Halloween:Â Resurrection should have been a found footage horror movie because the horror sequel's potential was let down by the execution. John Carpenter's iconic horror series started with a low-budget horror film in 1978 and rapidly grew into one of the most successful horror franchises of all time, with a total of eleven films in the series to date. However, not all of the movies in the series are beloved or even accepted by fans, and Halloween: Resurrection's jarring tone made it one of the franchise's most notorious low-points.
The seventh movie in the Halloween franchise, Halloween: Resurrection changed the format of the traditional slasher movie and set up a game show in which a group of people was brought into the old Myers house with video cameras and asked to spend the night. While the original house has been set up with all sorts of fake evidence to manufacture scares, the investigators soon find an underground hideout where the real Michael Myers has been living.
Halloween: Resurrection is largely maligned due to a supreme amount of late '90s cheesiness, Busta Rhymes’ cringeworthy performance, and the worst retcon of the Halloween series, but could it have been fixed? Changing the game show premise and getting rid of the over-the-top energy by shifting the film into a found footage story about a group of friends investigating the old Myers house and coming upon the real Michael could have provided a much more satisfying continuation of the series.
While some fans dislike the film simply for changing the format of the traditional Halloween movie, most of what made this movie so hated was the cheesy over-the-top feel that came from the Halloween internet game show premise. Taking the basic idea behind the movie, however, and adjusting instead to a found footage movie on a much smaller scale, maybe following a group of teens who decide to go investigate the old Myers house on Halloween night and livestream it, would have worked much better.
Instead of retconning the end of Halloween H20, the movie could have totally shifted away from Laurie Strode, which could have breathed some much-needed new life into the franchise, and just focused on these teens or college students in the Myers house. Shifting down from the game show premise into a much smaller scale would fix a lot of what fans hate about the movie. Examples like the teenage kid shown live streaming in Hell House LLC II or Friday the 13th fan film Never Hike Alone prove it works as a premise. The combination of slasher and found footage hasn’t often been done before, but the success of movies like Never Hike Alone and Behind the Mask: The Rise of Leslie Vernon shows that they can be extremely effective when done well.
Halloween: Resurrection at its core isn’t a bad idea - the internet premise might have even worked if it had been executed differently - but the extreme cheesiness so indicative of late '90s/early 2000s horror really didn’t work for the Halloween series. Keeping the tone serious and the mood much more intense would have remedied a lot of what fans hated so much about the movie. Similarly, trying a found footage format would have brought the movie much more into reality, which would provide an even more intense scare experience for a lot of viewers. For Halloween directors looking to try something new with the franchise and the slasher genre, found footage could have been a really good direction for Halloween: Resurrection.
