When you’re looking at the ambition, where there’s no simple scene in the entire movie, there’s no exposition of two people sitting in a room talking, other than maybe a moment or two in the hospital with Hawkins and Laurie. It was a lot of fun.Īt the same time, it was a lot of stress, because for the amount of ambition that we had for this movie, and the short number of days that we had… or should I say nights – it was seven weeks of all night shooting.
Here, we really just got to be destructive and lawless. You don’t have the authority of being the first film in the franchise that shows up and says, “Here are my characters and here’s what we’re setting to do.” You don’t have the responsibility of showing up at the end and having to wrap it all up in a tidy way. How fun was it to go so far, to just go ham?ĭavid Gordon Green: Well, it was the lawlessness of being a middle child. I feel like you’re just putting it all on the table.
Joel Meares for Rotten Tomatoes: In this new movie, Halloween Kills, I think slasher fans like myself are going to love that fact you just really go there. The framed posters on one side of my office wall are Deliverance, Medium Cool, Badlands on the other side, it’s The Jerk, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and Going Ape, the Tony Danza movie with the orangutans. A few moments of just disturbing poetry, like when Ned Beatty says, “This corn is special.” The appreciation of these strange little domestic incidents…. I just thought it was just a brilliantly executed film and something that rattles me.
It’s just an extremely powerful film with a beautiful blend of authentic naturalistic characters from within Appalachian culture, to the movie stars that inhabit the marquees. Of course, I’d heard, “Squeal like a pig,” and some tropes from the film, but didn’t understand the reality of what I was getting into, and then ended up seeing this study of masculinity that has affected me so vividly to this day. It was a movie that I thought was going to be some sort of Burt Reynolds adventure film. I remember vividly the first time I saw it – probably too young, I was probably 14 at the time. Here, he talks about why the movies mean so much to him, and discusses the challenges of creating all that Halloween Kills carnage and how he plans to close out his current horror trilogy. Given his history of playing in different genres, it was perhaps unsurprising that when Green sat down with Rotten Tomatoes to talk about his own favorite movies, the choices were diverse: an iconic Western here, a classic sports comedy there, plus, of course, a few journeys to the dark side. It’s an interesting evolution for the filmmaker who, until 2018, was mostly known for an eclectic mix of stoner comedies ( Pineapple Express, Your Highness) and wrenching dramas ( Joe, Stronger). Green is becoming one of horror’s hottest commodities – it was recently announced he would next develop a rebooted Exorcist trilogy and he is set to produce a Hellraiser TV series. (Seriously, don’t even try to keep count of the bludgeoned/stabbed/impaled/twisted bodies Michael leaves in his wake this time – we ran out of fingers and toes in the first third, as did a few of his victims.) Kicking off moments after the events of the first film, Kills sees Michael Myers surviving Laurie Strode’s (Jamie Lee Curtis) fire trap and beelining to Haddonfield for a killing spree like no other we’ve seen in this franchise – or any other. With Halloween Kills, his sequel to 2018’s critically acclaimed – and box-office–slashing – franchise reboot, Halloween, director David Gordon Green has made a horror film aimed squarely at the blood-thirsty hearts of true horror fans.