1985 was one of the best years for movies. Back to the Future, The Breakfast Club, Goonies, and Halloween? That’s right, there was an unseen Halloween movie titled: Harvest of Souls, which was lost in VHS hell, and now it’s resurfaced. The only problem with the movie, is it’s in fact a really clever idea brought about by Jay Burleson and Lane Hughes (You’re Next, V/H/S).

You wouldn’t know it was fake just by looking at it, especially after the detailed synopsis of the film below.

Here’s the story behind the lost movie:

[box_light]“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.”

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The Shape will never truly stay dead.

~Chaz