How the Team Behind the New Halloween Updated a Horror Classic

David Gordon Green and Danny McBride go way back. They were neighbors their first year of film school and have been together one way or another ever since. Best known for their HBO collaborations Eastbound and Down and Vice Principals, alongside films like Pineapple Express, they’ve become standout voices in modern comedy.

Now, though, they're doing something completely different: a sequel to John Carpenter's 1978 slasher classic Halloween. It ignores every other film, novelization, and fan theory that came after the original, instead operating as a straight sequel.

If these guys tackling a horror movie seems strange to you, look a little closer. Green is an auteur, having handled quieter, well-received films like Joe and Prince Avalanche. He's on track, he tells me, to check off every genre box there is. ("I gotta do a Western and a musical next.")

In the lead-up to Halloween, GQ spoke to the longtime friends about updating the slasher movie for a savvy modern audience, trying to buck their reputation as guys who'll do anything for a cheap laugh, and...the one cheap laugh they just had to keep in because it was so damn funny.

GQ: How did you both even find yourselves in the running to make Halloween?

David Gordon Green: I've known Jason Blum for a while, and every now and then we'll throw some ideas around together. I've worked in a lot of genres but never horror. One day, I get an e-mail that just says, "Halloween, question mark." It's hard to explain, but I had a premonition when I read that. It wasn't like, "What does he mean? What am I doing on Halloween?” I knew instantly that Jason Blum was asking me if I want to make a Halloween movie, and I'm going to make one.

So then I tell McBride, and he said, "You know, you're not doing that without me."

Danny McBride: He was asking me if I thought it was a good idea, and I was like, "It's a good idea if I can write it with you."

Green: We came up with some ideas, and we met up with Jason, and then we went to meet with John Carpenter at his house—which was super trippy—and threw him the idea. He liked it, and we started building momentum.

Then you had to go get Jamie Lee Curtis. Was there ever a chance she wouldn't be in the movie? Did you have a plan for that?

McBride: Man, we thought it might be hard to convince Jamie to come back and do this again. She's already revisited this before. We were approaching it like, well, how would you do this without her? Is it an alternate reality? Is it a different actress? Something doesn't feel right about that.

Green: From the get-go, we were reluctant to build a movie around her. You know, she died in the franchise. It would be confusing, if not uninteresting, for her to come back to life.

So if you want to go in the direction of, like, a Batman Begins, where you reinvent the mythology and recast everyone and do your personal spin on it...

Hire someone else and call them Laura Strode.

McBride: [laughs] Laurence Strode. Very early on we were just like, let's write this role to kick ass and make it so, so hard for her to say no to being in this. Let's not have her come in just to be swatted away, passing the baton to a new character. Let's make the whole story about her. We had so much blind faith. I don't know if the movie would've gotten made if she wouldn't have said yes.

I'm sure from then on, working on the script was a lot easier.

Green: Yeah, ’cause suddenly you have a voice to write for, and she's got cool ideas.

McBride: That's what's kind of amazing about David. I've worked with a lot of different directors at this point, and some directors have everything planned out to a T. He is able to collaborate and think on his toes and adjust quicker than anyone I've ever seen before.

What was the first image that came to you in writing the new Halloween?

McBride: Honestly, the first image that came to my head was that with him standing in that correctional facility...seeing him from the distance. When we were trying to figure out what the movie was or where you pick up, I just had this image of this man standing in this big courtyard by himself, and that being Michael Myers. How did he get there? What happened?

Green: I also gotta say, when McBride and I started brainstorming, we thought we should bring in a guy that really knows the movies inside and out, and not only just the Halloween movies but all horror films. That was Jeff Fradley [credited as co-writer next to Green and McBride]. He's worked on comedic stuff with Danny in the shows that we do, but his love is horror.

It was just the three of us in a writers’ room, basically on lockdown for a long time, throwing ideas around. One day, Danny comes up with the motion-sensor-light sequence. The next day, Fradley delivers this door-to-door, fluid, master concept of Michael on this murder spree.

And those are two of the scenes people are talking about the most.

Green: We make each other better.

Green, it seems like you hang on to your collaborators tighter than a lot of people do.

Green: It is that: It’s working with people that you're comfortable with, but it's not Entourage-y kiss-asses. It's people that call you on your bullshit and say, “You're taking the easy way out.” Our team is full of people that aren't full of baloney.

McBride: When we audition or read anyone or consider anyone, honestly, even more than what their abilities are, we're thinking: Are they an asshole, or will we have fun with them?

Danny, was there ever a chance you'd make a cameo appearance in this movie?

McBride: I didn't really see the need to do it. I didn't really want to. I feel like that helped to ground the movie and make it scarier. To me, it just didn't seem like this is the type of movie to have a bunch of cameos. Then also, I didn't want to see myself in the movie as a fan, so I didn't put myself in there.

But if you were in it, how would you die?

McBride: I would keep it simple, bare-bones. I think just a blade from the man would be fine, but maybe if it was in somewhere that a blade shouldn't go, like in the spinal cord or somewhere like that, where it just makes you very uncomfortable when you see the frozen look of death on my face.

Let's talk about the music in Halloween. More than just having John Carpenter's blessing, you have his score.

Green: I can't tell you how excited I was when he played the score for me. I couldn't sleep the night before. As we'd talked about it, he's going to do some familiar themes that we recognize from the original one, and then there's gonna be some new stuff, and just the idea of what new stuff meant. Like, does that mean new sounding? Does it mean orchestral? I'd thrown him a lot of adjectives and ideas. Suddenly, I'm sitting in the studio with those guys watching the movie, with the music.

I'm sure that's one of the moments where you're like, "Holy shit, this is real."

McBride: More for me was watching it with the audience at Toronto. David and I, neither of us had eaten in like a day. Our stomachs were in knots. [It was] just the anticipation of What are people gonna think? Is this gonna work? To be in that theater and watch people enjoy themselves, screaming and laughing, was just awesome. The last few years I've been focused so much on TV, Vice Principals and Eastbound. We craft that for the audience experience, but we never get a chance to ever see it with an audience. It comes out, people see it in their houses, and then it's just out there. You never really get that moment to see, like, “Oh, that thing worked.”

One thing I want to ask you about is working with different tones. A lot of the conversation around Halloween is already like, comedy guys made this. How did you approach making this film, knowing that there was going to be this implicit understanding that the people who made it are “comedy people”?

Green: Danny was actually really smart about it. We're both jackasses. We're always trying to have a good time and cracking each other up, but he said, “We don't want anybody to laugh for the first 20 minutes of the movie." Like, we wanna put the sign out there that we mean business.

McBride: I didn't want to fuck with people's expectations. I feel like, let's keep the tension and keep moving, and then let's just use the levity when we need to release tension. Let's not lead with the levity.

Green: There's very little that's funny in the script. Most of the stuff that's funny in the movie happened on set or was improvised. We were really insecure about being accepted and legit in the scary-movie business. But then you have someone like Toby Huss, that "I got peanut butter on my penis" line he did? I have no idea where that came from, and all of a sudden you're like, "What the fuck? This is amazing!" It's not even a joke, it's just a weird line that makes me laugh, and so then how can you not put it in the movie?

McBride: Yeah, you gotta put it in the movie. Goddamn him.

But you're not afraid to play with the iconic stuff, either. You can't be. I gotta tell you, people screamed in my theater when Jamie Lee Curtis disappears after being thrown from the window.

Green: That was Danny. Like, honestly, when he pitched me that idea, I yelled.

McBride: Yeah, yeah, that was my idea. We were kind of mirroring so many things from the first one that that one just felt like what it was all building up to, the ultimate sort of reversal. It was awesome to see people get stoked about that.

It's a statement, too. You put Michael in the position Laurie was in before. The idea of the final girl being replaced and examined. They're still all fucked up from it, though.

Green: Yeah, they are. Oh, man. That was the goal all the way through: Now, how do we make a fun, fresh version of the theme of the babysitter in a slasher movie, you know? You gotta have it in there. It'd be chicken shit not to. But you can't just deliver the expectation, you've gotta take it someplace new. If there's gonna be a climactic showdown, you either have two people fighting, or why not really bring out the bag of tricks and have fun? That's our thing: We want to take what people are familiar with [without making] the knowledge an essential. There's no prerequisite viewing for the movie, but if you have seen the original movie, if you have seen a bunch of slasher movies and babysitter horror movies, it makes it that much more fun. But it's not essential.

So how do you end a Halloween movie? You can't kill Michael Myers, obviously. No one can. But you went about as far in that direction as possible.

McBride: I remember that when we wrote that Michael gets his fingers blown off by Laurie, we had to get approval for that stuff. We had to go up the chain at Universal, like, are we allowed to have Michael Myers' fingers blown off? I get it, man. You can't just have somebody come in and fuck the whole thing up, but it was still crazy to me.

Green: That was months of conversation: How do we end this thing? Because they, Laurie and her daughter and granddaughter, have to believe that he is gone. If I'm them, I'm gonna cut this fucker's head off. He's already done his damage. I'm not gonna get outta here until he's gone, and that I've seen that. So we had to put them geographically, at a distance, from his potential demise, and that was what we came up with, in order to do that, you know? Fire. So that they don't necessarily see his passing, [and the] audience doesn't necessarily see it.

There's a quick shot that you'll have to see again to know whether or not he's even in the shot, when we cut to the basement on fire. Maybe he's in there. Maybe he's not.

Finally, what's your favorite Halloween movie? How many have you even seen?

Green: I've seen all of 'em. We're technically, according to the Writer's Guild, Halloween Eleven. Anyway, I like Halloween II.

McBride: I think if I had to go in order, Halloween II is probably my next favorite, and then weirdly, Season of the Witch is my third. I love Season of the Witch. I think it holds up. I think it's fun. And then all the other ones I'm into, but I felt like Michael Myers to me wasn't the same in those. They got too bogged down in the weird mythology.

And you fixed that.

McBride: I hope so, man.