Today the latest installment of the Halloween franchise drops in theaters and streaming on Peacock. If it's like the last one, it'll just be a bunch of reheated slasher movie clichés. (Pitch for the last movie: Michael Myers has killed like 10,000 people in the last 10 movies, but this time he's old and killing them with, get this, a knife! Oh, wow, people will never see that coming! Genius!) For the upcoming Eric Filler book Swapoween, I take a different tack and instead of it just being a slasher story, it's also a romance.
The original idea was just to do a pastiche of the original Halloween movie, only Michael Myers would have been turned into a girl thanks to some drug given to him during his supposed execution. The plan was just to follow the plot of the movie for the most part where Lori Todd is the good virgin girl babysitting a kid on Halloween while her friends are out fornicating and being murdered by Michael Myers, aka Melvin Michaels.
Then I got one of those crazy notions. Michaels turns into a girl Lori's age and so I had her hanging around the bus stop with Lori and her friend. Then I had Lori really making an effort to make friends with Michaels, going by the name Myra now, despite that Myra looks crazy and doesn't talk.
A couple weeks ago I talked about how boundaries can sometimes give you more creative freedom. In this case I needed some sex for the story. I had originally thought the sex would come from Lori's friends. Then I got thinking since I already had Lori and Myra together: what if they actually fall in love? So after Lori gives Myra a makeover to look slightly more normal, they kiss and that eventually leads to awkward teenage lesbian sex.
Besides adding sex to the story, it opens up a whole new dynamic. Having never been in love or anything, Myra doesn't really know how to react, so she's clingy and overprotective with Lori. And that really is why in the end Myra stabs Lori, to "protect" her while she goes to deal with Lori's friend, who's stealing the guy Lori has liked for a while. In her sick, twisted mind it makes sense to get Lori out of the way while she kills the friend and the guy so she can then have Lori all to herself.
Even though it wound up being different than I planned and different from the movie I was pastiche-ing, I thought it worked out pretty well. Because it does give a whole new dynamic with the characters. It definitely winds up being a different take.
I'm not saying the movies need to do that, but it would be nice if they tried something fresh. The last time they tried something really different was Halloween Resurrection and while some people would whine it killed the franchise or whatever, I thought it was a fun twist to have sort of a found footage aspect to it as a group of college kids are shooting a reality show in the Myers house when Myers himself starts picking them off.
It was a different take. I mean, Myers vs Laurie Strode has literally been done to death with the first two movies, H20, the opening sequence of Resurrection, the two Rob Zombie reboots, the 2018 movie, and this new movie. And what's the point? You know they can't really kill Michael off--so long as the movie makes money. When you have a franchise that focuses on a bad guy, the bad guy is always going to keep coming back because he's the focus of it.
Anyway, I would have liked to do something like the original movie poster/box art for the cover:
But I wasn't really sure how to do that. I thought that instead of the traditional jack o lantern I could find a pumpkin with a sexy lady cut into it but even on Google I couldn't find much that would work--almost any I could find were too sexy really. So as you can see at the top I found a picture of a sexy lady with a jack o lantern. Then I inserted a clip art bloody knife into it, pasting it over the stem of the pumpkin and cropping it to look like it's stabbing into the pumpkin. So there are the same elements but also it better fits what I usually do for gender swap covers. Maybe I should have called it "Eric Filler's Swapoween" like the graphic there. lol
2 comments:
with regard to this new Halloween movie, it is apparently part two of a "trilogy" so nothing happens in this movie except to rack up the body count. Yawn.
I like "Eric Filler's Swapoween" But probably too late to change it. It's clever what you've done with the story. I like how you put all your ideas together.
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