The atrocious horror movie Quentin Tarantino almost directed: “I never got hired”
Even after Reservoir Dogs took the independent cinema scene by storm following its premiere at the 1992 edition of the Sundance Film Festival, it wasn’t as if Quentin Tarantino was suddenly able to write his own ticket and be awarded the leeway to make whatever he wanted.
He stuck to his guns, though, refusing to use anything other than Pulp Fiction as his second feature. However, between those two points, he picked up plenty of work as an uncredited script doctor, performing rewrites and polishes on the likes of the dismal Saturday Night Live spinoff It’s Pat, Tony Scott’s submarine thriller Crimson Tide, and Michael Bay’s action blockbuster The Rock.
There’s no shame in a filmmaker capturing attention with a small-scale debut before instantly making the leap to studio-backed franchise fare, and it’s something that’s only become more prevalent in the modern age, but it wasn’t a plunge Tarantino was willing to take. He fielded plenty of offers, and one of them was for a horror sequel that was resoundingly panned by anyone unfortunate enough to see it.
The long-running horror saga had been running on fumes for years by then, but 1995’s sixth instalment, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, was the worst yet. It was the first fresh outing for Myers since 1989, and the studio wanted to take its time to ensure that it emerged as the best version of itself. Obviously, that didn’t happen because it was shite, but it’s debatable if even a writer and director of Tarantino’s calibre would have been able to save it.
The previous chapter, The Revenge of Michael Myers, ends with a mysterious figure descending upon Haddonfield, which was a cliffhanger Tarantino had been tasked to resolve. “I never got hired,” he told Consequence. “But it would have been my job to figure out who the guy in the boots is.”
“I was like, ‘Leave that scene where he shows up, alright, and freeze Michael Myers,'” he explained. “And so the only thing that I had in my mind – I still hadn’t figured out who that dude was – was like the first 20 minutes would have been the Lee Van Cleef dude and Michael Myers on the highway, on the road, and they stop at coffee shops and shit, and wherever Michael Myers stops, he kills everybody.”
It’s perhaps easy to see why Tarantino didn’t get the gig when his idea was essentially a road trip version of the slasher movie, where the Halloween saga’s iconic antagonist does little more than travel from place to place and leave a trail of bodies by the side of the freeway. Then again, it would have been a damn sight better than what audiences ended up with, even if nobody’s going to say he didn’t make the right call focusing on Pulp Fiction instead.
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