All good movie slashers need a high body count. And they don't come much higher than Michael Myers. The iconic horror villain is making his return in Halloween Kills and, ahead of Total Film magazine's new issue out this Friday, the cast and crew of the Halloween sequel – the second in a planned trilogy – have teased the gory bloodbath to come.
"It's intense and brutal. Just brutal," says Jamie Lee Curtis of the follow-up to 2018's Halloween revival, itself a direct sequel to John Carpenter's original, trailblazing slasher. "There's an incredible amount of killing in this movie," adds Danny McBride, the film's co-writer. "It's so bloody. It's wild. David [Gordon Green] just went for it. This is such a vicious sequel. It's relentless."
But buckets of blood and an escalation in gore doesn't necessarily make for a good horror sequel. McBride is aware of follow-ups that have faltered in the past – and wants to avoid any of their mistakes.
"The sequel is almost always where it shits the bed," McBride notes. "Or the monster is over-explained, or something happens that makes it into a joke. We really wanted find a way to sidestep that." Incorporating "a lot of ideas" developed for Halloween 2018, it was decided that Halloween Kills would pick up moments after the ending of the ending of the first film.
That will also factor in the residents of Haddonfield and the impact that Michael Myers' reign of terror has had on them: "It's the larger, pervasive spread of fear, and how that affects a community," director David Gordon Green says.
Halloween Kills opens in cinemas in the US and UK on 15 October. For much more on the film, pick up a copy of the new issue of Total Film magazine when it hits newsstands in stores and on digital retailers from Friday, July 23.
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