The horror franchise Quentin Tarantino called “awful”
Horror isn’t the first genre associated with Quentin Tarantino. While the filmmaker loves his gore, most of Tarantino’s films don’t quite have the suspense or tension to officially cross over into horror. Instead, Tarantino’s frenetic vision often turns his films into action pieces, westerns, or heady stoner flicks. Sometimes, they become all three at the same time. His genre-spanning work is one of his signature traits, but for all his skill at smashing different styles together, Tarantino has yet to dive into a true horror flick.
But just because he doesn’t make horror himself doesn’t mean that Tarantino doesn’t have an opinion on the best and worst of the genre. At one point in his career, he was in a position to possibly join John Carpenter’s Halloween franchise. In a 2019 interview with Consequence, Tarantino laid out his ideas for a follow-up to 1989’s Halloween 5: The Curse of Michael Myers.
“Yeah, I was like, ‘Leave that scene where [the Man in Black] shows up, alright, and freeze Michael Myers,'” Tarantino said. “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. So, they’re like leaving a trail of bodies on Route 66.”
Tarantino said that he was hired to write a continuation of the series after directing Reservoir Dogs and selling the script for True Romance. Ultimately, he opted to direct Pulp Fiction and abandoned his plans to start writing a Halloween script. It might have been for the best, considering his opinion on the first sequel in the series.
“The sequels were horrible. They’re like fruit from a poison tree because Laurie is not the brother of the Shape,” Tarantino added in the interview, criticising the ending to Halloween II that reveals Michael and Laurie are siblings (later to be retconned in future instalments). “It’s horrible that it does that. There’s something far more scary that he’s going through Haddonfield, and it’s just her… I think they just yanked some idea out of their ass, alright, and they just talked themselves into ‘Hey, well, this is why…’ and now part two has a reason.”
Check out the trailer for Halloween II down below.
Never Miss A Take
The Far Out Quentin Tarantino Newsletter
All the latest Quentin Tarantino content from the independent voice of culture.
Straight to your inbox.