That group fear. Then a few of them go out in the night to try to hunt him, and those people start getting killed off.
“Then what we ultimately would realize is that this coven, this secret society, was made up of a lot of the people within the town of Haddonfield. It wasn’t just this group of underground people at the sanitarium. It was almost like a ritual. It was very inspired by Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery. I thought if you apply that to a Halloween story of where a family is chosen to be sacrificed, and that this tradition goes back to the early days of Druids and Halloween and the celebration of Samhain … and that was kind of the idea. At the end, you would see that the whole town has come out in a Wicker Man sort of way, and has chosen their final sacrifice.
“The end of the movie was, Jamie Lloyd’s life was about to be taken by this mob and Michael, and all of a sudden out of this crowd appears a dark figure. It turns out to be Laurie, and she’s there to save her daughter. And that was the end of the film.”
Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode in Halloween: H20 (1998)
So the end of this Halloween 7 would have left audiences with a cliffhanger? “Yes, yeah. It was supposed to be the reappearance of Laurie Strode. I do remember, and this always makes me chuckle now in retrospect all these years later, that Mr. Akkad’s response to that was ‘Well, that’s nice, but Jamie Lee’s a big star. She will never come back to the series, so we need to think of something else.’”
Given that cliffhanger, with Jamie’s life in the balance, one assumes that Laurie’s daughter hadn’t been killed via farm machinery or gunshot in the original version of this story. “No. That all came later at the behest of the bean counters at the studio. All this goes into the whole Danielle Harris controversy, which was horrible, and how they wanted to basically pay her as a ‘scale plus 10 character.’ Like she was just a day player, essentially. She rightfully made the decision to walk, but on a personal fan level, it was so disappointing that they treated her like that. The movie fell prey to some nasty folks at the studio level, who I think are getting their own just desserts now. You reap what you sow, right?”
If we had indeed gotten this version of Halloween 7 with the Jamie/Laurie cliffhanger, one imagines that there was a plan in place for an eventual Halloween 8 to pick up right after. “Not really, no! The fact that I was even asked to do 6 was just so mind blowing to me at the time. I don’t think there was any bigger picture beyond that. And of course, when they put the kibosh on having Laurie Strode come in at the end of what I wanted to be Halloween 7, and what Mr. Akkad wanted to be Halloween 7, I would’ve had to go back to the drawing board. Unless 6 was such a success that we got momentum going on the thing and maybe [Curtis] would’ve come back and done it. I just thought it would have been great. I still feel like it’s kind of a cheat. Seeing Jamie Lee Curtis with Danielle Harris would have been such a cool way to bring the whole thing full circle. That would have been a nice way to connect all the dots.”
While this originally intended version of Halloween 7 never came to pass, this writer wonders if Farrands had even been asked to write a follow-up to the Halloween 6 that eventually made it to screens after a fraught production and considerable reshoots involving, among other things, fetuses in tanks and green ooze pouring from Michael’s mask after a Tommy Doyle-administered beatdown. “I don’t think you could. Honestly, if they’d asked me to follow that up, I would be like, ‘I don’t even know where to begin because I don’t even know what the fuck this is about anymore.’”
While H20 was eventually produced instead of Farrands’ Halloween 7, the writer was brought back in to pitch a take for a potential Halloween 8, which would have had the challenge of reviving Michael Myers after Laurie Strode took his head off with an axe in the closing moments of the prior film. “I was still very close and in contact with the Akkads, and their plan was always that, ‘Well, you know, even though she chops his head off at the end of H20, he’s coming back. We already know that he’s coming back, and we kind of have an idea how it’s going to happen.’ But in talking to Malek [Akkad, Moustapha’s son and current Halloween producer] and his dad, they said, ‘Yeah, go ahead. Write something up and send it to us.’ I did. It was called Halloween 8: Lord of the Dead. I think that was the name that I picked and stamped on the cover page of whatever treatment I sent over to Malek and his father, and it never went out. I doubt it went further than their own office because I think Dimension Films had their own ideas of what it was going to be.”
Farrands’ take acted as a sequel to H20, but also managed to reach back into the continuity that existed prior to the soft reboot that the 20th anniversary film had provided. “So in my take, I kind of took some cues from that original expanded treatment for 6. I thought, ‘Well, you know, there’s kind of an interesting idea here, but Michael Myers is clearly dead at the end of H20 … but they want the franchise to keep going.’ So I wrote up this very brief take, drawing from parts of that original Halloween 6/7 treatment that I had written back in the day, and I updated it so that it would kind of pick up from the events of H20, but also kind of taking it back to where we left off with 6. I was kind of trying to do a little damage control, too. Like, ‘Let’s not totally write off what we did. Let’s not spend too much time on it, but let’s not totally write it off either.’
“As I recall, it opened with kind of a summation of the events of 6 and H20, almost in a newscast sort of way. Obviously some years had passed, but then Tommy was still kind of like on the lam and sort of hiding. He ultimately comes out of hiding and is attacked by what he thinks is Michael Myers, and ends up running back to Haddonfield.
Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
“The plot had to do with Tommy Doyle looking through Loomis’ diaries, the book that he was writing in Halloween 6, and kind of putting together the pieces of Michael’s history. He was really delving into that and becoming even more of an obsessed, haunted guy. I think I described him as having a full beard, almost becoming Loomis.
“So a lot of it was told as kind of a backstory of Michael’s years in the sanitarium, how it affected Loomis, and concurrently with that there was this whole story of the ongoing murders around Haddonfield, and that Tommy Doyle was suspected of committing the [the murders in 6]. There was some talk about what happened in H20, but this definitely took it back to Haddonfield.
“The twist of my pitch was that, once the hell breaks loose and the murders began and we see all of this mayhem going on, with Tommy sort of taking on the role of Loomis, the big finale when they’re going to finally unmask Michael Myers reveals that the killer is actually Laurie Strode.
“She’s gone completely batshit crazy and came back to relive the murders that she barely survived, and she’s become like The Shape. It kind of made sense to me, because at the end of Halloween: H20, what you hear, after she chops his head off with an ax, is that she’s breathing heavily like Michael at the end of the original movie.
I thought that was a perfect setup knowing, because they had told me, ‘We have Jamie Lee for five minutes.’ That she was contractually obligated to be in the next movie. And I said, ‘Well, make them the best five minutes. Don’t just kill her off at the beginning,’ which sadly they did. I thought, you know, if you’re going to bring her in again, just don’t tell the audience. Make it a big, big surprise. Give it a twist. Put her in at the end, don’t even say she’s in it, and then when the mask comes off, Laurie’s the killer.” Farrands further notes that, much like little Jamie at the end of Halloween 4, Laurie would apparently be taking on the mantle of The Shape by the end of the film.
That big reveal is very similar to the end of the three-issue Chaos! Comics run from back in the early aughts. “That’s right. [Chaos!/Halloween comics writer Phil Nutman] had come to me because he knew that I had done one of the Halloweens and he said, ‘You know, I don’t really know these movies, certainly not like you…do have something that I can kind of draw from?’ So I handed him that treatment and I said, ‘Well, this is never going anywhere, so here you go!’ I think whatever he did with that comic was partly based on what I had written in that pitch.
Michael Myers and Laurie Strode in Halloween: H20 (1998)
“So that was kind of it. It was bit of a piecemeal type of thing. I honestly knew they probably wouldn’t take any of it seriously because I just knew how the politics were with this whole thing at that point. It was kind of ugly, with the Dimension/Miramax camp always at odds with the Nightfall/Akkad camp. It just wasn’t a friendly, amicable relationship after 6. I think they tried to play nice when it came to H20, but I think there was just always a tension, an unease and an unhappiness. It was just not a good marriage at all. And I think that the Akkads would have loved to have divorced themselves from it many, many times over the years, but because [Dimension] had a rolling option, if they greenlit another movie within a certain period of time, they would continue to control the sequels.
“I don’t even know if I ever heard an official pass. I think it just was like, ‘Okay.’ You know, I think it was just probably in a stack of other treatments, but it was nice that they even opened the door to me. Malek and his dad were always very kind and supportive of everything that I’ve done. We’ve always remained on really, really good terms. But when I sent that in, I never really held out any hope that anybody would even take it seriously because 6 didn’t do well, and I was associated with that. I don’t think anybody at Dimension would have given a second thought to anything I had to say at that point.”
In closing out our chat, Mr. Farrands offers his final thoughts on Halloween 8: Lord of the Dead: “The Halloween universe is constantly expanding and growing and taking different turns. It’s kind of like Choose Your Own Adventure. It’ll be interesting to see after this trilogy concludes in the next year or two where the franchise will go next, because I know for a fact that it’s not over. Halloween is like Christmas and Thanksgiving. It’s going to live forever.”
Very special thanks to Daniel Farrands for his time and insights.