Screen Rant's Pitch Meeting is back, covering 2018's Halloween. That is, not the original Halloween, or the Rob Zombie-directed Halloween remake (or its sequel), but another Halloween film sequel, this time called... Halloween. It's all a bit confusing.
The newest Halloween film features the return of Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, 20 years after her role reprisal in Halloween H2O (in which her character faked her death and moved to California to distance herself from Michael Myers). In full retcon mode, this new timeline sees Laurie never having left the fictional town of Haddonfield, spending the past 40 years wrestling with post-traumatic stress disorder from the Myers rampage, resorting to alcohol abuse and losing custody of her daughter Karen. Meanwhile, the now-unmasked killer has been safely locked away in Smith's Grove Rehabilitation Hospital, where a chance introduction to a pair of meddling true-crime podcasters might trigger a new Myers murder spree against the innocent townsfolk.
Related: The Halloween Franchise's 5 Timelines Explained
With a rich cinematic history spanning four decades of sequels to be outright ignored, Ryan George picks apart the Pitch Meeting for the third horror film to be known simply as "Halloween" on the popular Screen Rant YouTube series. Leaving the 1970s behind, it's up to one Hollywood writer bereft of even the most basic aptitude for research to sell another Halloween sequel during a historic title drought.
The Halloween series timeline is already fraught with diversions and alternate takes on John Carpenter's genre-defining original film. Interestingly, Halloween III: Season of the Witch tried out a bizarre meta-fictional approach, removing the Michael Myers character outright and calling out the first two films as actual films within its narrative. None of that really manages to justify why this newest Halloween film completely rewriters Laurie's history and removes one of the most logical decisions the character ever made: to finally leave Haddonfield and change her identity in an attempt to heal herself and leave the past behind.
Instead, this new Laurie decides to build a home fortress with security cameras, external floodlights, and a panic room/honeytrap specifically designed to lure Michael Myers to his (yet unproven, largely doubtful) death. To be fair, the famous killer does seem to have a predilection for dimly lit homes, so at least part of her plan makes sense.
Of course, with Halloween's box office topping the charts for two straight weekends in a row, sequel bells are loudly ringing. Whether that upcoming sequel will stick with the trend and be titled "Halloween 2" remains to be seen.