Quentin Tarantino Hates Most Iconic $855M Horror Franchise: 'The Sequels Were Horrible'
And it's kind of hard to disagree with the director this time.
Quentin Tarantino is a man with his own taste in cinema, formed over the years, and sometimes his criticism is surprising. The director can praise a B-movie that only he and a few hardcore fans have seen, and then call the cult film boring or simply pointless.
John Carpenter, inspired by classic horror and Italian giallo films, made a movie that gave birth to a whole new direction in cinema. Halloween became the first canonical slasher, and its plots and techniques have been used by so many imitators that the original may seem too obvious and typical to many.
In fact, this only shows how influential Carpenter's film was – to this day, few in the genre can compete with the very first Halloween.
Halloween Sequels Were a Disappointment for Tarantino
John Carpenter refused to work on a sequel despite Universal's persuasion – in his opinion, the story of Michael Myers was finished. Tarantino apparently agreed with Carpenter and gave a less than rave review of all the sequels and Halloween II in particular, directed by Rick Rosenthal:
“The sequels were horrible. They’re like fruit from a poison tree. [...] I think they just yanked some idea out of their a*s, alright, and they just talked themselves into ‘Hey, well, this is why…’ and now part two has a reason.”
Well, this position actually represents the opinion of a fairly large portion of fans of Carpenter's original film.
Carpenter Never Wanted to Make a Halloween Sequel
Of course, the studio bosses were not stopped by the fact that Carpenter considered the story finished, and three years later they released Halloween II. Carpenter stayed on as screenwriter and supervised the filming.
However, he found the final version so boring that he himself shot several bloody murder scenes to somehow liven up Rick Rosenthal's movie.
His disappointment is understandable: Halloween II turned out to be a typical sequel, blindly copying the plot of the original and unable to come up with anything new. Myers returns and terrorizes Laurie in the same way as in Halloween – only the setting changes: the action now takes place in Haddonfield Hospital.
But the frankly weak script did not prevent the movie from becoming a commercial hit: with a budget of $2.5 million dollars, the movie grossed $25 million, and further sequels were inevitable.
Source: Consequence of Sound