Welcome to Script to Pieces, a recurring feature at Wicked Horror where we look at the best, most interesting and at times most unbelievable horror movies that never happened. Sometimes these will be productions that never came together at all, other times, they will be original incarnations that were completely different from what we wound up with. Each should be fascinating in its own way, because the stories of movies that never see the light of day can sometimes be even more interesting than the stories of those that do. In this installment, we are taking a look at Halloween 666: The Origin.
Script to Pieces, as you might have noticed, has been away for awhile, but we’re back to kick off the Halloween season with a look at the original draft of Halloween 6 that never saw the light of day. Obviously, this film eventually became Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. And even then, it was a troubled shoot that eventually resulted in the filming of two almost completely different movies. Before the Curse of Thorn and the mythology-heavy script from Daniel Farrands, Dimension had attempted to take a previous stab at the sequel with a script by Phil Rosenberg titled Halloween 666: The Origin.
A few of the major beats of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers are intact in Halloween 666: The Origin, which is almost surprising considering it came from a completely different writer, as this indicates that there are certain aspects to that story that either the producers or the studio heads fought for. Some of the key elements of Curse of Michael Myers that factor into Rosenberg’s script are the return of Tommy Doyle as an adult protagonist, the notion of digging deeper into Michael’s ties to the pagan origins of Halloween, and the idea of Haddonfield’s citizens rallying to bring Halloween back to their town, as the holiday has been banned since the police shootout that ended Halloween 5.
Related: Script to Pieces: Halloween Returns
That’s where things really take a left turn. Daniel Farrands made a really smart decision in writing Curse of Michael Myers that gave us a softer Loomis in his older years, a man who had done his best to put the past behind him before being dragged in one last time. Halloween 666: The Origin goes in a totally different direction. This script brings Loomis full circle in an entirely different way by showing him as an inmate of Smith’s Grove. I know some fans would probably be happy at that, as some have always seen the character as someone who was a little too extreme and intense, but in that original movie, Loomis is a man at the end of his rope. He spent years trying to reach that kid before he realized what evils he was truly capable of, and then tried his best to warn absolutely everyone around him, to no avail. Loomis is only crazy if he’s never right about Michael, which, of course, he is.
More than that, Loomis’s glorified cameo in Halloween 666: The Origin is a little too generic. There are so many horror movies, especially ones that hinge on an investigation of the supernatural, that feature a point in which the main characters go to someone who has survived this thing in the past for help, and as great as it is to have Loomis back, it would have been a disservice to the character to waste his appearance on a short scene like that.
Related: Script to Pieces: Carpenter and Etchison’s Halloween 4
The bulk of Halloween 666: The Origin, though, hinges on a pretty absurd twist. It turns out that the reason Dana is having this dreams about Michael Myers is because she is actually his sister. This is our only major signifying connection between the two of them, and it’s pretty bizarre because Laurie didn’t dream about Michael before the original movie, she didn’t know he was coming. It does, however, feel incredibly similar to Rob Zombie’s Halloween II. In that movie, Laurie has nightmares every single night after surviving the initial attack that ultimately prove to be a signifier to her discovery that she is actually Michael’s sister. The age difference between Dana and Michael is even more shockingly different than it was between Michael and Laurie.
There’s also a bizarre amount of VR in the script for Halloween 666: The Origin, which is not at all surprising when you consider that it was written. The early ‘90s were obsessed with Virtual Reality, to the point that The Lawnmower Man was completely reimagined from the Stephen King story to become a virtual reality nightmare. In this script, some of the cult stuff is initially shown as people almost attempt to recreate it as a VR game and it’s just a very bizarre subplot.
Of course, the number one thing that people have talked about in regards to this script since it first leaked online is its treatment of Michael. In Halloween 666, Michael is homeless. He even lives at a shelter, where he’s acknowledged and known by the other homeless people there, accepted because nobody knows who he really is. There are a couple of times when people note how hideously scarred his face is, which is interesting because in its immediate predecessor Halloween 5, Michael’s had been unmasked for the first time since the original and had been shown to have a perfectly normal face, and there’s nothing that happened to him by the end of that movie that would have disfigured him in any way.
There’s a moment that beats the reader over the head with an extended Clockwork Orange callback where four teens dressed as the Droogs from that movie beat the living hell out of Michael only for him to put his mask on and start taking them out one by one. This draws immediate parallels with another scene in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, in which—minus Clockwork Orange references—pretty much the exact same thing happens.
Overall, that’s basically how Halloween 666 reads: as a direct cross between Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Zombie’s Halloween II. Some fans would definitely have been interested in that, but it doesn’t appear to work as a whole. It’s clear that the studio borrowed the best bits from this original script before moving in a very, very different direction by the time they began production on the actual film. We’re not here to critique the script itself, though. By all accounts this is an early draft if not a first draft and almost none of the smaller moments or dialogue would have made it into the movie in anything like the way they were written in this script. But we can still look at the major elements that tell us what this would have looked like if it had become an actual feature film. On that level, Akkad and Dimension probably made the right call by moving in a different direction.
For a brief time, though, they appeared to be serious about making this version a reality. Truth be told, it had already been a few years since Halloween 5, and they probably just wanted to get something in theaters. But they began meeting with directors and this was the script that they were giving out. This was, at that time in 1994, what they were planning to shoot. And the director they wanted to helm it was none other than Evil Dead producer Scott Spiegel. This makes sense, as Spiegel had just found some indie success in the late ’80s with the supermarket slasher Intruder. But Spiegel only had to take one look at the Halloween 666: The Origin draft before realizing that this just wasn’t for him.
After that, Daniel Farrands was brought on board to write the script, coming up with a new and ambitious story that attempted to more directly tie up the many loose ends leftover from Halloween 5. In the end, we wound up with two very different versions of The Curse of Michael Myers, with this script representing a third, equally ambitious direction that the sequel could have taken.
