What's old will become new again when Blumhouse/Universal's reboot of Halloween slashes into US Theaters beginning October 19th. The release is timed to coincide with the 40th Anniversary of John Carpenter's original Halloween, released in 1978; it's also apropos considering Halloween 2018, helmed by David-Gordon Green, is being billed as a direct sequel to Carpenter's classic, redacting all 7 sequels released between 1981 and 2002 (not to mention Rob Zombie's reboots released in 2007 and 2009).

In an exercise that emphasizes Halloween 2018's connection to the original (widely credited with popularizing the slasher subgenre and igniting its 1980s era heyday) the YouTubers at the Video Archive Project have worked some editing magic on a classic TV spot, created for NBC's broadcast debut of Halloween back in 1981 (which also coincided with the theatrical release of Halloween II). They've swapped the original footage with clips culled from the trailers for Gordon-Green's Halloween while retaining the dialog, added text, and retro aesthetic. You can see the end result and compare it too the original TV spot at the bottom of the article.

Gordon-Green recently spoke to Collider at length about his film's extensive retcon of the Halloween franchise, along with the approach he and his writing partner and frequent co-collaborator Danny McBride took when tackling the plotline:

"We talked about so many ideas, and so much respect for the entire franchise went into what we're trying to engineer, so literally just a love of horror movies and a love of every Halloween movie across the board. We were trying to come up with what our take would be and really just found an original path that more or less takes the first one as our reality, kind of sets the tone for our story or history, and then we jumped forty years into the future and we see... how the world today responds to, was affected by... how we meet our characters in a different phase of their life under the reality of this traumatic event and have to come to terms with some of these issues horrifically, in many circumstances, how that is relayed and that's kind of the fun of how we launch off. "

The director went onto say this about the creation of the movie.

"There's a lot of things that we haven't even huddled on to what to say, what not to say as this movie is unleashed in a short number of months. Obviously a lot of the fun is those reveals and seeing how these things unfold, how these characters interact with one another, who they have become and hopefully the honor of the franchise in what we've painted in our very unique portrait."

Halloween 2018 doesn't just reunite Laurie Strode with Michael Myers for the first time in 40 years, it's a reunion for the actors who made these characters iconic. Jamie Lee Curtis will be going toe-to-toe with original "Shape" actor Nick Castle. Though much of Myer's action was accomplished by stuntman James Jude Courtney, Castle's participation adds to the legitimacy of this latest iteration of the classic horror property. Then there's the fact that Carpenter is also involved in the film as both the executive producer and musical mastermind behind Halloween 2018's modernized score.

Horror fans are rightly expecting this October to be one for the books but whether the new Halloween brings slasher flicks back to their past place of prominence remains to be seen. This video arrives from Video Archives.