Doing the Halloween Twist and Other Monster Mashes

News that 59-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis will return to confront her old nemesis, "Michael Myers," in this fall's "Halloween" was met with "huh's?" and head-scratching. After all, in the last All Hallows' Eve outing, 2002's "Halloween: Resurrection," Curtis' character, Laurie, was stabbed in the back by Michael before falling to her death.


Hey Wait a Second, They're Just Making Things Up as They Go Along

Actually, the course of the "Halloween" franchise has been a convoluted one, speed-bumped and detoured by side roads that make audiences helpless passengers.

Young Michael Myers in "Halloween" was the sole screen role
for child actor Will Sandin.

As we all know, in the 1978 original "Halloween," six-year-old Michael Myers, dressed in a clown costume, stabs his teen sister Judith to death on Halloween night 1963. Judith, incidentally, was played by Sandy Johnson, Playboy Playmate of the Month in June 1974 (pictured below).

Oh, what Sandy Johnson did for baseball! 
Sandy's other movie credits included "Surfer
Girls, " "H.O.T.S." and "Gas Pump Girls."

"Halloween" cast 20-somethings Jamie Lee Curtis (20), P.J. Soles (28), and Nancy Loomis (29) as high school students (pictured below).

P.J. Soles (center) stands out as a Moviehouse favorite, particularly
for her roles as Lynda in "Halloween" ("Totally!"), diehard Ramones
fan Riff Randell in "Rock 'n' Roll High School" ("Rock the roof off it!"),
and Stella, the friendly MP in "Stripes," with Bill Murray.

"Halloween" ends with Donald Pleasence, as Dr. Loomis, emptying his Smith & Wesson 15 revolver into Michael's torso, as a hysterical Jamie Lee Curtis sobs, "Was that the boogey man?"

With the lifeless body of Michael spreadeagled on the lawn below, Loomis drily replies, "As a matter of fact, it was." Then, in the very next shot, there is no trace of Michael Myers.

"Halloween" was intended by director John Carpenter and producer Debra Hill (who also wrote the script together) as a stand-alone production. Carpenter claimed the only reason he got involved as a co-writer and co-producer (again with Hill) on "Halloween II" was to recoup payments owed to him originally by the studio

In 1981's "Halloween II," it's suddenly discovered that Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie is Michael Myer's "other" sister, a fact conveniently overlooked in the original. Also, Dr. Loomis finds the word "Samhain" written in blood on a schoolroom chalkboard, referring to an ancient pagan Gaelic festival that marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half, or winter, of the year. Samhain came to be associated with Halloween. Loomis calls Samhain the "lord of the dead." Nothing is made of this reference elsewhere in the film, nor for that matter, in any subsequent "Halloween" sequel.

"Halloween III: Season of the Witch" (1982) was produced by John Carpenter and Debra Hill and written by director Tommy Lee Wallace, a longtime associate of Carpenter. The plot, having nothing to do with characters or events from the first two pictures, involved an insidious corporation that makes androids and killer Halloween masks.

By the time "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers" was made in 1988, originators Carpenter and Hill had severed their connection to the franchise. The script postulated that Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) had already died in an automobile accident, leading to Michael Myers' obsession with killing her daughter, cleverly named Jamie (played by 11-year-old Danielle Harris), who shares a psychic connection with her bloodthirsty uncle.

Michael Myers manages to have survived a fall down a mine shaft - capped off by an icing of a dynamite blast by state troopers - from the ending of "Halloween 4" to continue terrorizing his pre-pubescent niece, again portrayed by tween Danielle Harris, in 1989's "Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers." It would be an understatement to suggest that Myers' squirm-inducing tormenting of his niece crosses the line into uncomfortable exploitation of child endangerment.

Inevitably, Michael escapes a heavily tranquilized ride to a maximum security prison to wreak more havoc in 1995's "Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers," in which he finally catches up with his now adult niece Jamie (played by actress J.C. Brandy) and turns her into a John Deere shish-kabob on a farm thresher, leaving a baby daughter of hers as yet another potential victim of the undying Myers, who is last seen pumped full of corrosive acid and beat to a bloody pulp with a lead pipe.

In 1998's "Halloween H20: 20 Years Later," it's revealed that Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis reprising her original role) faked her earlier death in a car accident and has been living under an assumed identity with a boyfriend (Adam Arkin) and a rebellious teenage son, played in his screen debut by St. Paul, Minnesota native Josh Hartnett. The sequel's timeline completely ignored the previous installments, dispensing with the existence of Laurie's ill-fated daughter Jamie and granddaughter.

Laurie's boyfriend falls victim to Michael Myers, while Myers himself, pinned between a totaled van and a tree, is decapitated, once and for all, by Laurie.

Yep, this is obviously the disembodied head of Michael Myers.

When Jamie Lee Curtis made her ballyhooed fourth, and supposedly final, appearance as Laurie, in 2002's "Halloween: Resurrection," it's explained that the man whom she had beheaded was actually a paramedic with whom Michael Myers had swapped clothes. Directed by Rick Rosenthal, who made "Halloween II," "Resurrection" has Laurie meeting an early demise, stabbed in the back by Michael before falling to her death.

A farewell kiss and a "I'll see you in hell" before the fall...

After a fire at the conclusion of "Halloween: Resurrection," Michael Myers' body and those of his victims are taken to the morgue, where, of course, Michael stirs.

Following filmmaker Rob Zombie's 2007 reimagining of "Halloween" and the 2009 follow-up, "Halloween II," both featuring Scout Taylor-Compton (a real-life mortician's daughter) as Laurie and former professional wrestler Tyler Mane as Michael Myers, there was talk of a third entry, "Halloween 3D," in 2012, but the project was abandoned.

So naturally, after all these twists and twirls, one couldn't help but wonder, after 40 years, which Laurie is going to turn up in 2018's "Halloween." As it developed, the new picture is a direct reference to the first two "Halloween" movies, completely disregarding the five sequels.

Burgeoning scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis poses with director
John Carpenter on the set of "Halloween" in 1978.

Four decades after the original "Halloween," John Carpenter returned as an executive producer of the upcoming reboot, as well as creative consultant and score composer. "I'm going to help make the...sequel the scariest of them all," he said, adding, "I've talked about the 'Halloweens' for a long time, the sequels - I haven't even seen all of them...But finally it occurred to me, 'Well, I'm just flapping my jaws here. Why don't I try to make it as good as I can. So...stop throwing rocks from the sidelines and get in there and try to do something positive.'"

Truth be told, Carpenter disagreed with Rob Zombie's depiction of Michael Myers and was displeased with the backstory given the character. Carpenter desired to take Michael back to his mysterious roots as a "force of nature."

The writers assembled to come up with a worthy script - Jeff Fradley, Danny McBride, and David Gordon Green - come from comedy backgrounds, mainly McBride's HBO series "Eastbound & Down" and "Vice Principals," but all are fans of "Halloween" and chose to focus primarily on continuing the mythology of the first two films and ignoring the sequels. Green, selected as the director, directed McBride in "Pineapple Express" and "Your Highness," as well as episodes of "Eastbound & Down" and "Vice Principals."

Venerable scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis poses with director
David Gordon Green on the set of "Halloween" in 2018.

It's interesting to note that the original 1978 "Halloween" has often been credited with introducing the concept of the seemingly indestructible movie monster, a cinematic trope they say was adopted by the filmmakers of 1980's "Friday the 13th" and its sequels, as well as the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise, which started in 1984.

How Jason Voorhees, unstoppable juggernaut of death-by-machete,
could transmogrify from a scrawny, hydrocephalic, water-logged
guppy into a hulking, barn-sized behemoth is a question left
unanswered in the "Friday the 13th" series of films.

Evidently, "they" were never familiar with the classic monsters from Universal Pictures in the 1930s and '40s. The studio tirelessly found ways to revitalize Frankenstein's creature, Dracula, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy. Some of these methods were as tangled as the strings from one "Halloween" sequel to another, and they deserve to be unknotted forthwith.


You Just Can't Keep a Good Patchwork Reanimated Dead Man Down or a Hirsute Lycanthrope, for That Matter

The climax of the groundbreaking 1931 picture "Frankenstein" found the monster (Boris Karloff) dragging his helpless creator, Henry Frankenstein, to the top of a dilapidated countryside windmill. (By the way, the name of the monster's mentor in the original 1818 novel was Victor.) The now-clichéd mob of angry, torch-bearing villagers forced the creature to drop Henry to safety before setting the windmill ablaze, destroying, to all appearances, the monster (pictured below).

When "Frankenstein" director James Whale was assigned the task of directing the 1935 sequel, "The Bride of Frankenstein," he went completely off the rails, fashioning an utterly unique, often surrealistic, tongue-in-cheek romp that defied all genre expectations, beginning with a prologue based on the storied origin of the tale.

During a rainy summer in 1816, Mary Wollstonecraft and her future husband, English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, visited Lord Byron, another leading poet in the Romantic movement of the early 19th century, at his villa on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Also present were Mary's stepsister and Byron's lover, Claire Clairmont, and British physician and writer Dr. Polidori. To amuse themselves on unseasonably cold and dreary evenings, Byron proposed they each concoct a "ghost story." Mary related her "waking dream" of a reanimated corpse.

It is that premise that director Whale chose as a springboard for his sequel, in an amusing introductory scene with the friends at a later gathering, taking place after the publication of the novel, where the coquettish Mary, played by a particularly fetching Elsa Lanchester (then married to the legendary actor Charles Laughton), coyly asks Shelley and Byron, "Would you like to hear what happened after that? It's a perfect night for mystery and horror. The air itself is filled with monsters."

(Above) Elsa Lanchester, as the kittenish Mary Shelley, prepares to
weave a new yarn of terror in "The Bride of Frankenstein," casting
herself as the hodgepodge of dismembered cadavers created as the
reluctant betrothed of Boris Karloff's smitten creature (below).

As per Mary Shelley's retelling, "The Bride of Frankenstein" begins with the monster having survived the windmill inferno by falling into a convenient flooded pit beneath the mill.

A smoky monster emerges from beneath the smoldering
windmill to terrorize one of Hollywood's favorite Irish
comic-relief housekeepers, Una O'Connor, in "Bride."

"The Bride of Frankenstein" ends with a spurned monster allowing Henry Frankenstein and his newlywed wife Elizabeth to escape oblivion before he prophetically intones, "We belong dead," and destroys his spiteful bride and himself by triggering an explosion that levels Frankenstein's tower laboratory (pictured below).

In 1938, Universal Pictures revitalized their declining horror market by re-releasing 1931's "Frankenstein" and that same year's "Dracula," with Bela Lugosi, as a double-feature. The studio subsequently cast both stars in 1939's "Son of Frankenstein," with Boris reprising his signature role as the monster and Bela as Ygor, a blacksmith with a broken neck who aids the son of Henry Frankenstein, Baron Wolf von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone) in his experiments. (Originally approached to play Frankenstein's monster in 1931, Hungarian-born Bela Lugosi declined. asserting, "I was a star in my country, and I will not be a scarecrow over here!").

In "Son of Frankenstein," Ygor discovers the monster's comatose body lying in state - apparently untouched by the laboratory demolition - in the Frankenstein family crypt.

Ygor (Bela Lugosi) reveals the unconscious creature (Boris Karloff)
to an incredulous Baron von Frankenstein (Basil Rathbone). For
reasons known only to the wardrobe department, the monster wears
a fashionable furry vest throughout "Son of Frankenstein."

"Son of Frankenstein" ends with the baron swinging on a rope to save his son from the monster's clutches and knocking the creature into a conveniently located pit of molten sulphur in the laboratory (pictured below).

In 1942's "The Ghost of Frankenstein," the insidious Ygor (Bela Lugosi reprising the role) unearths the monster from its sulfuric tomb (pictured below).

The creature in "The Ghost of Frankenstein" was played by Lon Chaney Jr., fresh from his breakout role as "The Wolf Man." Boris Karloff had no interest in again portraying the monster, apparently out of jealousy over the attention paid the scene-stealing Bela Lugosi in "Son of Frankenstein." After mortally wounding yet another son of Henry Frankenstein, Dr. Ludwig Frankenstein (Sir Cedric Hardwicke), the monster is trapped in the burning castle at film's end (pictured below)..

In 1941's "The Wolf Man," Lon Chaney Jr.'s character, Lawrence Talbot, was ultimately beaten to death in his beastly state by his father wielding a silver-handled walking stick (pictured below).

Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) is about to meet the business end
of a cane brandished by his pop, Sir John Talbot (Claude Rains).

In 1943's "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man," grave robbers break into the Talbot family crypt and remove the protective wolfsbane plant from Lawrence's body, which results in his resuscitation and transformation into a werewolf in the light of the full moon (pictured below).

Originally, Chaney was going to portray both the Wolf Man and Frankenstein's monster, but the filmmakers deemed it would be too demanding on makeup and scheduling. Ironically, Bela Lugosi was cast as the monster.

Speaking of the monster, at the ashen shambles of Frankenstein's chateau, Talbot, hoping to find a remedy for his curse in the doctor's notes, falls through the burnt-out floor into the frozen cellars, where, conveniently, he stumbles upon the creature frozen in ice (pictured below).

By the time the two monsters actually go at it, mano a mano, in the ruins of Frankenstein's laboratory, a concerned innkeeper from the nearby village has planted dynamite in an imposing dam that conveniently looms over Frankenstein's castle (pictured below). The dam is destroyed, and the creature and the Wolf Man are swept away in the ensuing flood.

Universal Studios rolled out "House of Frankenstein" in 1944 as a monster rally, featuring the Wolf Man (Lon Chaney Jr,), Count Dracula (John Carradine), and Frankenstein's monster, played for the first time by Glenn Strange, a 6' 6" former rancher, rodeo performer and deputy sheriff best known for his long-running role as Sam the bartender of the Long Branch Saloon in the TV series "Gunsmoke." Boris Karloff, Universal's original Frankenstein's monster, got top billing in "House of Frankenstein" as Dr. Niemann, a mad scientist, whose hunchbacked henchman was played by J. Carroll Naish. Universal's the Mummy was supposed to be in the picture but was removed due to budget restrictions.

The Frankenstein castle, seemingly destroyed in the flood at the end of "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man," is surprisingly intact here, although it is in the flooded ruins of the cellar where Karloff and Naish discover the conveniently frozen remains of Frankenstein's monster and the Wolf Man (pictured below).

By movie's end, the mandatory mob of torch-armed villagers chase the monster, carrying the semiconscious Dr. Niemann, into the nearby marshes, where the two are enveloped in quicksand.

In the direct sequel, 1945's "House of Dracula," Lawrence Talbot (Lon Chaney Jr.) arrives at the castle of another mad scientist, Dr. Edlemann (played by Onslow Stevens), which is surprising since Talbot was killed after being shot with a silver bullet in "House of Frankenstein." Likewise, Dracula (John Carradine), who perished in the sunlight in the previous film, shows up at the castle as well. Well, no matter. In the cave below the castle, Talbot and Edlemann discover the catatonic Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strane) conveniently encased in hardened quicksand, still clutching the skeletal remains of Dr. Niemann (pictured below).

After enduring three hours in the makeup chair each morning, Glenn
Strange had to spend the rest of the day, including lunch, buried in
liquid mud. Lon Chaney Jr., no stranger to booze, helped Glenn stay
warm by passing him a bottle of Scotch between takes. By day's end,
Strange was so drunk he could barely change out of his costume. 

Talbot ends up cured of his lycanthropy, while the monster, as a result of the ubiquitous torch-wielding mob, has a burning roof collapses on top of him.

The crazed Dr. Edlemann smells something burning while
Frankenstein's monster waits for the ceiling to cave in.

Lon Chaney Jr. reprised his role as the Wolf Man one more time in the 1948 comedy "Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein." Somehow, the remains of Frankenstein's monster (Glenn Strange) and Count Dracula (Bela Lugosi, portraying the vampire for the second and last time) are being shipped by rail in crates destined for a "House of Horrors" wax museum. The crates end up being delivered by baggage handlers Chick and Wilbur, played by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello. Mayhem and hilarity ensue.

Looking none the worse for wear after all the obliterations and
resurrections he has endured in seven previous motion pictures,
Frankenstein's monster stirs on the beckoning of Dracula while
Wilbur stands transfixed in a hypnotic state.

The picture ends at a lady mad scientist's island castle, where the Wolf Man and Dracula, the latter having transformed himself into a bat, grapple and tumble off a balcony, apparently falling to their deaths on the rocks below. Frankenstein's monster is trapped on a burning pier, which collapses in flames. And thus exited the monstrous trio for good.

As alluded to earlier, the Mummy was another movie monster under copyright to Universal Studios. Billed simply as "Karloff the Uncanny," Boris Karloff starred in 1932's "The Mummy"as Imhotep, an ancient Egyptian high priest who sheds his wrappings to masquerade as a papyrus-skinned present-day Egyptian called Ardath Bey in his search for his reincarnated love, Ankh-es-en-Amon.

Universal's subsequent unrelated series of "Mummy" movies centered on Kharis, a sluggish, wrapped mummy resurrected by and sustained on brewed tana leaves (a fictional herb) by a modern-day mystical priest, usually played by bald character actor George Zucco. The name "Imhotep" would not be used again until Universal's 1999 reboot of "The Mummy," with Brendan Fraser and Rachel Weisz.

Tom Tyler, an early cowboy star and "Captain Marvel" in the motion picture serial, appeared as Kharis in 1940's "The Mummy's Hand." Lon Chaney Jr. took over the role of Kharis in 1942's "The Mummy's Tomb." Like Frankenstein's monster, no matter his demise in one picture, Kharis would be conveniently revived in the next.

(Above) Boris Karloff  rests before being reanimated by a reading
from the accursed Scroll of Thoth in the original "The Mummy."
(Below) Lon Chaney Jr. adds the Mummy to his monsters' résumé
of the Wolf Man, Frankenstein's creature, and the son of Dracula.

Chaney played Kharis again in 1944's "The Mummy's Ghost" and that same year's "The Mummy's Curse." The Mummy was a role the actor especially disliked, often having to suffer through eight hours of being wrapped by Universal Studios' Jack P. Pierce, the makeup wizard responsible for the iconic visages of Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, and Dracula (pictured below).

Actress Virginia Christine (who later gained small-screen success as Mrs. Olson in TV ads for Folger's Coffee) recalled her experience portraying Princess Ananka in Lon's last stint as the lumbering bundle of bandages in "The Mummy's Curse," when she was physically bound to Chaney via a harness around her waist attached to his neck for a shot of him carrying her up a flight of temple steps. According to the actress, Chaney, who was drunk through most of the production, was "absolutely stoned," weaving from side to side. Christine was relieved when the director cut the scene and replaced Lon with a stand-in.

In 1955's "Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy," the final Abbott and Costello film for their foster studio, Universal Pictures cast the comedy duo as treasure hunters who run afoul of an Egyptian cult. Called, for whatever reason, Klaris, the Mummy was played, in remarkably shoddy wrappings, by Eddie Parker, who worked as a stunt double in "The Ghost of Frankenstein," "The Mummy's Tomb," and "Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man." You know you're in the bargain basement when the high priest is played by Richard Deacon, best known as the bald-pated toady of a producer, Mel Cooley, on "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

At this point in their screen career, the studio was even
too tired to give the comedy team character names and
 simply had them play "Abbott and Costello."

As mentioned above, Karloff's Imhotep returned as the title character in Universal Pictures' "The Mummy" in 1999. Played by South African-born actor Arnold Vosloo, Imhotep is engaged in deadly combat with adventurer Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) when librarian Evie Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) reads a spell from the Book of Amun-Ra that renders the 3000-year-old Imhotep mortal and susceptible to a killing blow from O'Connell.

(Above) Mortally wounded, Imhotep decomposes in the soul-filled
River of Death as Evie intones, "Death is only the beginning." She
must have been referring to the 2001 sequel, "The Mummy Returns,"
when an Egyptian cult resurrects Imhotep (below).

Britannia Waives the Rules

Between the 1950s and '70s, London-based Hammer Film Productions, in association with Universal International, retooled horror icons Dracula, Frankenstein's creature, the Wolf Man, and the Mummy in a number of crimson-soaked bloodlettings that again played fast and loose with the monsters' exits and incarnations.

The venerable Peter Cushing (endeared to "Star Wars" fans as Grand Moff Tarkin in "A New Hope") played various versions of Victor Frankenstein in five of Hammer's six "Frankenstein" films, while the creature, initially portrayed by Christopher Lee in 1957's "The Curse of Frankenstein," was played by David Prowse (the former bodybuilder who physically inhabited the Darth Vader costume in the original "Star Wars" trilogy) in a couple of the latter Frankenstein outings.

Victor Frankenstein (Peter Cushing) prepares for work while the
Creature (Christopher Lee) hangs out in the laboratory
in "The Curse of Frankenstein."

Speaking of Christopher Lee (whose later roles included evil wizard Saruman in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and Count Dooku in the "Star Wars" prequel trilogy), the veteran actor of almost 300 pictures essayed the role of the Transylvanian vampire in no less than seven Hammer films, from 1958's "Horror of Dracula" to 1973's "The Satanic Rites of Dracula," always finding innovative ways to literally pump new blood into the character.

(Above) Christopher Lee satisfies his bloodlust in the original
"Horror of Dracula" in 1958, only to thirst for more blood in
"The Satanic Rites of Dracula" 15 years later (below).

In 1959, Christopher Lee cut an athletic and fast figure as Kharis in Hammer Film's "The Mummy." Kharis ultimately sinks in the quagmire of a swamp, taking the cursed Scroll of Life with him. Different bandaged mummies appeared in Hammer's "The Curse of the Mummy's Tomb" (1964) and "The Mummy's Shroud" (1967), while 1971's "Blood from the Mummy's Tomb" had no such character.

Peter Cushing tussles with Christopher Lee in "The Mummy."

Everything New Is Old Again

Well, there you have it. They keep coming back. Let's take a look at the scorecard.

Admittedly, the killer in the original, 1980 "Friday the 13th" turned out to be Mrs. Voorhees, but her devoted son, Jason, was in 12 movies, including the 2009 remake, "Friday the 13th." The producers allegedly enjoyed working on the reboot so much that they eagerly announced a sequel for 2010. The release date was changed to a "To Be Determined," but by the spring of 2010, the sequel was declared "dead - not happening."

Jason Voorhees was portrayed in 2009's "Friday the 13th" by
former improv comedian and stuntman Derek Mears.

Progress on a sequel was hindered by a dispute between two different studios that each owned a portion of the "Friday the 13th" franchise. In 2015, it was announced that a director had been selected for the picture, set for a May 2016 release. The release date was then delayed to January 2017. In August 2016, with rumors that the new movie would be an origin story for Jason Voorhees involving his mother, Breck Eisner, the director of "Sahara" and "The Last Witch Hunter," was in talks to direct the feature. In January 2017, it was announced that the film would be titled "Friday the 13th: Part 13," with an October 2017 release date. Come February 2017, Paramount Pictures announced that the production was canceled. When October 2017 rolled around, Damian Shannon and Mark Swift, the writing team that scripted the 2009 reboot, revealed the title of their proposed sequel as "Friday the 13th: Camp Blood - The Death of Jason Voorhees." The rights of the "Friday the 13th" franchise were slated to return to New Line Cinema this year. To date, the International Movie Database (IMDb) lists the next "Friday the 13th" in "pre-production" for a 2020 release, 40 years after the original.

Freddy Krueger, the bacon-nated child serial killer in a ratty, striped sweater, moth-eaten fedora and spiked glove, was played in eight "A Nightmare on Elm Street" films by Robert Englund. For the 2010 reboot, "A Nightmare on Elm Street," Freddy was depicted by Jackie Earle Haley, a former child actor best known as the cigarette-smoking, Harley-riding Kelly Leak in 1976's "The Bad News Bears" and its two late-'70s sequels, as well as Moocher, in 1979's "Breaking Away."

(Top) Kelly (Jackie Earle Haley) enjoys a smoke in "The Bad News
Bears"; (bottom) Freddy Krueger (Haley) stalks another victim in
REM sleep in "A Nightmare on Elm Street."

Wes Craven, who created "A Nightmare on Elm Street" as the writer-director of the original 1984 picture, was reportedly disappointed when the filmmakers of the 2010 reboot chose not to use him as a consultant, as the makers of the 2009 remake of his 1972 "The Last House on the Left" had done. Craven succumbed to brain cancer in 2015. For his part, Robert Englund, whose mastery of dark comedy as Freddy Krueger etched a permanent niche in the iconography of screen horror, looked forward to the 2010 remake, anticipating how CGI and other technologies could "exploit the dreamscape" of the original.

A glance on the IMDb website shows a new "A Nightmare on Elm Street" in "pre-production," scripted by David Leslie Johnson, who wrote the screenplays for "Orphan," "Red Riding Hood," and "Wrath of the Titans," as well as teleplays for episodes of "The Walking Dead."

Finally, not counting 1982's unrelated "Halloween III: Season of the Witch" but allowing for Rob Zombie's 2007 reboot and 2009 sequel, as well as the upcoming "reimagining" of "Halloween," deathless Michael Myers has terrorized the fictional community of Haddonfield, Illinois, in ten films.

Dr. Sam Loomis: "I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then
another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realized what
was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil."