This week’s Halloween is a direct sequel to the John Carpenter original, ignoring all of the previous sequels. In an exclusive phone interview, producer Malek Akkad shared some of the Halloween sequels that did not get made over the years. Before the Rob Zombie remake, for example, there was a script for a Halloween 9 that would have addressed the Man in Black teased in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.

“What happened with us, we started getting a little bit locked into a corner,” Akkad said.

“We were actually working on a part nine. We had everything from the Man in Black to the niece, sister and we started having to answer so many different storylines. That takes quite a writer to try and address all of those but we were trying. We had a couple drafts of a Halloween 9.”

Ultimately, real-life tragedy stopped development of Halloween 9. Series producer Moustapha Akkad and his daughter were killed in a bombing in Jordan.

“That’s when the tragic accident happened and we lost my father,” Akkad said. “At that point, it took me quite a while to get back to my senses. Once I did I really felt that’s a good time to stop. Those are the first eight films. If there are going to be any more, those will be his era if you will. Let’s start anew. Let’s start something big and fresh and strong and really go out. That’s where the Rob Zombie film comes. I know Rob Zombie’s films, like every single one of these films, they’ve got their die hard fans and their detractors. That’s one of the beauties of horror films is that people just love to debate and talk about them and discuss them. We did the Rob Zombie era if you will. We did two films with Rob which we didn’t really know we were going to do two. We never considered doing three. So after two of those, I didn’t really see any other director continuing in Rob’s voice a part three and using those characters that he had set up.”

It has been nine years since Zombie’s Halloween II, but there has never been a time since then that a Halloween sequel was not in development.

“Immediately after Rob Zombie’s II, we were in production again and then that one stopped,” Akkad said. “So that was impossible to get in production. There were a couple other starts and stops.”

Akkad shared some more details about who was involved with the lost Halloween movies.

“We had several different scripts and some really good filmmakers,” Akkad said. “Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer were on the first start which at the time actually was Halloween 3D. I love Patrick and Todd. I think they’re great filmmakers and that was that moment where 3D was making its resurgence. So I do think that would’ve been a really great movie. I liked it and I wanted to work with those filmmakers. Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton, I really enjoyed working with them. These kinds of filmmakers, I wish we could have gotten that going those sake if nothing else.”

Akkad would not share some of the bad pitches he received over the years. He’s saving those for himself.

“In fact, it’s not the good ideas that we passed on,” Akkad said. “It’s some of the rather bad ones. I’ve heard so many bad pitches of where to take Michael Myers and what to do with Michael Myers, they’re actually in retrospect very funny. I sometimes joke I should just write a book about all the bad Michael Myers pitches I’ve gotten that go from the absolute absurd to WTF? What are you talking about? It’s more the bad ones that come my way that we laugh about now, but it’s more the filmmakers that I regret we didn’t get to work with.”

Halloween opens Friday, October 19.