Director Jay Burleson has teamed with actor Lane Hughes (V/H/S, You’re Next) to create a trailer for the fictional “lost” film Halloween: Harvest Of Souls. The film supposedly would have been filmed in the mid-1980s, between Halloween III: Season of the Witch and the fourth installment of the series, The Return of Michael Myers. The short film has been created to appear as though it was recorded on a VHS cassette in 1985.
Watch below, and check out the excellent fictional (and almost plausible) back-story the creators wrote beneath the video.
“After the failure of ‘Halloween III: Season of the Witch’, the rights to the ‘Halloween’ franchise were lost in the shuffle of a merger, and a sequel to ‘Halloween II’ was quickly rushed into production by a new team of producers. The new installment, ‘Halloween: Harvest of Souls’, was viewed as a direct sequel to the second film and would be a true ‘Halloween III’ with Michael Myers.
The film was made on a shoestring budget, even less than Carpenter’s original, and did not feature a return by Jamie Lee Curtis. The character of Loomis returns, still played by Donald Pleasence, but in a limited capacity. To keep pace with the height of the ’80s slasher craze, Harvest of Souls featured extreme nudity and gore, and had yet to receive better than an X-rating before it was canned.
Original series producer Moustapha Akkad tied the rights up with a long legal battle, which he ultimately won, and ‘Harvest of Souls’ was shelved altogether in favor of ‘Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers’, which was released in 1988, three years after Souls was filmed. Until recently, ‘Harvest of Souls’ was nothing more than an urban legend, the original film print long lost, the knowledge of its very existence scarce. A lone VHS tape, found in an abandoned storage locker, containing the X-rated cut of the film and a very tame ‘PG’ trailer, recently surfaced and that brings us to the here and now. The release of the aforementioned trailer and proof that this urban legend is real.” (via Bloody Disgusting)