Halloween Kills Almost Featured A Community Theater Musical Of A David Cronenberg Film

As Abbie Bernstein’s book “Halloween: The Official Making of Halloween, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends” details, the development process for “Halloween Kills” originally saw co-writer Scott Teems taking the story in some bold new directions. For one, it set the continuation (the present-day portion of it, anyway, as the draft still included flashbacks to ’78 as the finished film does) one year after the events of “Halloween” 2018, and for another, it had a slightly different conception of where the adult Tommy Doyle would find himself. As Teems explains in the book:

“It had Tommy Doyle having all this trauma, and he poured it into acting in community theatre. We meet him as he’s doing a musical version of ‘Eastern Promises.'”

If that character detail sounds a little out of bounds to you, you’re not alone, as Green himself thought that Teems’ first at-bat with the script went a little too silly. Teems elaborated:

“[Green said] ‘I love a lot of this, but I’m realizing that there is unresolved stuff from the first movie, and the second movie needs to be a continuation of the night.’ Also, I think my script was too funny-it got gnarly, but it wasn’t quite tonally right.”