An unmade John Carpenter script basically introduced Halloween's Michael Myers first. Halloween proved to be Carpenter's breakthrough as a filmmaker, and its impact on the horror genre can't be underestimated. Prior to this, Carpenter wrote many spec scripts with an eye toward building his career. His serial killer screenplay Eyes later became The Eyes Of Laura Mars, while Carpenter's unmade Prey prefigured Wrong Turn by 20 years and involved a trio of female friends being menaced by killer mountain men. One of his most well-known unproduced works was Meltdown, based on the novel The Prometheus Crisis.
Carpenter's adaptation involved a group of scientists exploring a nuclear power plant that has been taken over by a mysterious killer. Carpenter penned Meltdown in 1977, with the story being a slasher tale set in a very unique locale, and featuring characters being killed off in creatively nasty ways. Sadly, despite being a solid script, Meltdown never got produced. It does have one intriguing legacy, however, as its killer was essentially the prototype for Halloween's The Shape.
John Carpenter's Meltdown Had A Michael Myers-Esque Killer
The script's killer is dubbed The Figure, who has reprogrammed the computers in the power plant and is determined to cause a meltdown. The Figure's origins are kept mysterious - though the opening scene suggests he might be a survivor of an atomic bomb test - and his face is never seen. Like with many of Carpenter's villains, including Assault On Precinct 13's street gang, he strips away the humanity from The Figure, which makes him all the more terrifying. Fans of Halloween will have no doubt spotted the similarities between "The Shape" Michael Myers and The Figure too.
They're both masked figures with mysterious motives who silently stalk and slash their victims. In contrast to Michael, The Figure is seen talking via a pre-recorded tape, but as Carpenter himself once described Meltdown to Soundtrack.net, it's very much "... Halloween in a nuclear power plant." Going a step further, certain character names like Ben Tramer were recycled for Halloween, while a disturbing demise involving a character being dunked into radioactive liquid was reworked into a similiar death in Halloween 2.
Why Meltdown Wasn't Produced
Carpenter moved on from Meltdown following Halloween's success, where it spent years in development hell. It's been suggested 1979's The China Syndrome - which also dealt with a nuclear meltdown - may have stalled the script's progress. Director Joe Dante later became attached to Meltdown, though he recalled to Den Of Geek in 2008 that the project "melted down" when production company Avco Embassy folded; Dante moved on to Gremlins instead. There were several attempts to resurrect it though, with the script being rewritten to become Die Hard in a nuclear power plant in the '90s, with Dolph Lundgren set to star and battle terrorists. That version also never got made.