Quentin Tarantino Called These Classic Sequels “Fruit from a poisoned tree”
I have a lot of opinions on the Halloween franchise that no one really ever asked for. In the past, I’ve written lengthy franchise retrospectives, and David Gordon Green’s Halloween Kills rattled me so much, I wrote not one, but two different editorials unpacking what I thought were its worst moments. In recent years, I’ve simmered down some, shifting my criticism away from what I wish a movie had been and instead assessing it on its own terms. It’s challenging at times, especially with properties I love as much as Halloween, but I ultimately think it makes for richer, more engaging criticism. I’m also not Quentin Tarantino, a filmmaker who has never shied away from discussing what he would have done differently (have you seen his thoughts on Scream?).
Halloween fans, even Quentin Tarantino, often prefer one particular timeline over another, whether that’s the Cult of Thorn canon which jumps from Halloween II to Halloween 4 through Curse or the first Laurie Strode timeline that wraps in Halloween: Resurrection. And some prefer the quasi-reboot trilogy, while others prefer Rob Zombie’s take on the material. I’m not quite sure where Quentin Tarantino stands, but he has shared his thoughts on Halloween 5, making it clear that, had he been involved, he’d have done things very differently.
At the end of Halloween 5, Jamie Lloyd arrives at the Haddonfield Police Department and finds it in ruin. At the start of the next film, she’s several years older, kidnapped by a cult, and poised to give birth to the next heir to an ancestry of evil. It’s… a lot, and certainly a turning point in the franchise’s lore. The franchise never found its way out of the corner it backed itself into, accounting for not one, not two, but three different reboot attempts in the years that followed.
According to Taking the Shape II, Quentin Tarantino had, at one point, been approached to write and direct the sixth Halloween film. He was an admitted fan, even if he wasn’t thrilled with every decision the series had made, and was quoted as saying, “They’re like fruit from a poised tree.” From Michael and Laurie’s relationship to the introduction of Jamie, Tarantino was frustrated with the direction the films had gone in, ultimately declining involvement in a sequel.
Had he been attached, Quentin Tarantino shared in a 2019 Consequence of Sound interview that his first job would have been figuring out who Don Shanks’ mysterious Man in Black was.
Tarantino remarked,
“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.”
I recommend checking out Taking the Shape II for a complete rundown on several unmade sequels, Quentin Tarantino’s among them. While we’ll never get to see his iteration of either Halloween 5 or 6, it is fascinating to think about what could have been.
What do you think? Are you a fan of Halloween 5? How do you feel about Tarantino’s proposed direction? Sound off on Twitter @Chadiscollins where I’m always down to talk Michael Myers.
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