For one terrifying instant Jamie thought she'd applied WAY too much foundation.

HALLOWEEN H20: TWENTY YEARS LATER

The Abridged Script

FADE IN:

INT. NANCY STEPHENS'S HOUSE - LANGDON, ILLINOIS

DR. DONALD PLEASANCE'S colleague NANCY STEPHENS comes home to find her home office burglarized. She goes next door only to find... JASON VOORHEES!

JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT

Just kidding, I was just wearing this hockey mask because Scream came out two years ago and this is one of THOSE kinds of movies.

NANCY STEPHENS

Joseph, someone broke into my home. All of my files were strewn about and my file on Jamie Lee Curtis was stolen! Such a HIPAA violation, I'm so fired! Thank goodness my framed headshot of Donald Pleasance was unperturbed!

JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT

Donald Pleasance? Isn't he the doctor who spent his life chasing Michael Myers?

NANCY STEPHENS

Is he? That would make sense if this were a sequel to The Curse of Michael Myers, but it's apparently a direct sequel to Halloween I and II which ignores the other 4 movies. And those two movies take place over a few days, so I think Donald spent like a week chasing Michael Myers and then died in a hospital explosion.

JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT

Yeah that's right, and Myers's body was never found!

NANCY STEPHENS

Again, that line would make sense if this were a sequel to basically any Halloween movie except II, where his body is very much found burnt to a crisp.

JOSEPH goes to investigate her house and eats a super stale cookie off the counter that she just cooked for herself or something. Suddenly MICHAEL MYERS shows up!

JOSEPH GORDON-LEVITT

Holy shit! Wait, why are you here? You got the file you wanted so what's the point of sticking around?

(ice skate to the face)

MICHAEL MYERS immediately establishes what a deadly threat he poses by murdering a couple children and nearly having his ass handed to him by an elderly woman. Then he takes her car and drives from ILLINOIS to CALIFORNIA.

NANCY STEPHENS

He's taking a road trip? Will he take bathroom breaks? Does he pump his own gas? Does he wear the mask the whole time on the highway? This raises so many questions...

(throat sliced)

MICHAEL MYERS

(ridiculous-looking mask)

NOT DONALD PLEASANCE (V.O.)

Since Donald died in real life, I'm here to narrate the Myers backstory over the opening credits in a voice that sounds virtually nothing like him. Even more baffingly, I'm only going to say lines that he actually said in other movies, which could have easily just been reused here.

INT. POSH PRIVATE BOARDING SCHOOL - CALIFORNIA

JAMIE LEE CURTIS is headmistress at a fancy private school where she also teaches a class called "Famous Literature That Directly Relates to the Movie's Plot 101", the only class anyone in a horror movie teaches.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Alright, who wants to tell me about Frankenstein? Why was the doctor haunted by visions of the monster? Did he need to face the monster to achieve narrative redemption? What medication could he have taken to help and do any of you kids have some?

MICHELLE WILLIAMS

With all due respect Mrs. C, later tonight the entire campus is leaving for a trip to Yosemite so shouldn't you just be showing a filmstrip or something?

JOSH HARTNETT

Yeah mom, and I'd really like to go on this trip this year. But I've had 17 years to observe that you get super weird and rattled on Halloween so I'm going to try to be sensitive to your just kidding I'm going to be a total dipshit today.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Look, I don't care if People magazine voted you 1998's Hottest Caveperson! You're not going on that trip and neither are exactly 3 other WB actors that you're close friends with! You're all going to keep your hormonal bodies here at this giant school completely unsupervised, I'm sure the other 3 parents paying tuition would be thrilled!

JOSH HARTNETT

Grrr mom, this squints my eyes and toussles my hair!

(storms out)

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

And learn to tie your tie, you look like the damn Nostalgia Critic!

Suddenly JAMIE sees THE SHAPE aka MICHAEL MYERS approaching but when she looks again it's...

ADAM ARKIN

(loud noise)

Surprise! It's me, your boyfriend! I also work at this school and so does everyone else you've ever met so we can definitely shoot the rest of this movie in a single location and keep the budget under $20 mil.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

And speaking of keeping the budget low, it's time for this movie's entire bodycount to leave on 3 schoolbuses. Bye non-union extras! Don't feel bad you're leaving 7 people behind, less than half of us are going to die and it won't start until 59 minutes into this 85-minute movie!

Suddenly JAMIE'S assistant JANET LEIGH shows up.

JANET LEIGH

Hey Jamie, I was hoping we could have a conversation that doesn't advance any aspect of the plot at all and is instead just a series of easter eggs about the fact that I'm your real-life mother and also the star of Psycho.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Sounds good, this preposterous winking will be really enjoyable for the zero people in the audience who both would watch the seventh Halloween movie in 1998 and a black and white Hitchcock film from 1960.

JANET LEIGH

Look everyone, it's the car I drove in Psycho!

Meanwhile...

INT. SECURITY BOOTH

LL COOL J stays behind as the security guard for a campus that's literally empty.

LL COOL J

(on phone)

Alright baby, do you want to hear a passage from my steamy romance novel I'm writing? In it a woman's legs are so long they connect directly to her breasts. My target audience is horny males who read books, so nobody.

Suddenly MICHAEL MYERS shows up in a PIECE OF SHIT CAR. LL investigates and discovers the car empty. MICHAEL walks around behind him but doesn't kill him.

LL COOL J

(on phone)

That was weird, I get the feeling there's a psychopath murderer just hanging around me at this security booth but that doesn't make any sense at all because if he's not going to kill me, why is he here?

(spared)

MICHAEL MYERS

(different mask, just as bad)

INT. JAMIE LEE CURTIS'S HOME

JAMIE sees THE SHAPE again. Knowing that she's been hallucinating the figure, she closes and reopens her eyes over and over and over, each time confirming it really is MYERS...

ADAM ARKIN

(loud noise)

Nope, it's me again! Geeze, I keep scaring you today. And that's not my line in the script, I'm adlibbing passive-aggressive notes to the director that this is a bit much.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Sorry, I know I'm weird on Halloween... I should probably just call in sick and wash down some Ambien with a glass of wine each year but I don't. I guess it's time I told you. I changed my name and went into hiding after my brother killed my sister and then tried to kill me on Halloween.

ADAM ARKIN

Mmmm, that's really sexy, I'm into it. This sounds like the Michael Myers story, whatever happened to that guy's sister?

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Er... she... changed her name and went into hiding. Are you really not getting this?

ADAM ARKIN

Ooooh yeah, hearing about your sister's murder has my dick so hard, I could pound railroad spikes right now. Tell me more about Michael Meyers and shit.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Dude, it's me. I'm Michael Myers's sister. This sequel ignores all the other Halloween sequels but kept Halloween II canon so we could preserve the worst thing it adds to the mythology.

ADAM ARKIN

Rowr, this is some pretty weird roleplay but okay yeah you're Laurie Strode and I'm Sam Loomis let's fuuuuuuck.

INT. SECRET CAMPUS BOILER ROOM

JOSH HARTNETT and MICHELLE WILLIAMS sneak into a candle-lit basement TEEN SEX LAIR, along with unrecognizable nobodies ADAM HANN-BYRD and JODI LYN O'KEEFE.

ADAM HANN-BYRD

Nobodies? Hey, I was Little Man Tate!

JODI LYN O'KEEFE

Yeah, and I... uh... oh, we're the half who die, aren't we?

MICHELLE WILLIAMS

Hey guys, I think I left my see-thru black blouse and Pearl Jam CDs back in my room - should I get them in case someone forgets it's the 90's?

JOSH HARTNETT

Yeah, let's go grab those and also a VHS copy of Scream 2 which exists in our universe even though Halloween exists in the Scream universe because fuck it, easter eggs are filmmaking now.

JOSH and MICHELLE split off to MAKE-OUT and do some HAND STUFF.  MICHAEL MEYERS shows up and slowly stalks ADAM and JODI.

ADAM HANN-BYRD

Shoot, I dropped the bottle opener into the garbage disposal. My first instinct here is to immediately turn on the garbage disposal as if that would knock it back out so I really am a total moron, but after that, I'm going to reach my hand into this dangerous disposal like so... I sure hope no masked maniacs come and--

NOPE he's killed by a KITCHEN KNIFE!

JODI LYN O'KEEFE

Oh my god, my boyfriend whose league I was way out of! I'll try to escape in this dumbwaiter, I sure hope no rampaging lunatics crush my neck with this heavy--

NOPE she's killed by a KITCHEN KNIFE TOO!

MICHAEL MYERS

(wearing Chucky mask painted white)

INT. POSH PRIVATE BOARDING SCHOOL

JAMIE jolts up out of post-tragedy-discussion coitus.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Wait a second! Josh is 17 now! And Michael came after me when I was 17! And surely he pays very close attention to the calendar and also knows when I had a kid! This is pretty much the thinnest justification imaginable but stunningly I'm right and we have to find Josh.

ADAM ARKIN

Honey, relax! Michael Myers is gone, nobody is going to try and make another sequel to Halloween! Do you realize how pathetic it would be for something relatively popular once to desperately try to cling to cultural relevance twenty fucking years later?

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

...

ADAM ARKIN

...

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

...

JAMIE and ADAM leave to find JOSH and MICHELLE but run into LL COOL J.

ADAM ARKIN

He's got a gun!

(shoots LL)

Okay, this looks bad but in fairness to me, he looks literally nothing like Michael Meyers at all.

JOSH HARTNETT

Mom!

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Gorilla boy!

MICHELLE WILLIAMS

And I'm still alive too!

ADAM ARKIN

And me too unless someone uses this gun I dropped to--

NOPE it's the KITCHEN KNIFE AGAIN and then ADAM acts like he's having a seizure and really just GOES FOR IT.

MICHAEL MYERS

(CGI mask for some reason)

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Wow, face to face with The Shape again after 20 years. It's not quite cool enough to make someone forget about how shitty the rest of this movie is, but it should be enough to make them forget that I was sadder about LL Cool J's death than my boyfriend's.

JAMIE hides JOSH and MICHELLE in a closet, then immediately gets them out of a closet and into a car, which is like a closet with wheels.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Get out of here and don't come back! This franchise I mean, don't let your agent talk you into doing...

(checks IMDB)

Jesus, I'm in 5 of these things? And the next one is another sequel that ignores the other sequels? Including this one? Goddamn.

JOSH HARTNETT

Mom, I'm not leaving you even though you both carried my limping useless ass to the car! Besides, after this I do Pearl Harbor and kamikaze my entire career, I'd be lucky to be in another one of these.

MICHELLE WILLIAMS

Welp I'm fine with it good luck byeeeeee!

JAMIE grabs an AXE and faces THE SHAPE once and for all until ROB ZOMBIE gets his grimy fingers on the property.

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

Alright Michael you stupid-looking motherfucker! I know you're in here and all you've got is your really gross kitchen knife! I AM GOING TO STRAIGHT UP BEAST MODE AXE MURDER THE EVERLOVING SHIT OUT OF whoops my axe failed time to hide under flimsy folding tables like a putz.

MICHAEL flips every table in the room as JAMIE scoots from table to table, then runs upstairs and hides.  MICHAEL follows her and prepares to kill--

NOPE this time JAMIE'S got the kitchen knife and she stabs MICHAEL over a balcony and onto a fully set up folding table in the exact room where we just saw all the tables flipped 10 seconds ago.

EXT. BOARDING SCHOOL PARKING LOT

The POLICE arrive and helpfully put blankets over people's shoulders while turning on as many flashing lights as possible.

LL COOL J

(on phone)

No baby, I'm still alive, George Zimmerman over here only grazed me! And guess what, I'm not writing steamy romance novels anymore, I'm writing rap songs for movies! Check this one out:

Cheapest, newest,

this movie's full of has-beens!

Cheapest, newest,

a franchise in a tailspin!

Cheapest, newest,

my films go in the trash bin!

Suddenly JAIME steals a cop's gun and takes the ambulance with MICHAEL'S BODY in the back. She then drives away while none of the police follow her, waits for him to get out of the body bag and nearly kill her, stops suddenly so he flies through the windshield, runs him over, drives him off a cliff on the hood of the ambulance, rolls the vehicle down a hill, jumps out of the ambulance as it's tumbling, and watches as it perfectly pins MICHAEL against a tree. Also, she gets another AXE.

MICHAEL MYERS

(cartoon mask drawn frame by frame)

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

My weirdly elaborate plan worked, Michael. And now that I've held a cop at gunpoint and stolen an emergency vehicle I'm definitely going to jail forever so I might as well make it murder. Do you have any last words?

MICHAEL MYERS

Yeah, are they really going to call this movie "Halloween H2O" and not have it involve water in any way?

(decapitated)

JAMIE LEE CURTIS

There, it's over. He's finally dead and there's no way to make any more of these things. If I ever agree to be in another one of these pieces of garbage in another 20 years then it's fair to say my career has taken an Activia shit.

It HAS.

END

Discussion