The Halloween movie Canon Jigsaw Part 1: An explanation of Cannon and is the original Halloween a sequel to Black Christmas?

OK so this is the first in a series of posts about the Halloween film series but in order for this all to make sense I kind of need to start with explaining what the term"canon" means. It should be easy but its kind of not. Canon is basically any part of anything which is supposed to fit in to a larger story, its treated as something which actually happened and can be sited as a true series of events within a film or a comic series. I guess the easiest way to explain it would be to say that all of the regular issues of Spider-man happened and can be seen as counting as real events that happened in the life of Spider-man, where as any of the ''What If'' stories Marvel did happened outside of canon, they are interesting little tales which might feature the same characters but are supposed to be ignored for the purposes of the bigger picture.

Canon is a complex beast because what is and is not considered canon can change at almost any time, basically whenever the person or company holding the rights decides that it needs to. The easiest example for me to give is probably Star Wars. So for years and years books and comics and such were released which were supposed to show us what happened in the Star Wars universe after the end of Return of the Jedi. Fans invested a whole bunch of both time and money in following the adventures of Luke Skywalker and friends and then bang Disney buy Lucas Arts and they own Star Wars and pretty much the first thing they do is to tell us all that all of that stuff we had purchased and read was no longer canon, it was all basically alternative universe what if style stuff and that if we really wanted to follow what happened canon wise in the universe after Return of the Jedi then we would have to watch the new films and stuff that they were going to be working on.

Plenty of film series have toyed with canon in a whole range of ways scrubbing out a film here or there, telling us to ignore certain parts but arguably no other franchise has pissed around with its canon to quiet the same degree as the Halloween series. I cant even make it past the first film without having to talk about its Canon and whether it is part one of one story or part two of another and its only going to get more complicated from this point onwards.

So I guess usually the first place to start would be the original, in this case the 1979 slasher movie, Halloween. Sounds simple right? Well it mostly is apart from one little footnote and that's the fact that some people think that Halloween is kind of an unofficial sort of sequel to a film called Black Christmas. So what do Black Christmas and Halloween have in common, whats the connection? Well both of the films were released in the 1970s, Black Christmas in 1974 and Halloween in 1978, add to this that both of them are often credited for helping to kick-start the American slasher movie movement that pretty much dominated the 1980s. Add on to this the fact that some people feel that the origins of John Carpenter’s film can perhaps be traced back to a conversation he once had with Bob Clark about Black Christmas. The following is taken from an interview with Bob Clark and is about a discussion he had with John Carpenter.

I never intended to do a sequel [to Black Christmas]. I did a film about three years later… started a film with John Carpenter. It was his first film for Warner Bros. He asked me if I was ever going to do a sequel and I said no. I was through with horror; I didn’t come into the business to do just horror. He said, ‘Well what would you do if you did do a sequel?’ I said it would be the next year and the guy would have actually been caught, escape from a mental institution, go back to the house, and they would start all over again. And I would call it Halloween.

OK so that is for all intents and purposes basically the plot of Halloween right? So this conversation does very much make Halloween look like a Black Christmas sequel which went on to have its connection to Black Christmas stripped out of it doesn't it? Yet when you look into the history of Halloween a little more deeply you learn that producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad approached Carpenter to direct a movie about a killer stalking babysitters. Carpenter and Debra Hill agreed, and began working on a script titled The Babysitter Murders. It was reportedly Yablans who then suggested the movie be re-titled Halloween, and that the story take place on Halloween night.

In total honesty I don't think Halloween is a sequel to Black Christmas in any way shape or form, but I do think that Carpenter had clearly enjoyed Black Christmas and had taken something away from his viewing of it, something which lurked in his mind and in certain ways came out during the making of Halloween but this is a common thing people do. It is one of the reasons why if I am writing stories I will try to limit what I read and watch and will try my best to look for elements of anything I have seen seeping into my work, as long as you keep it in check and you remain inspired instead of simply cutting and pasting whole chunks of something else I don't really think that it is a problem, heck if you can see even a slither of Black Christmas in the DNA of Halloween I am pretty sure most people involved in that film would take it as a very high form of compliment.

OK so join me next time when I will be talking about how the canon of the first film was changed for the TV version to set up what they decided needed to be set up for Halloween 2.