To celebrate Halloween this week, The Cutting Room gets into the Samhain spirit.

Halloween 3

Masked killer Michael Myers stalks and kills a bunch of young people. Probably. Oh, and no Rob Zombie. Yep, that’s really all we know for now, but what more do we really need to know?

Why we’re looking forward to this: It’s probably no surprise that we here at This Is Horror adore John Carpenter’s original Halloween, and we even have a soft spot for the many sequels, though we’re not denying that the law of diminishing sequels definitely applies. What we didn’t love was Rob Zombie’s take on the mythology, in which he not only managed to turn Michael Myers into the by-product of a whiny kid’s trailer trash upbringing, but somehow leeched all the fun out of the series in the process.

Just in time for this year’s Halloween celebrations, producer Malek Akkad has confirmed that a new script for the upcoming Halloween 3 film is all but ready, and while there are no other firm details available at the moment, we’re so excited about the prospect of seeing The Shape back on the big screen that we’re going to indulge ourselves in a wish list for this week’s Cutting Room.

The best news as far as we’re concerned is that with Zombie tied up with his own upcoming Halloween film 31 and the critical panning that his Halloween 2 got it seems very unlikely that he’ll be returning to Haddonfield any time soon. Zombie’s take on Myers felt wrong from the get go and neither of his films really felt like a proper Halloween movie. In common with the Friday The 13^th and A Nightmare On Elm Street remakes, it just seemed like he didn’t understand what it was that made these iconic characters, well, iconic.

Though this potentially means another reboot, and hot rumours have the film being called Halloween: The Next Chapter which seems to support this theory, as long as it returns suspense, scares and a smattering of intelligence back to the series then we’re prepared to overlook our usual aversion to reimaginings.

It also gives the series the opportunity to begin again with a (hopefully) classy new origin film, and to wipe the slate clean of the less successful directions the first eight movies occasionally veered into, such as the Thorn subplot, comedic cops, bogus beheadings and Busta Rhymes.

There is the chance, of course, that like the aforementioned unholy trinity of Friday, Elm Street and Zombie’s Halloween it’ll turn out to be a trick rather than a treat, but the very fact that it has been confirmed to be on the way, and that we may get to see Myers back on the big screen for the first time in several years, is enough for us to dig out our Captain Kirk masks and head off into the chilly Halloween night to deliver a few good scares.

Halloween , like winter, is coming. Hopefully next Halloween. Fingers crossed.

RICHARD COSGROVE