Taking Shape Read online

  By Dustin McNeill & Travis Mullins

  Edited by Natalie Tomaszewski

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Halloween’s Godfather.

  Moustapha Akkad

  1930 - 2005

  And to screenwriter Larry Brand, who passed away shortly after our interview. Larry looked back fondly on Halloween: Resurrection with a mix of humor and humility. Rest in peace, good sir.

  Copyright © 2019 by Harker Press

  ISBN-13: 978-0-578-58681-6

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  Any unauthorized duplication, copying, distribution, exhibition or any other use of any kind may result in civil liability, and/or criminal prosecution.

  This book is an independent editorial work and is not authorized by or affiliated

  with Trancas International Films, Miramax Films, Dimension Films, Blumhouse Productions, or any other entity related to the Halloween series.

  Contents

  FILM: HALLOWEEN

  INTERVIEW: Richard curtis

  FILM: HALLOWEEN II

  INTERVIEW: Dean Cundey

  FILM: HALLOWEEN III

  INTERVIEW Tommy Lee Wallace

  FILM: HALLOWEEN 4

  INTERVIEW: Larry Rattner

  INTERVIEW: Nicholas Grabowsky

  FILM: HALLOWEEN 5

  REFLECTIONS ON H5 by Michael Jacobs

  INTERVIEW: Dominique Othenin-girard

  INTERVIEW Rob Draper

  FILM: HALLOWEEN 6

  INTERVIEW: Daniel Farrands

  FILM: HALLOWEEN H20

  INTERVIEW: Robert Zappia

  INTERVIEW: Patrick Lussier

  INTERVIEW: Kevin Williamson

  FILM: HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION

  INTERVIEW: Larry Brand

  FILM: ROB ZOMBIE'S HALLOWEEN

  INTERVIEW: Phil Parmet

  FILM: ROB ZOMBIE'S HALLOWEEN II

  INTERVIEW: Brandon Trost

  INTERVIEW: Glenn Garland

  FILM: HALLOWEEN 2018

  INTERVIEW: David Thwaites

  INTERVIEW: John Passarella

  A Note About Sources

  Special Thanks

  FILM: HALLOWEEN

  HALLOWEEN. To trace the holiday’s origin, you would need to journey back thousands of years to modern-day Ireland. To trace the origin of the film franchise, you need only go back to northern Italy in the year 1976. The Milan Film Festival had just concluded and film producer Irwin Yablans is headed back to the United States. He would spend the long flight home brainstorming his next project, which was to be a horror picture. Yablans formulated a rudimentary premise about a slasher that targets babysitters in a quiet suburban community. This plot was assigned a lurid working title – The Babysitter Murders. Though he had few specifics beyond these, Yablans knew he wanted John Carpenter in the director’s chair. The up-and-coming filmmaker had just finished Assault on Precinct 13, which Yablans’ Compass International Pictures had picked up for distribution.

  The producer soon approached Carpenter with the idea, who expressed interest in helming the production. Carpenter would agree to a modest salary of $10,000 to write, direct, and score the project. There were several conditions to his involvement, however. First, he would have complete creative control over the film. Second, he would receive above-the-title billing. Third, his then-girlfriend Debra Hill would be hired to co-write and produce. These were rather bold demands given Carpenter’s relative inexperience as a director and Hill’s complete inexperience as a producer. Even so, Yablans took a leap of faith and agreed to all conditions.

  Yablans next pitched The Babysitter Murders to business partner Moustapha Akkad, who agreed to finance the production for $300,000. Though he would later take an active role in developing the sequels, Akkad was essentially a silent partner on the original Halloween. He would spend most of its production overseas prepping his own directorial effort, a Libyan historical epic entitled Lion of the Desert. Akkad would forego executive producer billing on the film, opting for a “Presented By” credit instead.

  Having already written two self-directed features, Carpenter was a rising talent. Debra Hill, on the other hand, had shown promise as a script supervisor but lacked any screenwriting or producing experience. In this sense, The Babysitter Murders would be an enormous proving ground. Carpenter and Hill began work on the project by crafting a list of scares they hoped to feature in the movie. They next penned a basic outline together that could incorporate these gags. The filmmakers were initially unsure who to feature as their story’s masked killer and considered using a neighborhood parent or school teacher in the role. Though Carpenter retained full creative control, Yablans was allowed to give story notes, several of which were incorporated into the script. One formative suggestion was to condense most of the film’s action to a single night as a cost-saving measure. Another was to feature the Halloween holiday. Yet another was to change the film’s title from The Babysitter Murders to simply Halloween. (To everyone’s surprise, this title had yet to be capitalized on by a motion picture.)

  Carpenter was forced to step away from Halloween’s development early on to direct Someone’s Watching Me, a television movie about a voyeuristic stalker in a high-rise. A decent thriller in its own right, Someone’s Watching Me makes for an interesting lead-in to Halloween. (Fans take note: Charles Cyphers co-stars as a character named Gary Hunt.) In Carpenter’s absence, Hill wrote a first draft of Halloween based on their initial outline. Upon wrapping production on Someone’s Watching Me, Carpenter made his own pass at the script. According to production lore, the script was finalized in a matter of weeks.

  THE NIGHT HE CAME HOME

  Halloween opens on the titular holiday in 1963 within the quiet town of Haddonfield, Illinois. Dressed as a clown and armed with a kitchen knife, six-year-old Michael Myers murders his older sister Judith in her upstairs bedroom. The film then jumps ahead fifteen years to find the boy’s longtime psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis, driving to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium on a stormy night to transfer his patient to a court hearing. We learn that Michael was immediately institutionalized in a catatonic state, unable to offer any explanation for his crime. Upon arrival, Loomis is alarmed to find the hospital’s patients freely wandering the grounds. Amid the chaos, Michael steals the transport vehicle and escapes into the night. Just as Loomis suspects, Michael heads home to Haddonfield, murdering a mechanic for his jumpsuit along the way.

  The following morning finds seventeen-year-old Laurie Strode dropping off a key at the old Myers house for her realtor father, wholly unaware that the returned killer is watching her from inside. From this moment on, Michael fixates on Laurie, whom he stalks throughout the day along with her friends Lynda and Annie. Concerned over his patient’s escape, Dr. Loomis travels to Haddonfield to warn Sheriff Brackett of the approaching danger. Meanwhile, Michael robs a local hardware store, stealing a white mask, rope, and two kitchen knives. As night falls, Brackett and Loomis find unsettling evidence that Michael has indeed returned home. They stake out the old Myers place hoping to catch the escaped killer. Loomis struggles to convince the sheriff that his patient is not mentally ill but pure evil and quite dangerous.

  Halloween night finds Laurie babysitting two children, Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace, while Lynda and Annie engage in more carnal activities. Michael soon murders both girls along with Lynda’s boyfriend, strategically displaying their corpses ins
ide the darkened Wallace home. Unable to reach her friends by phone, a concerned Laurie puts the children to bed and goes across the street to investigate. She is horrified to discover her murdered friends inside. Michael attacks a terrified Laurie, slashing her arm and pushing her down a flight of stairs. She escapes back to the Doyle household, though her attacker follows. Laurie and Michael engage in a series of violent confrontations until he finally gains the upper hand by choking her. Tommy and Lindsey run screaming from the house, which catches Loomis’ attention.

  Upon reaching the scuffle upstairs, Loomis fires six bullets into his patient, sending him tumbling over a balcony. He turns briefly to a sobbing Laurie before looking back to the ground where Michael is no longer laying. As the script tells it, “Loomis stares down with a growing fear, then looks out from the house. The backyard, the neighboring yards, the street, all are empty. There is only the sound of the wind swelling in the trees. Michael is gone.”

  Four decades later, it’s difficult to find anything to say about Halloween that hasn’t been said before. Like Casablanca, The Searchers, and Jaws, it is one of those rare perfect films. Perhaps that’s why we still bother with sequels, remakes, and clones. We know the odds aren’t good, but we still hold out hope that lightning might strike twice. Even if it doesn’t, we’ll always have the original. Forty years later, its raw power has yet to diminish. What’s the key to its success? Take your pick. Between the performances, music, cinematography, lighting, and production design, there is so much to appreciate here. Yet it all started with an ace screenplay.

  The strength of Carpenter and Hill’s creative partnership is particularly evident in the film’s dual narratives. There are essentially two stories converging in Halloween – that of an obsessed doctor tracking down an escaped killer and that of the escaped killer stalking several unsuspecting teenage girls. Both writers were said to have drawn heavily from personal experience in writing the film. Hill used her own years as a babysitter to craft authentic interactions between the three main girls. Carpenter reflected back to his college years in Kentucky where he toured a psychiatric hospital as part of his coursework. This chilling visit brought him face to face with several seriously disturbed patients, one of whom would inspire Loomis’ ominous characterization of Michael Myers. (“I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face... and the blackest eyes... the devil’s eyes.”)

  It was Roger Ebert who said, “A film is only as good as its villain.” This certainly explains why Halloween remains an enduring classic. Michael Myers may not have been cinema’s first slasher, but he did at once become the prototype for all slashers that came after. The character is an arguable masterstroke of simplicity. Unlike his contemporaries, there’s no clear reason for why Michael kills. He simply does. The motivations of fellow slashers Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees are at least partly rooted in vengeance, but not with Michael. He seems to target Laurie and her friends entirely at random. (Recall that their sibling connection wouldn’t come into play until the first sequel.) The indiscriminate nature of Michael’s murderous urges represents Halloween at its most ideologically pure.

  Yet the lack of a clear motive is only one part of what makes Halloween’s boogeyman such a terrifying screen villain. The character is rooted in an unsettling duality in that he is both human and inhuman. Carpenter has cited Yul Brynner’s robot gunslinger from Westworld as a major influence on the character. Like Michael, Brynner’s android killer is silent, unstoppable, and shows a complete lack of emotion. Michael may look like a man, but he isn’t one. Like the featureless white mask he wears, Michael only vaguely resembles something human. Halloween’s screenwriters go to great lengths to dehumanize the slasher within their script, even referring to him as “the Shape” in scene direction. One detail lost on many viewers is that Michael’s full name is never once spoken in the entire film. In fact, no one even utters his first name beyond the opening scene in which he kills his sister. Loomis exclusively refers to his patient as “he,” “him,” and “it.” To young Tommy, Michael is simply “the boogeyman.”

  More than just a false face to hide behind, the Shape’s iconic white mask is a brilliant projection of characterization or lack thereof. While most fans already know this mask was adapted from a 1975 Captain Kirk piece, fewer know that it wasn’t the only mask considered for the film. Production designer Tommy Lee Wallace mulled several other choices, two of which – Richard Nixon and Mr. Spock – were immediately dismissed for being too recognizable. The only other option seriously considered was a sad clown mask with frizzy red hair in the style of famed circus performer Emmett Kelly. Had it been used, this alternate choice might’ve nicely echoed the happy clown mask young Michael wears in Halloween’s opening scene. Wallace would audition both masks for Carpenter and Hill at the film’s production office. While the sad clown was well liked for its obvious creep factor, the modified Kirk was found to be far more chilling for its lack of feature and color.

  Most of the characters in Halloween are blissfully unaware that evil has returned to Haddonfield. Only Michael’s longtime psychiatrist, Dr. Samuel Loomis, carries the burden of this terrible knowledge. Narratively, Loomis functions as a sort of hype man for the Shape – our only real source of exposition. His prophetic monologues about the approaching danger fail to inspire an appropriate response from law enforcement. As we find him in Halloween, Loomis is very much a man at the end of his rope. He tells Sheriff Brackett how he spent eight years trying to treat Michael before fully realizing the boy’s dangerous lack of humanity. Loomis would spend the next seven years trying to keep his patient locked away out of fear he would surely kill again. He arms himself with a Smith & Wesson for the same reason Van Helsing carries a stake.

  Carpenter initially hoped to cast either Christopher Lee or Peter Cushing in the role of Dr. Loomis, though both declined. Cushing would have been especially appropriate given his time playing Van Helsing in Hammer’s Dracula series. Irwin Yablans wrote in his autobiography that he was strongly against casting the horror vets, fearing they “would reduce Halloween to just another Hammer production.” He instead suggested Carpenter consider using British performer Donald Pleasence. “My feeling was that he would give the character a quirky originality and a sense of dignity, English accent and all. Carpenter concurred.”

  Pleasence accepted the role of Loomis despite not fully understanding his character’s choices within the story. He would dismiss these concerns and play the part as written with one exception. Midway through the film, Loomis stops at a roadside phone booth to warn Haddonfield’s authorities of the Shape’s approach. As first written into the script, Loomis was to instead phone his wife, who voices concern for her husband’s lack of sleep. (“Yes, yes. I’m all right. Stop worrying. After this I’ll sleep for a week. Two weeks.”) Pleasence suggested Carpenter omit the character having a wife, reasoning that such a work-obsessed clinician would be a loner and not the marrying type. The director agreed and the scene was changed on the spot.

  In the film, the Shape targets seventeen-year-old Laurie Strode after seeing her drop off a key at his family home on Halloween morning. As far as horror heroines go, Laurie is among the best of the best. It’s neither by random chance nor virginal status that only Laurie makes it through the night alive. She survives by having a keen awareness of her surroundings and a fierce fighting spirit. The characters in Halloween are constantly writing off red flags and warning signs of the Shape’s return – but not Laurie. Something isn’t right in Haddonfield and she senses it. Laurie also demonstrates courage and a selfless concern for others, both winning qualities of a heroine. Notice how she goes to check on Lynda and Annie inside the darkened Wallace house despite the obvious bad vibes. Her demeanor and slow approach are telling. She’s clearly scared but goes to investigate anyways. In addition to fending off the Shape’s attack, she also manages to keep both children in her care safe during the assault. Not unlike the Shape, Laurie may not have been the first �
��final girl,” to borrow the term coined by film scholar Carol J. Clover, but she did at once become a prototype for those that came after.

  Halloween’s leading lady was to be played by newcomer Jamie Lee Curtis, who was the daughter of Hollywood power couple Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. That Leigh starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho played a definite part in landing Curtis the role of Laurie Strode. “I knew casting Jamie Lee would be great publicity for the film because her mother was in Psycho,” Hill told Entertainment Weekly. “At least I knew she had the genes to scream well.” In actuality, her casting wasn’t Halloween’s only connection to Psycho, nor was it even the first. Carpenter had already paid tribute to the Hitchcock masterwork by naming Dr. Samuel Loomis after the boyfriend of Leigh’s character in that film.

  In retrospect, Halloween stands out from the slasher sub-genre it helped create for its surprising lack of sanguinary spectacle. Unlike its countless imitators, there is no gore to be had in the 1978 film and almost no blood. Carpenter would instead prefer to leave those grisly details entirely to the viewer’s imagination. It’s all too easy to dismiss a mutilated body as being fake from the comfort of a theater seat. Of course, it’s fake. But when a filmmaker withholds those visuals, your mind may involuntarily fill in what you’re not seeing with something even more horrific. It’s much harder to dismiss what you see inside your mind’s eye. By avoiding such graphic violence, Carpenter is able focus on building tension through suspense. This is one of Halloween’s best qualities and yet also the one its own sequels tend to replicate the least.

  More than a few have noticed similarities between Halloween and 1974’s Black Christmas, an often-ignored forerunner to the slasher phenomenon. It’s difficult not to draw comparisons given how both films open with POV-shots of the killer entering a house to murder someone. On the surface, yes – both feature young women being terrorized by holiday-themed slashers in a suburban setting, but their connection goes even deeper than that. Filmmaker Bob Clark nearly directed a Carpenter script immediately after Black Christmas titled Prey, a sort of spiritual precursor to The Hills Have Eyes. The story goes that Carpenter inquired about how his colleague might approach a hypothetical follow-up to Black Christmas. Clark responded that his film’s killer would have been caught and institutionalized only to escape on Halloween, which would have also been the sequel’s title. That anecdote may seem damning at first, but remember that it was Irwin Yablans who first conceived of Halloween and then approached Carpenter to develop it. Clark has strongly denied any creative theft, insisting that his own Halloween would have been very different than Carpenter’s. Speaking at his film’s thirtieth anniversary screening in 2004, the filmmaker tried to set the record straight: “He did not copy my movie. Halloween is entirely John Carpenter’s and one of the greats of its kind.”