Halloween Kills checks back into Haddonfield Memorial Hospital with a case of sequelitis

While the current Halloween continuity only recognizes the original film as canon, the first sequel to the 2018 soft reboot will revisit a familiar location seen in the follow-ups directed by Rick Rosenthal and Rob Zombie. Per a photo making the rounds online, Halloween Kills is returning to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, a setting heavily utilized in the Halloween II of 1981 and the one made in 2009.

Of course, Haddonfield Memorial Hospital is the hospital where Laurie is taken after her first encounter with Michael Myers, and in the case of the first Halloween II, it serves as the main source of action for her second bout with the notorious killer — who is eventually revealed to be her brother in the old timeline. In Zombie's Halloween II, Laurie is chased throughout the hospital by Michael, but all of it eventually turns out to be a dream.

SYFY WIRE has been able to confirm that the viral photo is indeed legit, and was taken by Travis Woods of Eccentric Pop Records, who confirms to us that filming for Halloween Kills is taking place in Wilmington, North Carolina this week. This was corroborated in late September by a local newspaper/media site, the Star-News. According to Jimir Reece Davis, who's got some friends in the Wilmington area, the hospital set is just a re-dressed building of the Cape Fear Community College. Based on casting calls, "they're shooting mob scenes of about 300 extras" today and tomorrow.

Maybe it's just a tradition that every second entry in each continuity has to feature Haddonfield Memorial in some way...

David Gordon Green (Your Highness) is returning to direct and co-write Halloween Kills, which brings back Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, and Andi Matichak as the Strode women: Laurie, Karen, and Allyson. Anthony Michael Hall (The Breakfast Club) has been cast as a grown-up version of Tommy Doyle, the little boy Laurie was babysitting in the 1978 original.

During a recent interview, Curtis said we should expect a bunch of the franchise's characters to show up in the next film. Gordon Green, who once again wrote the sequel's screenplay with Danny McBride (Alien: Covenant), announced the start of shooting in mid-September with a photo of Michael's iconic kitchen knife sitting on the director's chair.

Halloween Kills is slated to stab its way into theaters Oct. 16, 2020. It will be followed by Halloween Ends on Oct. 15, 2021. Those release dates are subject to change, according to John Carpenter, who will be producing and scoring both movies.