Halloween Kills Almost Featured A Community Theater Musical Of A David Cronenberg Film
In David Gordon Green's "Halloween Kills," it's revealed that Michael Myers is responsible for the trauma of an entire town, not just a few victims. The survivors of Myers' 1978 rampage and the citizens of Haddonfield, IL in general are shown to still be dealing with the aftershocks of The Shape's evil, a condition that has lain dormant for 40 years until his reemergence in 2018. Myers' new reign of terror causes a mounting mass hysteria within Haddonfield, resulting in violent and erratic behavior from a mob previously made up of good people that can only be described as self-destructive.
The leader of that mob, Tommy Doyle (Anthony Michael Hall), has been particularly traumatized ever since he and Lindsay Wallace (Kyle Richards) were saved by their babysitter, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), on that fateful night in '78. So it's no surprise that in an earlier draft of the script for "Kills," Tommy's artistic tastes were shown to include a filmmaker whose oeuvre always includes self-destructive characters: David Cronenberg. In that draft, Tommy is performing in a musical theatre version of one of Cronenberg's more underrated efforts: 2007's "Eastern Promises."
'It wasn't quite tonally right'
As Abbie Bernstein's book "Halloween: The Official Making of Halloween, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends" details, the development process for "Halloween Kills" originally saw co-writer Scott Teems taking the story in some bold new directions. For one, it set the continuation (the present-day portion of it, anyway, as the draft still included flashbacks to '78 as the finished film does) one year after the events of "Halloween" 2018, and for another, it had a slightly different conception of where the adult Tommy Doyle would find himself. As Teems explains in the book:
"It had Tommy Doyle having all this trauma, and he poured it into acting in community theatre. We meet him as he's doing a musical version of 'Eastern Promises.'"
If that character detail sounds a little out of bounds to you, you're not alone, as Green himself thought that Teems' first at-bat with the script went a little too silly. Teems elaborated:
"[Green said] 'I love a lot of this, but I'm realizing that there is unresolved stuff from the first movie, and the second movie needs to be a continuation of the night.' Also, I think my script was too funny-it got gnarly, but it wasn't quite tonally right."
Tommy 'Nikolai' Doyle
Although Teems' initial draft may have gone too far with the material, his sense of thematics was fairly on the money, certainly when it comes to his marrying Tommy Doyle with "Eastern Promises." In the Cronenberg film, a heavily tattooed Russian gangster named Nikolai (played by Viggo Mortensen) struggles to simultaneously work his way up in the Russian mafia while working undercover to expose them, all the while finding his own sense of self becoming confused and in danger of being obliterated. As part of his role in the organization, Nikolai is a button man and enforcer, and his violent tendencies may be further influencing the eradication of his "real" personality.
That's a very similar character makeup to the Tommy Doyle of "Halloween Kills," who himself is a man who allows his pent-up trauma to fuel his rage against a returning Michael Myers, no matter how much he may think he's protecting Laurie, saving a town, or causing a revolution by starting a mob chant of "Evil dies tonight!" By the end of "Kills," Tommy's baser instincts have resulted in the death of an innocent mentally ill man, the demise of many of his friends and neighbors, and his own slaughtering by Myers. As Green seems to infer via the emotional logic of the movie, it's Tommy's own blindness to the evil that Myers is (or at least represents) that the Shape tragically turns back upon him.
Who knows; if Tommy had been allowed to channel his trauma into the craft of acting and a character such as Nikolai, maybe he would have survived his second encounter with The Shape. In any case, I'm sure the "Eastern Promises" musical would've given him a chance to show off his physique, as certainly such a musical would adapt the film's infamous nude bathhouse fight sequence into a dance number. Ah well, perhaps in another "Halloween."