Halloween Meets Three-Mile Island.

I just wanted to post about something really cool I discovered recently. I think a few sites wrote about this last year, but I didn't hear about until a friend of mine told me about a treasure trove of unproduced movie scripts over at archive.org.

So legend has it that circa 1977, John Carpenter took a job writing a script for a project called Prometheus Crisis. This screenplay, which was later called Meltdown, is essentially "Halloween in a nuclear power plant".

This script is fascinating for a few reasons. If you read it (you can find it here), you can see elements that would later end up in his future projects. The characters arriving and exploring the abandoned facility echoes that of MacCready and Doc Copper at the Norwegian camp in The Thing and there is a sequence that would be lifted verbatim a decade later for Prince of Darkness. I even saw a shot or two that would end up in Halloween II, but that could just be coincidence.

Perhaps most impressive is that the technical jargon sounds accurate - at least from my rudimentary knowledge watching Chernobyl and a few Netflix docs - even though it was written at a time when I can't imagine information of nuclear energy was readily available. Carpenter wrote this before meltdowns were a reality, as Three Mile Island or even the film The China Syndrome wouldn't happen for another two years. It's basically like when Stanley Kubrick made 2001 before anyone actually went to space. 

Aside from that though, Meltdown is  a pretty brutal slasher script with an atmospheric and unique location and some really good set pieces - one kill I've still never seen even to this day! It's a bummer this was never made. Carpenter & Co were trying to get it done as recently as 1997, but things just never came together. Oh well, at least we have the script.