Did you really believe he was dead and buried? Didn't think so. Which is why it should not come as too much of a surprise that Michael Myers is making a Halloween: Homecoming in the eighth (!) film in the series, hitting theaters September 21 from Dimension. 

  But there's more to Homecoming than merely beating a many-times-dead-horse. The storyline finds Michael--head still firmly on his shoulders--returning to mete out slasher justice to Laurie Strode and a new batch of squirming teens. But the sequel also wraps itself in a mixture of classis haunted-house shtick and video/mutimedia technology in which Internet elements (not to mention an estimated dozen imaginative kills) add to the horror. And it was the idea of going back to the scene of the crime and bringing the story to a modern place that lured Halloween ll  director Rick Rosenthal back to the franchise.

  "It's a really odd feeling to be given a second chance to make a similar but in some ways different movie," says Rosenthal of Homecoming, which was scripted by Larry Brand and Sean Hood. "I'm not approaching it as a sequel, but rather as a stand-alone movie that has some distant relatives. I liked the idea that this movie gave me the opportunity to integrate multimedia in a way that had not been done before. The idea that I would be able to set up horror by cutting back and forth between video and film makes this kind of a color German Expressionist film."

  Halloween: Homecoming begins with a flashback to the events of Halloween: H20 in which we discover how Michael survived his beheading. We then flash forward to Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), now residing in a local sanitarium. In the meantime, Haddonfield entrepreneur Freddie (rapper Bustah Rhymes) is attempting to exploit the Myers myth on Halloween night 2001 by recruiting six university students, armed with web cameras and surveillance equipment, to hunt for clues inside the Myers house. What they don't realize until it's too late is that there's an uninvited guest... 

  The cast backing up Curtis and Rhymes incudes Bianca (Boston Public) Kajlich, Sean Patrick (Save The Last Dance) Thomas, Daisy McCrackin, Katee Sackhoff, Luke Kirby, Thomas Ian (American Pie) Nicholas and Ryan Merriman as the students, Brad Loree as Michael and model Tyra Banks as Freddie's parter Nora. Also returning are executive producer Moustapha Akkad and producers Paul Freeman and Malek Akkad, while makeup and gore FX were handled by genre vet Gary (Hellraiser sequels) Tunnicliffe.

  "I'm making sure I'm not associating myself with bullshit films," says Rhymes, "and this is definately not bullshit. These are the kinds of films that used to send me crawling into my mother's bed when I was little. I'm really excited to be a part of one now."

  A big reason for the rapper's "no bullshit" seal of approval on
 Homecoming is the emphasis on character and avoiding the predictable.

  "Freddie's not the obvious guy where you already know what's going to happen to him," Rhymes says. "He's typical of what goes on in this movie. Stuff happens that you don't expect to, and stuff doesn't happen that you're almost certain will."

  Canadian stuntman/actor Loree, however, is typical of those who have donned the Shape mask: He's big, mellow and enjoying playing the shark in human form. "There is definately pressure to maintain the integrity of the original Halloween, he says. "Michael is not just the shark anymore. In this film, we're getting more of an idea of what he is thinking."

  That Myers is exhibiting more than a determined walk and a big blade is, according to Rosenthal, part of a bigger picture. "There's no way this is an art film," he says. "This movie will certainly meet the level of horror and suspense people have come to expect from these films. But I feel we've found a way to make this something other than the typical slasher film."

Special thanks to Zach "Z.S.T." Taylor for typing this up.