Halloween Kills pits the outraged residents of Haddonfield against the evil of Michael Myers. After the successful reboot of the Halloween franchise with 2018’s smash hit directed by David Gordon Green, the Michael Myers train will roll on with the sequel Halloween Kills.

Of course, that sequel was supposed to be delivered in time to scare audiences this October, but thanks to coronavirus the release has now been delayed until 2021 with the third planned film Halloween Ends pushed back all the way to 2022. When Halloween Kills does arrive, fans will be treated to a sequel that takes place immediately after the events of the first film – as, not shockingly, Michael Myers was not actually killed at the end of that movie. And according to original Halloween mastermind John Carpenter himself, Halloween Kills indeed lives up to its name by boasting a massive body count.

Related: Halloween Kills Confirmed To Be Set Immediately After Halloween

Speaking to Total Film (via Games Radar), reboot writer/director Green gave a few more details about the delayed sequel. Like Carpenter, Green seems to promise the new movie will be a big expansion in terms of carnage over the last movie, which was more of a traditional slasher effort. He said:

If the first film was somewhat retelling the origin of Myers and getting us up to speed with where Laurie had been all those years, then part two is about the outrage of Haddonfield. Mob Rules was our working title for the film. It’s about a community that is united by outrage, and divided in how to deal with evil.

Indeed, in keeping with the higher body count of the second film, the tone of the movie is expected to be less humorous (some fans actually complained that the reboot movie took the material a little too lightly). And as the town of Haddonfield takes the fight to Michael Myers, fans will get to see more returning characters from the 1978 film that were not featured in the reboot. As the movie’s co-writer Danny McBride put it in a previous interview, Halloween Kills is "more about the unraveling of a community into chaos. It’s about how fear spreads virally.”

Obviously, the theme of how fear can spread through a community and cause it to unravel is a painfully relevant one given the current state of the world. It remains to be seen if the Halloween formula is sturdy enough to actually hold up under the weight of such thematic ambition, but at the very least, Green and McBride deserve credit for trying to expand things in the sequel and bring in more characters and ideas rather than simply settling for a rehash of the first movie. Halloween Kills definitely sounds like it will be a genuinely big event of a horror movie when it eventually does make its way to theaters. And fans will also get Halloween Ends, which is meant to satisfyingly wrap up the story of Laurie Strode (until the next reboot at least).

More: Everything We Know About Halloween Kills

Source: Total Film (via Games Radar)

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