10 Blumhouse Productions That Prove The New Halloween Movie Is Doomed

7 years after the Halloween franchise went down in flames at the box office, it looks like Michael Myers is set to return to Haddonfield one more time. According to a recent press release, Miramax and Blumhouse Productions are co-financing the development and production of a new Halloween movie. And that’s not all – John Carpenter is also involved.

“All of us felt that the next Halloween movie shouldn’t exist without John Carpenter,” says Blumhouse’s Jason Blum. “We were saying, when we first started talking about it, ‘we’ve gotta do this with the guy that started it all.”

According to Blum, Carpenter will produce “and hopefully score” the new movie, marking his first involvement with the franchise since 1983’s Halloween III: Season Of The Witch. Will it be a sequel, a reboot or the previously mooted “recalibration” Halloween Returns? “We can’t tell you yet,” Carpenter says, “because we don’t know.”

In other words, watch this space.

There are several reasons why you should take the announcement with a pinch of salt, the first being that Carpenter’s producer credit on The Fog remake was (by his own admission) purely window dressing. The second is that Blumhouse’s output of late has been mixed, running from the very fine The Gift to the unbelievably tatty Exeter.

Here are 10 movies that will make you question whether the movie is in safe hands.

Originally titled 6 Miranda Drive, The Darkness (how’s that for a generic title?) stars Kevin Bacon and Radha Mitchell as a couple who return home from a Grand Canyon vacation to find their lives invaded by a supernatural presence.

You wouldn’t expect Greg McLean, who also made Wolf Creek, to take the reins on a PG-13 horror movie and sure enough, the critics wondered if he was phoning this one in. One critic called the movie “pretty much a total bust – it isn’t scary, it isn’t exciting and it plods along at such a snail’s pace that even though it clocks in at just over 90 minutes, it plays like it runs at least twice that.”

The cast are good, McLean does what he can with the material (it’s his first film that he didn’t write) but the results are thin and predictable at best. When will Blumhouse abandon the supernatural in favour of a story with bite?