By DENNIS ETCHISON (1986)
The late horror scribe Dennis Etchison (1943-2019) penned the novelizations of HALLOWEEN II and III, so it makes sense that he was selected by John Carpenter to script HALLOWEEN IV. That Etchison’s 1986 script went unused for HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS (1988) was due to a number of factors, including the fact that it simply isn’t very good.
Ramsey Campbell once wrote that “Dennis Etchison is the finest writer of short stories now working in the field, and the rest of us ought to learn from him.” The real problem with HALLOWEEN IV, and Etchison’s other excursions in the screen trade (which included an early 1980s adaptation of Stephen King’s THE MIST that likewise went unfilmed), is that it took time away from his real talents.
The setting of Etchison’s HALLOWEEN IV is the town of Haddonfield, Illinois on October 31. Tommy and Lindsey, the kids from HALLOWEEN, are now teenagers, with she a more-or-less well-adjusted suburbanite and he a horror-obsessed weirdo. Despite attempts at banning Halloween festivities in Haddonfield due to its dark history with the holiday, the local teens are gearing up for All Hallows and there’s nothing the uptight grown-up populace can do about it.
Etchison’s marching orders were to bring back Michael Myers the psycho killer, who powered the first two HALLOWEEN films but sat out part three. In this script MM is identified (as he originally was) as The Shape, with the supernatural properties suggested by the earlier films made explicit in descriptions of MM regrowing severed fingers and expanding to giant size.
Etchison also includes what must rank as a record amount of fake scares. Examples: “she backs into something—a tall figure in black! She SCREAMS,” only to have the tall figure be revealed as “a dummy with a crude face,” and “Suddenly a KNIFE swoops down—and stabs the pumpkin in front of her!,” which of course turns out to be a guy carving a face in said pumpkin.
There are some memorable kills, particularly a pumpkin patch attack, although they’re pulled off without any overt gore (“The knife arcs down. Again and again. The orange pieces go flying”), reminding us that Etchison was an outspoken proponent of “Quiet Horror.” Missing is the superbly naturalistic dialogue of Etchison’s prose, replaced with generic expositional chatter.
The climax, involving Shape/Myers loose in a drive-in multiplex playing THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE (1974), THE FOG (1980) and FRIDAY the 13th (1980), seems a bit tiresome these days—TARGETS (1968) it’s not, although Etchison pays deliberate lip service to that film’s legendary drive-in movie climax—but in 1986 I imagine it probably read much better. Self-reflective pop culture infused moviemaking, let’s not forget, wasn’t yet a thing in the eighties, so Etchison was exploring new territory. The final scene, however, contains a dream-shock that cribs rather shamelessly from the ending of CARRIE (1976), so clearly Etchison’s originality only went so far.