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Death has come to your little town,
Sharon.

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John Carpenter's Halloween was released in
the autumn of 1978.

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It changed horror forever.

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Black pale emotions.

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There's nothing like it.

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It just blew me away.

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It certainly has become a classic.

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Halloween ushered in modern horror.

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You can sort of look
at horror and it's before

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Halloween and then
it's after Halloween.

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It's success made it the most profitable
independent film of its time.

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In Halloween, it's the movie everybody had
to say.

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Everybody who went to see that film got on
the phone and told three other people.

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And those three told six other people.

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And within three or four days,
it was huge.

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The film captured the imagination of a
generation.

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This movie gives me the creeps.

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It is really scary.

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I remember getting goosebumps.

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It gave its producers a
chart topping franchise

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as unstoppable as
its central character.

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You can't kill the fucking man.

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This killer masked, unknown, but is a
force of nature.

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Michael Myers is purely and simply evil.

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This is not a man.

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With a minuscule budget,
it would be running around

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inside moving lights because
there weren't enough lights.

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We created Fall with three trash bags full
of painted leaves.

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A group of unknown actors.

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My agent called me up, so did you play
some psycho?

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And Jamie Lee Curtis is in the movie.

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Well, who's Jamie Lee Curtis?

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I was surprised I was cast, period.

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And little hope of financial success.

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The reviews came in.

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They were awful.

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As far as I knew, it was a complete pop.

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The film spawned scores of imitations,
but not one was its equal.

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Every scene is put together perfectly.

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It is.

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The magical movie.

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It's an exercise in style.

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There's something very beautiful about it.

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The lighting.

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The mask.

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The music is unbelievable.

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This is the story of a group of Hollywood
newcomers working hard and having fun.

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And scaring the hell out of audiences.

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Happy Halloween.

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I saw the boogeyman.

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I saw him outside.

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What do you look like?

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The boogeyman.

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With a thin storyline.

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The thought of a babysitter being in
jeopardy came to mind.

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Every kid in America knows what the
babysitter is.

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A shoestring budget.

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The pressures were tremendous.

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Twenty-some days of shooting.

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And a director barely out of film school.

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Happened in here and then you leave.

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No one expected big things from Don
Carpenter's Halloween.

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We're just a bunch of kids.

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We just wanted to make a movie.

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It's a horror-be-flick, low-budget movie.

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It didn't feel like a movie.

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This is going to be the worst film ever
made.

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It's a horror flick with a guy with a
mask.

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I mean, who's going to watch that?

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A short answer.

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Everyone.

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I have never seen an audience react the
way they did.

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I saw people react and I went, oh my
God, this actually made you pretty good.

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They were running up and down the house
and screaming and hollering.

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It was very clear that what he had tried
to do was working.

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Film gores were haunted by the simple
story of an ordinary boy who went mad and

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killed his sister in the creepy house down
the street.

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We're not supposed to go up there.

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Ex-book out.

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And who then escapes from captivity years
later to pick up where he left off.

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It seems absurd that at some
time that seemed completely

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like a fresh idea, just this
single killer with a knife.

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Michael Myers is faceless and he's
psychotic.

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He was a force, this horrible force
blowing into town.

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As Luma says, he is purely and simply
evil.

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What do we do?

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He's been here once tonight.

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I think he'll come back.

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You feel that you're watching
something that could happen in

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any town in America, not just
Halloween town, so to speak.

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Halloween is very, very effective at
finding the horror in the ordinary.

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Makes the senseless acts all the more
horrifying.

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And it makes the poem feel like an unsafe
place.

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I'm babysitting the doils.

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It's only three houses down.

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We can keep each other comfortable.

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And for the unknown killer's prey, a cast
of ordinary, harmonally charged teenagers.

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Paul, drag me into the boys locker.

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Exploring uncharted territory.

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It's totally charged.

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A large portion where we
take place in daylight hours

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with these characters running
around being teenagers.

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The characterizations of the girls is one
of the things I love about the original

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Halloween, is that the three of us are so
different.

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You had three choices for girls.

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You either have the quiet, repressed,
really smart, good girl.

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I forgot my chemistry book.

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I have the cheerleader.

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I always forget my chemistry book and my
knack book and my age.

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Or the snarky smart alec girl.

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Hey, jerk!

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Speak, kill!

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We're teenage girls, you know,
having fun, kissing, making, out, dying.

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Well, the film's heroines remain in the
dark about the killer tracking them.

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I saw the boogeyman.

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The children in their
care are helplessly

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aware of the boogeyman
lurking in the shadows.

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No, buddy boogey.

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I believe you tell me.

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In this film, it's the little kid who's
aware.

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And actually, it's funny,
the only two people in the

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whole movie who know what's
going on are Tommy and Loomis.

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And one's a little kid and one's a weirdo.

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On the hunt to stop the evil is Michael
Myers psychiatrist, the brave,

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but unhinged Dr. Loomis.

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Maybe Ken Padko thinks his place is
haunted.

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He's this weird character.

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Michael Myers isn't just a patient for
him.

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Michael Myers is a crusade.

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You can either ignore it or you can help
me to stop it.

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It's really rare that you're
going to find a psychiatrist

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whose mission in life
is to shoot his patient.

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You're listening to me.

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You're very sensitive to
Dr. Carpenter's mastery of

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the medium is evident from
the film's opening sequence.

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One of the longest and most intricate
shots in film history.

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To its thrilling finale.

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You're sitting down in the scene where we
call Halloween about a mass killer.

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That guy's going to kill somebody
eventually.

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By stretching it out, he makes the tension
unbearable to the point where,

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as Michael Myers begins to
get closer to these characters

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and sort of really intersect,
he's watching on the edge.

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He's getting closer.

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When he finally gets in there,
it's not just scary.

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It's this incredible tension relief.

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We know what's coming and we're powerless
to stop it.

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It was a film so effective that its
audience was too busy screaming.

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The notice that there was virtually no
on-screen blood.

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If you watch the movie, you feel like you
watched a bloodbath, but there's no blood.

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Don't show it to them.

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They can think they saw it.

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Don't give them blood and gore.

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Theater of the mind.

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That formula would work tomorrow.

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Stuff we see we can conquer, but what we
can't see really scares us.

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Halloween became so successful that it's
hard to believe it was the work of

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inexperienced young filmmakers,
many of whom were making their first film.

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Here we were, this kind of guerrilla film
unit.

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It was about as lean and as mean as you
could get.

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Those days, kids making movies was rare.

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I get $25 a week and I get to walk around.

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I was right by my house.

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Okay, I'll do it.

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It was my first real speaking part in the
film.

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Don't get dressed.

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It was everybody's big chance.

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So everybody was really rowing in the same
direction to make it something big,

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something that would really, really be
great.

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Carpenter delivered a film that
transcended its meager budget.

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This low budget gave
the film certain, haunting,

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looking, empty screen
because you couldn't afford extra.

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That added to the success of it.

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A finite number of
people, one principle set

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and the people were
killed off one by one.

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So, you know, it's a very economical way
to cast a movie.

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That same economy and efficiency is
perhaps most evident in Halloween's score,

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which added
immeasurably to the film's

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effectiveness and became
a classic in its own right.

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I mean, it's got to be
one of the most top five

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most recognizable
movie scores of all time.

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That score, in a lot of ways, is the main
character of the movie.

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Come on, the music is unbelievable.

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Unbelievable.

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That he did that by himself.

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Totally creatively John Carpenter is the
one who really took care of it.

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I think he gets all the credit for this
franchise.

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But before filming even began,
Carpenter, in a move that would become the

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stuff of Hollywood legend, put it all on
the line with a list of demands that could

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have derailed his career before it had
even started.

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Between

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years, sitting in a room, staring at a
wall, not seeing the wall, looking past

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the wall, looking at this night in humanly
patient.

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Over the past three decades,
John Carpenter's Halloween

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has become the gold
standard of the slasher genre.

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It's a far cry from its B-movie inception
in 1978.

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The seats for the film were planted even
earlier in 1953, when a five-year-old John

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Carpenter sat in a dark and cinema scared
out of his wits.

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I think probably the film
that influenced me the

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most was a film called It
Came From Outer Space.

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It was in 3D of all things.

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Back in 1953, I was a little tight.

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And I had the glasses on and it scared
that pants off me.

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Terrified me.

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But I quickly realized, wait a minute, you
know, I'm in this theater with my parents.

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There's nothing going to happen to me
here.

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This, me, this thing, I just saw caused
that feeling.

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That's pretty cool.

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I thought, man, that's what I wanted to
do.

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I wanted to write movies.

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That looks cool.

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I was stupid and young.

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He was filmmaking when he was a mere lad.

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It was cool.

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And it was somebody who knew what they were
doing and had some great dreams up ahead.

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As a young adult, Carpenter enrolled in
the prestigious USC Film School,

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he fancied himself a classical director in
the mode of a cinematic idol, Howard

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Hawks, a studio director from Hollywood's
Golden Age, who carved out a name for him.

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He was a director
himself in many different

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genres, producing and
directing a slew of classics.

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Man, I was much more of an old Hollywood
fan, so I kind of brought that with me and

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decided if I'm going to direct movies,
I'm going to do it that way.

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He didn't want to do something just appeal
to him on some narrow level.

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He wanted to make a film that a wide
audience would enjoy.

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You also said once that you'd like to cluck
to stop, and you'd go back to the forties.

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I would love to be a director during the
forties in a studio situation.

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I would love to working
on sound stages, having

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that kind of control,
that kind of style.

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From early on, Carpenter proved himself to
be a shrewd businessman, managing to raise

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$30,000 to expand his student thesis Dark
Star into a feature film.

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We had these guys
out in space for 20 years,

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and the women, and
they were bombing planets.

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The sci-fi comedy didn't
create much impact, but it did

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catch the attention of a group
of independent film investors.

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Who agreed to back
Carpenter's next film, an

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urban reimagining of
Howard Hulk's Rio Bravo.

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Made for $75,000, Assault on Precinct 13
impressed the film's distributor,

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Erwin Yablans, who was looking to move
from distribution to film production.

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I looked at it, and I thought to myself,
this is really a good movie.

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This is exciting.

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It's got energy.

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Well, that got me to thinking about how we
could make a film with John Carpenter.

242
00:12:30,541 --> 00:12:34,120
I knew that this band had talent,
and how could I use it?

243
00:12:35,500 --> 00:12:39,040
Horror films were my first thought,
because horror films are bread and butter,

244
00:12:39,560 --> 00:12:42,740
in that they are easy to make and easy to
sell.

245
00:12:43,660 --> 00:12:47,760
He said, why don't we make a low-budget
movie about these babysitters?

246
00:12:48,560 --> 00:12:51,560
Because every girl in American
can relate to babysitting,

247
00:12:51,561 --> 00:12:53,940
and we'll have some killer
out there stalking them.

248
00:12:54,520 --> 00:12:56,160
And we'll call it the babysitter murders.

249
00:12:56,760 --> 00:12:58,260
And I thought I'd have to do a sell on
him.

250
00:12:58,261 --> 00:13:00,260
He was a USC film school graduate,
and all that.

251
00:13:00,380 --> 00:13:02,480
I thought he was going to think it was too
crass.

252
00:13:02,920 --> 00:13:04,100
I wanted to make Westerns.

253
00:13:04,140 --> 00:13:05,420
I didn't want to make this crap.

254
00:13:06,580 --> 00:13:07,580
But Westerns died off.

255
00:13:07,840 --> 00:13:09,820
So, you know, what are you going to do?

256
00:13:13,300 --> 00:13:15,720
Because I wanted to direct movies,
and I wanted to work.

257
00:13:15,900 --> 00:13:16,900
I said, sure.

258
00:13:16,960 --> 00:13:17,440
No problem.

259
00:13:17,960 --> 00:13:21,760
And I told him the idea, and what do you
think we can do a picture like this for?

260
00:13:22,260 --> 00:13:23,500
Because you've got to shoot it.

261
00:13:23,740 --> 00:13:25,400
And he threw out the figure of $300,000.

262
00:13:27,040 --> 00:13:32,360
Well, I said, John, if you can do it for
$300,000, I'll find a way to get the money.

263
00:13:32,620 --> 00:13:33,940
Halloween was made for peanuts.

264
00:13:34,580 --> 00:13:36,475
The budget was so small
in the movie that they

265
00:13:36,476 --> 00:13:39,261
had to have the actors
wearing their own clothes.

266
00:13:39,840 --> 00:13:43,580
By 1982, a movie like E.T., which is
considered a low-budget movie,

267
00:13:44,160 --> 00:13:45,160
is made for $10 million.

268
00:13:46,600 --> 00:13:48,720
The young director had only two
conditions.

269
00:13:49,520 --> 00:13:52,840
I get Final Cut, and I get my name out of
the title.

270
00:13:54,620 --> 00:13:57,420
Both requests were unheard of for a novice
filmmaker.

271
00:13:59,520 --> 00:14:01,620
John Carpenter is a maverick.

272
00:14:01,700 --> 00:14:03,340
I always call him Hollywood's Dark Star.

273
00:14:03,680 --> 00:14:05,040
And I love the balls on Carpenter.

274
00:14:06,900 --> 00:14:10,080
He had that cockiness, but he had the
talent to back it up.

275
00:14:10,380 --> 00:14:11,380
How dare I?

276
00:14:11,820 --> 00:14:14,720
Well, I was a film school student.

277
00:14:15,020 --> 00:14:17,500
I had studied a lot of film history,
and my favorite directors.

278
00:14:18,120 --> 00:14:20,560
I saw how they could brand themselves.

279
00:14:20,561 --> 00:14:23,920
And I knew that it was a way to people
remember me.

280
00:14:24,800 --> 00:14:28,900
If you can do it for $300,000,
I said you could have anything you wanted.

281
00:14:29,780 --> 00:14:34,120
Had it been done by a major studio on a
big budget, I think it's fairly certain he

282
00:14:34,121 --> 00:14:35,801
wouldn't have had his name above the
title.

283
00:14:36,020 --> 00:14:37,960
Now I had to figure out I get the
$300,000.

284
00:14:39,920 --> 00:14:42,400
Ublans began to pursue financing for their
film.

285
00:14:43,140 --> 00:14:47,941
He set up a meeting with Mustafa Akad, a
colleague and occasional business partner.

286
00:14:48,000 --> 00:14:50,860
Ublans knew that Akad was on the lookout
for projects to fund.

287
00:14:51,700 --> 00:14:56,760
He said I have a film and a low budget and
he said $300,000.

288
00:14:58,540 --> 00:14:59,540
I was worried.

289
00:14:59,760 --> 00:15:01,422
I mean, you get worried
when the budget is low

290
00:15:01,423 --> 00:15:04,381
and you get worried
when the budget is high.

291
00:15:04,760 --> 00:15:07,360
He couldn't even conceive that a movie
could be made for $300,000.

292
00:15:08,120 --> 00:15:11,140
I knew it could be because I had been
around that world.

293
00:15:11,580 --> 00:15:13,120
I said $300,000.

294
00:15:13,280 --> 00:15:14,280
He said, well, yeah.

295
00:15:14,580 --> 00:15:15,980
I said, what's the story about?

296
00:15:17,520 --> 00:15:21,040
He said he's about a babysitter to be
killed by the boogeyman.

297
00:15:21,860 --> 00:15:24,600
I said to John, John, here's what I want
you to do.

298
00:15:24,980 --> 00:15:28,100
I want you to go in there and I'm going to
range a meeting for you and Mustafa.

299
00:15:29,780 --> 00:15:33,760
I want you to call me
from his office when

300
00:15:33,761 --> 00:15:37,680
you're sitting with him
and just do that for me.

301
00:15:38,080 --> 00:15:39,980
At everyone's request, I met Mustafa.

302
00:15:40,680 --> 00:15:42,780
He said, why should I give you this movie?

303
00:15:43,900 --> 00:15:45,560
How do I know you're going to be able to
pull this off?

304
00:15:45,580 --> 00:15:47,640
And I just simply said, you have to trust
me.

305
00:15:48,180 --> 00:15:52,240
When he spoke to me, he was speaking to me
with images.

306
00:15:53,580 --> 00:15:57,100
He was editing in front of me,
so I was very impressed.

307
00:15:57,460 --> 00:15:59,680
They called me from his office and I got
on the phone.

308
00:16:00,580 --> 00:16:03,160
And I proceeded to shame Mustafa,
who was a very proud man.

309
00:16:03,161 --> 00:16:05,320
And I little reset the moustache.

310
00:16:05,700 --> 00:16:08,660
I know it's a lot of money and I know that
you don't want to take the risk.

311
00:16:09,260 --> 00:16:12,100
And with John sitting across from him,
I knew he wouldn't back down.

312
00:16:13,960 --> 00:16:15,640
And we got the $300,000.

313
00:16:17,440 --> 00:16:22,100
With financing secured, Carpenter set out
to begin building the team he needed to

314
00:16:22,101 --> 00:16:24,780
bring the film in on a 21-day shooting
schedule.

315
00:16:25,540 --> 00:16:27,620
To that end, he made another bold request.

316
00:16:28,160 --> 00:16:30,808
And lobby to have his
girlfriend, 27-year-old Deborah

317
00:16:30,809 --> 00:16:33,480
Hill, brought on board to
produce the babysitter murders.

318
00:16:34,260 --> 00:16:36,996
At the time, Hill's experience
was limited to script

319
00:16:36,997 --> 00:16:39,681
supervisor work on a
handful of low-budget films.

320
00:16:40,480 --> 00:16:42,852
One of my first jobs
was a script supervisor

321
00:16:42,853 --> 00:16:45,181
working on a movie called
Goodbye, Norma Jean.

322
00:16:45,780 --> 00:16:49,240
And then I met John Carpenter when he
directed Assault on Precinct 13.

323
00:16:49,600 --> 00:16:51,680
And I was his script supervisor and
assistant editor.

324
00:16:51,880 --> 00:16:53,400
So there's a lot of trust going on.

325
00:16:53,500 --> 00:16:55,440
And I knew Deborah could handle the job.

326
00:16:55,640 --> 00:16:56,640
It's alright with me.

327
00:16:56,980 --> 00:16:58,640
If you think she's good, put her in there.

328
00:16:58,641 --> 00:17:02,620
All of a sudden, it's John and Deborah are
going to make a movie.

329
00:17:03,520 --> 00:17:06,840
And of course, wait, she was script
supervisor on the last picture.

330
00:17:07,280 --> 00:17:10,280
So everybody's kind of looking at each
other like, how's this going to work?

331
00:17:10,480 --> 00:17:11,681
We were searching for a story.

332
00:17:11,940 --> 00:17:13,300
You know, what could the story be?

333
00:17:13,640 --> 00:17:15,646
And I think it was because
of a Halloween time

334
00:17:15,647 --> 00:17:17,460
that suddenly Halloween
popped into my mind.

335
00:17:17,680 --> 00:17:18,360
I got on the phone.

336
00:17:18,500 --> 00:17:19,500
I called John Carpenter.

337
00:17:19,640 --> 00:17:21,121
And I said, John, I told me the idea.

338
00:17:21,780 --> 00:17:24,180
And I said, what if I told you I wanted to
call it Halloween?

339
00:17:26,080 --> 00:17:27,160
He got it immediately.

340
00:17:27,780 --> 00:17:28,780
He got really excited.

341
00:17:29,160 --> 00:17:30,200
He said, that's brilliant.

342
00:17:30,400 --> 00:17:33,580
When he called and came up with a
brilliant idea of using the themes of

343
00:17:33,581 --> 00:17:37,620
Halloween to tell our story, it was like a
gold mine.

344
00:17:37,960 --> 00:17:39,992
And they looked into it and
the assumption was, well,

345
00:17:39,993 --> 00:17:42,040
somebody's made a movie
called Halloween by now.

346
00:17:42,220 --> 00:17:44,500
I mean, you know, it was 1977,
78.

347
00:17:45,620 --> 00:17:47,420
Nobody had ever made a movie called
Halloween.

348
00:17:47,580 --> 00:17:49,720
Nobody had ever made a movie with
Halloween in the title.

349
00:17:49,721 --> 00:17:52,681
It was hard to believe there had never
been a movie with that title before.

350
00:17:52,800 --> 00:17:54,120
Hard to figure that out.

351
00:17:54,840 --> 00:17:57,324
With a new title and
a distinctive hook, Hill

352
00:17:57,325 --> 00:17:59,460
and Carpenter began
to work on the script.

353
00:18:00,120 --> 00:18:01,700
We went to a list of scares.

354
00:18:02,360 --> 00:18:06,400
You know, like, imagine if, you know,
you're in bed with your boyfriend and he

355
00:18:06,401 --> 00:18:08,460
goes down to get some water or a coke or
something.

356
00:18:09,460 --> 00:18:13,740
And he comes back with a sheet trying to
pretend he's a ghost.

357
00:18:14,420 --> 00:18:15,420
But it's not him.

358
00:18:15,660 --> 00:18:18,460
And then we decided to weave the scares
into the story.

359
00:18:18,461 --> 00:18:23,780
I wrote the first draft and John came back
with a pass for the Sam Loom's character.

360
00:18:24,200 --> 00:18:25,200
The blackest guy.

361
00:18:26,040 --> 00:18:27,320
The devil's eye.

362
00:18:28,060 --> 00:18:31,160
So all the stuff about evil and everything
is really John's.

363
00:18:31,800 --> 00:18:34,091
The screenwriting pair
went to great pains to

364
00:18:34,092 --> 00:18:37,361
ground the film's characters
and events in reality.

365
00:18:38,040 --> 00:18:41,149
Deborah Hill wrote the girl's
dialogue and she brought

366
00:18:41,150 --> 00:18:43,820
a real palpable sense
of what girls talked about.

367
00:18:47,480 --> 00:18:50,860
The kind of thing that you usually didn't
see in exploitation movies.

368
00:18:51,480 --> 00:18:53,340
You didn't hear girls talk like girls.

369
00:18:53,460 --> 00:18:55,360
You usually just saw girls who were hot.

370
00:18:56,640 --> 00:19:02,180
Deborah really wrote dialogue that sounded
like, you know, the real people.

371
00:19:02,680 --> 00:19:06,980
This movie was just ordinary conversation
that could happen in any city anywhere.

372
00:19:07,920 --> 00:19:11,640
Which makes their killing all the more
senseless and all the more realistic.

373
00:19:11,641 --> 00:19:16,500
Once the real world was established,
the unimaginable could exist.

374
00:19:17,840 --> 00:19:21,660
Only now the mythic monster wouldn't rise
from a coffin in Transylvania.

375
00:19:22,140 --> 00:19:24,340
This time he would live right next door.

376
00:19:25,660 --> 00:19:29,300
Modern horror films really began with
Psycho.

377
00:19:32,680 --> 00:19:36,640
Psycho began this trend with a maniac
killer with shocking horror.

378
00:19:38,780 --> 00:19:41,785
Before then horror movies
were pretty much in agothic

379
00:19:41,786 --> 00:19:46,800
situations with old castles and
cobwebs and costume melodramas.

380
00:19:50,830 --> 00:19:53,432
And they were the werewolves
and mummies and they were

381
00:19:53,433 --> 00:19:58,230
always related to castles
and sort of Victorian romance.

382
00:19:58,710 --> 00:20:02,750
And Psycho kind of moved it to the modern
stage.

383
00:20:05,170 --> 00:20:10,250
It literally had a motel and in back of
it, here was this gothic house.

384
00:20:11,410 --> 00:20:15,230
If Alfred Hitchcock moved horror away from
the gothic and into the real world,

385
00:20:15,530 --> 00:20:19,210
it was Carpenter's plan to turn realistic
horror into modern myth.

386
00:20:20,250 --> 00:20:22,126
So what am I going to do with this
Halloween thing?

387
00:20:22,150 --> 00:20:26,490
Well, I'll try to kick it into another
place with the screenplay.

388
00:20:28,290 --> 00:20:32,424
This killer masked a
known faceless and a

389
00:20:32,425 --> 00:20:37,511
force of nature, as
opposed to a human being.

390
00:20:39,990 --> 00:20:44,590
Into this narrative, Hill and Carpenter
were of a number of inside references.

391
00:20:45,230 --> 00:20:48,990
Hadn't Field was in fact the town in New
Jersey where Deborah Hill grew up.

392
00:20:50,070 --> 00:20:54,791
Sam Loomis was named after the character
played by John Gavin in Hitchcock's Psycho.

393
00:20:55,790 --> 00:21:00,611
Sheriff Lee Brackett shared a name with the
screenwriter of Howard Hawk's Rio Bravo.

394
00:21:00,770 --> 00:21:04,310
And the film's relentless antagonist was a
tribute to a film distributor who

395
00:21:04,311 --> 00:21:07,050
championed assault on Precinct 13 in the
UK.

396
00:21:08,630 --> 00:21:11,530
There was a man named Michael Myers who
wanted to see me about the film.

397
00:21:12,210 --> 00:21:13,586
And he did an incredible film festival.

398
00:21:13,610 --> 00:21:16,010
And lo and behold, it became a great
success.

399
00:21:16,470 --> 00:21:18,333
Carpenter was very
grateful and thought he'd

400
00:21:18,334 --> 00:21:20,170
give him a very strange
sort of thank you.

401
00:21:20,171 --> 00:21:22,571
Because I guess the guy's like the
sweetest guy in the world.

402
00:21:22,750 --> 00:21:25,250
And he names this psychotic killer after
him.

403
00:21:26,070 --> 00:21:27,850
There'd been worse tributes, but yeah.

404
00:21:28,610 --> 00:21:30,775
To help bring the
script to life, Carpenter

405
00:21:30,776 --> 00:21:33,331
recruited a childhood
friend from Kentucky.

406
00:21:33,590 --> 00:21:38,191
Tommy Lee Wallace would also move to Hollywood
to try his hand at the movie business.

407
00:21:38,650 --> 00:21:44,390
I was hired ostensibly as the production
designer and also the editor.

408
00:21:45,130 --> 00:21:47,830
Those two jobs don't work well together.

409
00:21:48,410 --> 00:21:49,650
You know, you can forget sleep.

410
00:21:51,690 --> 00:21:56,090
One of Wallace's first responsibilities was
to develop the look for the film's killer.

411
00:21:56,570 --> 00:22:01,611
The escaped mental patient Michael Myers
referred to in the script only as the shape.

412
00:22:02,670 --> 00:22:06,020
Wearing a mask depicting the
blank neutral features of a man,

413
00:22:06,021 --> 00:22:09,830
Wallace knew that the mask
itself could make or break the film.

414
00:22:10,390 --> 00:22:17,470
John instructed me to go out and find
something that hopefully was plain and

415
00:22:17,471 --> 00:22:20,250
didn't call attention to itself in some
strange way.

416
00:22:21,030 --> 00:22:28,330
The choices, Richard Nixon, Mr. Spock,
Captain Kirk.

417
00:22:29,990 --> 00:22:34,670
I also picked up an Emmett Kelly mask,
which is the classic sad clown.

418
00:22:35,530 --> 00:22:38,930
Enit Castle was there doing the modeling
for us.

419
00:22:39,370 --> 00:22:42,211
And he came out in that
Emmett Kelly mask and

420
00:22:42,212 --> 00:22:45,310
it was unmistakable
that the effect was eerie.

421
00:22:45,311 --> 00:22:50,450
Then Nick came out with the Captain Kirk
mask.

422
00:22:51,230 --> 00:22:54,010
He won by default because he was the
plainest face.

423
00:22:54,650 --> 00:22:56,130
We changed a lot.

424
00:22:56,250 --> 00:22:57,410
We opened up the eye sockets.

425
00:22:57,910 --> 00:22:58,910
We changed the hair.

426
00:22:59,690 --> 00:23:01,270
Yanked off the sideburns.

427
00:23:01,630 --> 00:23:05,350
And spray painted the whole thing white,
fish belly white.

428
00:23:09,870 --> 00:23:10,870
Oh, shit.

429
00:23:11,370 --> 00:23:12,410
It was horrifying.

430
00:23:12,810 --> 00:23:17,430
It was so scary that we immediately knew
if nothing else our movie was going on.

431
00:23:18,430 --> 00:23:20,890
Maybe nobody would go see it, but it was
going to be scary.

432
00:23:23,350 --> 00:23:27,130
Tommy Lee Wallace's creation exceeded
everyone's expectations.

433
00:23:28,250 --> 00:23:31,250
He's got the devil's eyes, the darkest
eyes, but all around him is white.

434
00:23:31,850 --> 00:23:33,150
That's enormously creepy.

435
00:23:34,370 --> 00:23:36,930
It reflects sort of all your fears.

436
00:23:37,150 --> 00:23:38,590
I mean, there are no features in it.

437
00:23:38,670 --> 00:23:41,930
We sort of put onto it our own feelings
about it.

438
00:23:41,990 --> 00:23:43,350
It's almost like a Rorschach test.

439
00:23:45,370 --> 00:23:47,803
With the film's central
image in place, Wallace

440
00:23:47,804 --> 00:23:50,631
turned his attention to
his many other duties.

441
00:23:52,230 --> 00:23:55,850
His next job to make Southern California
look like Haddonfield, Illinois,

442
00:23:56,270 --> 00:23:57,750
a fictional Midwest suburb.

443
00:23:59,810 --> 00:24:03,210
The streets out there have these big
California live oaks that although they're

444
00:24:03,211 --> 00:24:06,946
not native to Haddonfield,
Illinois, which doesn't even

445
00:24:06,947 --> 00:24:09,690
exist, they were gnarly and
strange and it didn't matter.

446
00:24:09,870 --> 00:24:11,890
I think most of the audience bought that.

447
00:24:11,891 --> 00:24:13,290
It was like, oh, spooky trees.

448
00:24:13,810 --> 00:24:14,810
That's all we needed.

449
00:24:15,210 --> 00:24:17,796
As the film's visuals
took shape, the production

450
00:24:17,797 --> 00:24:19,990
now needed a
cinematographer to capture them.

451
00:24:20,610 --> 00:24:24,270
He'll turn to Dean Candy, the director of
photography she'd worked with on such

452
00:24:24,271 --> 00:24:27,330
B-movies as Bear Knuckles and Satan's
cheerleaders.

453
00:24:28,150 --> 00:24:32,170
It was the time of the drive-in theater
and B-movies had a place.

454
00:24:32,590 --> 00:24:37,130
And so I was fortunate to be able to learn
on a lot of these old, you know,

455
00:24:37,850 --> 00:24:38,190
action movies.

456
00:24:38,191 --> 00:24:40,290
You don't believe that they're going to
kill us.

457
00:24:40,410 --> 00:24:41,770
Come on, we've got to get it back.

458
00:24:42,210 --> 00:24:42,830
There's no time.

459
00:24:43,130 --> 00:24:43,230
Come on.

460
00:24:43,370 --> 00:24:47,214
It was a great serendipitous
moment to meet with John

461
00:24:47,215 --> 00:24:49,791
and to go off on this adventure
that became Halloween.

462
00:24:51,590 --> 00:24:54,110
The filmmakers then had to cast the film.

463
00:24:54,690 --> 00:24:57,990
With a minuscule budget, the famous faces
were out of the question.

464
00:24:58,510 --> 00:25:02,350
The film would rely on the uncertain
shoulders of a 19-year-old newcomer,

465
00:25:03,110 --> 00:25:06,110
but she would bring with her some serious
horror pedigree.

466
00:25:13,420 --> 00:25:18,920
In the spring of 1978, 30-year-old John
Carpenter agreed to deliver a low-budget

467
00:25:18,921 --> 00:25:22,180
horror film to producers urbanie blans and
Mustafa Akad.

468
00:25:22,680 --> 00:25:26,580
With his core crew in place, Carpenter
turned his attention to the other side of

469
00:25:26,581 --> 00:25:30,160
the lens, determined to fill his frame
with attractive, professional,

470
00:25:30,860 --> 00:25:32,880
and most importantly, affordable talent.

471
00:25:33,440 --> 00:25:38,260
For the fun-loving, slightly bubble-headed
Linda, Carpenter set his sights on PJ

472
00:25:38,261 --> 00:25:43,220
Soles, an actress who'd impressed him two
years earlier in Brian De Palma's Carrie.

473
00:25:43,860 --> 00:25:47,620
I thought she was just great in Carrie,
and just real great, great actress.

474
00:25:48,860 --> 00:25:52,240
When I got the call to meet with a
director, I was like, wow, I mean,

475
00:25:52,420 --> 00:25:53,540
not a casting agent first.

476
00:25:53,800 --> 00:25:55,280
You actually got to see the director.

477
00:25:55,660 --> 00:25:57,964
So we proceeded to read
a scene, and it was one

478
00:25:57,965 --> 00:26:00,140
of the scenes where I
had to say the word totally.

479
00:26:00,141 --> 00:26:02,000
Three new cheers to learn the more.

480
00:26:02,420 --> 00:26:03,460
The game is in the action.

481
00:26:03,760 --> 00:26:06,080
I have to get my hair done at five,
and the dance is eight.

482
00:26:06,280 --> 00:26:07,320
I'll be totally wiped out.

483
00:26:07,500 --> 00:26:08,776
I don't think they have enough to do
tomorrow.

484
00:26:08,800 --> 00:26:09,800
Totally.

485
00:26:10,140 --> 00:26:13,159
And after I finished reading,
he said, wow, you're the

486
00:26:13,160 --> 00:26:16,460
only one that said the
word totally the way I hear it.

487
00:26:16,860 --> 00:26:17,980
And I said, are you kidding?

488
00:26:18,060 --> 00:26:20,280
What other way is there to say totally?

489
00:26:20,860 --> 00:26:22,760
And he said, well, that's why you got the
part.

490
00:26:23,200 --> 00:26:24,200
Totally.

491
00:26:24,580 --> 00:26:24,580
Totally.

492
00:26:24,581 --> 00:26:26,660
Well, she's totally not here today.

493
00:26:27,520 --> 00:26:30,740
Among the cast of new faces, PJ's was the
most recognizable.

494
00:26:31,700 --> 00:26:35,320
PJ's Souls was the big star, really,
and she was great fun.

495
00:26:35,620 --> 00:26:36,620
Anything you like?

496
00:26:38,260 --> 00:26:41,680
To cast the role of Annie Brackett,
production didn't look far.

497
00:26:42,260 --> 00:26:45,840
Nancy Kais, then Loomis, my ex-wife.

498
00:26:47,800 --> 00:26:49,320
I had known her through Tommy Wallace.

499
00:26:49,700 --> 00:26:51,240
He was a husband at the time.

500
00:26:51,760 --> 00:26:53,460
And she was a very accomplished actress.

501
00:26:53,461 --> 00:26:54,660
I really liked her.

502
00:26:55,200 --> 00:26:57,520
I worked on a cell phone precinct 13.

503
00:26:58,260 --> 00:26:59,460
And that's how I got involved.

504
00:27:00,060 --> 00:27:02,040
You know, just through those connections.

505
00:27:02,820 --> 00:27:03,940
I've got a shirt on.

506
00:27:04,080 --> 00:27:05,360
That's all you ever think about.

507
00:27:07,140 --> 00:27:11,040
For the central role of Laurie Strode,
the producer Debra Hill, saw an

508
00:27:11,041 --> 00:27:14,640
opportunity to give their scrappy little
film something of a horror pedigree.

509
00:27:15,200 --> 00:27:17,813
She suggested a
19-year-old unknown with a

510
00:27:17,814 --> 00:27:20,400
unique connection to
another horror classic.

511
00:27:20,401 --> 00:27:24,520
Her mother was Janet Lee, the star of
Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

512
00:27:25,340 --> 00:27:27,220
Debra brought up Jimmy Lee Curtis.

513
00:27:27,640 --> 00:27:29,180
She was under contracting universal.

514
00:27:30,080 --> 00:27:32,584
And Debra thought
it'd be a great idea to tie

515
00:27:32,585 --> 00:27:34,440
into that whole Janet
Lee Psycho business.

516
00:27:35,020 --> 00:27:41,200
I'm sure that it was an added,
kind of fun added bonus for them.

517
00:27:41,920 --> 00:27:44,700
We saw a lot of girls to play the Laurie
Strode character.

518
00:27:44,701 --> 00:27:49,760
And Jamie was just so vulnerable and so
real and so fresh.

519
00:27:50,660 --> 00:27:53,013
And Jamie came in and she
was 19 and she was really

520
00:27:53,014 --> 00:27:55,340
sweet and just did a great
reading so we cast her.

521
00:27:55,980 --> 00:27:56,980
Was that simple?

522
00:27:57,360 --> 00:28:00,360
Well, kiddo, I thought you had grew
superstition.

523
00:28:01,640 --> 00:28:05,310
I was surprised I was cast,
period, because I'm an actor

524
00:28:05,311 --> 00:28:07,821
and you can't ever imagine
somebody's going to hire you.

525
00:28:08,260 --> 00:28:10,400
Producer, when your plans run with the
idea.

526
00:28:10,860 --> 00:28:13,040
I'm going to have a picture of Jamie Lee
Curtis here.

527
00:28:13,520 --> 00:28:15,620
And a picture of Janet Lee here.

528
00:28:16,360 --> 00:28:19,600
I want you to pose her just like her
mother did in Psycho.

529
00:28:20,420 --> 00:28:21,996
You know, there are two ways to sell a
movie.

530
00:28:22,020 --> 00:28:23,471
There's publicity and
there's advertising

531
00:28:23,472 --> 00:28:25,120
advertising, because
money publicity is free.

532
00:28:25,560 --> 00:28:26,900
And more effective, I might add.

533
00:28:27,640 --> 00:28:31,840
Apart from her familial association with
the Hitchcock classic, the casting seemed

534
00:28:31,841 --> 00:28:34,240
an odd choice to the effervescent young
actress.

535
00:28:34,920 --> 00:28:36,120
And she didn't mind saying so.

536
00:28:36,880 --> 00:28:38,493
I remember Jamie
said, well, you have the

537
00:28:38,494 --> 00:28:40,240
fun part and I went,
well, you have the lead.

538
00:28:40,241 --> 00:28:43,140
And that was just the coveted part,
no matter what it is.

539
00:28:44,060 --> 00:28:46,400
He had three choices for girls.

540
00:28:47,040 --> 00:28:49,300
And the weird thing is I'm a combo of all
three.

541
00:28:50,300 --> 00:28:52,020
Lindsay is gone for the night.

542
00:28:53,060 --> 00:28:56,400
I was a cheerleader in high school,
so I am naturally a cheerleader.

543
00:28:57,360 --> 00:28:59,920
And I'm naturally a sarcastic little
bitch.

544
00:29:00,340 --> 00:29:02,780
I hate a guy with a car, no sense of
humor.

545
00:29:03,420 --> 00:29:05,060
And then I am ultimately a good girl.

546
00:29:06,160 --> 00:29:09,400
And so, in a weird way, they chose that
one.

547
00:29:10,240 --> 00:29:12,080
Which turned out to be good for me.

548
00:29:12,420 --> 00:29:14,860
But you could have cast me as any of them.

549
00:29:15,840 --> 00:29:19,480
Ultimately, Curtis came to understand the
logic of carpenters casting.

550
00:29:20,180 --> 00:29:23,720
I was a little worried because he used the
word vulnerable.

551
00:29:24,560 --> 00:29:26,200
I didn't really understand what it meant.

552
00:29:26,420 --> 00:29:27,420
I understood the word.

553
00:29:27,680 --> 00:29:32,304
But I really now understand
that what John wanted was to be

554
00:29:32,305 --> 00:29:35,261
vulnerable means that somebody
else wants to take care of you.

555
00:29:35,420 --> 00:29:38,740
That there's something about you that
other people want to protect.

556
00:29:38,741 --> 00:29:42,220
We're watching her, and we know
something's going to happen to her.

557
00:29:42,380 --> 00:29:43,500
We're powerless to help her.

558
00:29:43,680 --> 00:29:46,460
But we're in her world, and we feel almost
like we're alongside her.

559
00:29:49,260 --> 00:29:53,220
Offsetting the largely team cast was the
role of Dr. Sam Loomis.

560
00:29:54,600 --> 00:29:58,580
Carpenter and Yablands agreed that a
recognizable character actor was crucial.

561
00:29:59,440 --> 00:30:01,200
It was another, or when Yablands
suggested.

562
00:30:01,940 --> 00:30:05,600
We should cast somebody as a psychiatrist
that the audience would know.

563
00:30:06,440 --> 00:30:09,240
He hasn't spoke the word in 15 years.

564
00:30:09,860 --> 00:30:14,240
Dr. Loomis is the voice of exposition on
Michael Myers history in Halloween.

565
00:30:14,960 --> 00:30:18,700
And we get all of this great, really sort
of, flowery dialogue about Michael Myers,

566
00:30:18,820 --> 00:30:21,620
about his eyes, the devil's eyes,
the darkest eyes.

567
00:30:21,860 --> 00:30:24,504
And it helps to have a
classically trained actor

568
00:30:24,505 --> 00:30:27,340
and someone with a
great voice playing this part.

569
00:30:27,940 --> 00:30:30,255
The production approached
the veteran horror

570
00:30:30,256 --> 00:30:32,120
actors Christopher
Lee and Peter Cushing.

571
00:30:32,121 --> 00:30:34,040
I really got upset with that.

572
00:30:34,160 --> 00:30:36,433
I said, look, you put those
guys in this movie, and it's

573
00:30:36,434 --> 00:30:38,861
just another Christopher Lee
and another Peter Cushing movie.

574
00:30:39,300 --> 00:30:40,300
What was in there?

575
00:30:40,700 --> 00:30:42,960
I told you a muscle, heartache,
heartache.

576
00:30:43,520 --> 00:30:46,004
Years after we had
originally asked Christopher

577
00:30:46,005 --> 00:30:48,660
Lee to play the Sam
Loomis role, we ran into him.

578
00:30:49,020 --> 00:30:51,800
He said, I made the biggest mistake of my
life.

579
00:30:51,980 --> 00:30:53,260
I should have been in your film.

580
00:30:53,660 --> 00:30:56,860
With both actors refusing the role,
Yablands couldn't have been happier.

581
00:30:56,861 --> 00:31:01,940
I had seen a movie called Will Penny,
and there was a man in there who played,

582
00:31:02,240 --> 00:31:06,300
he was a western romer, he was with a
wild, crazy eye, he was a mad man,

583
00:31:06,500 --> 00:31:07,620
and it was Donald Pleasance.

584
00:31:07,960 --> 00:31:10,040
And they said, what do you think of Donald
Pleasance?

585
00:31:10,960 --> 00:31:12,600
John immediately liked it.

586
00:31:12,780 --> 00:31:13,780
That's a great idea.

587
00:31:14,540 --> 00:31:16,880
I said, call Donald Pleasance up and offer
him the role.

588
00:31:17,400 --> 00:31:19,200
I don't think I'll take it, but give it a
try.

589
00:31:19,660 --> 00:31:24,060
59-year-old Donald Pleasance, who had
built an impressive CV appearing in major

590
00:31:24,061 --> 00:31:26,554
films such as You
Only Live Twice and The

591
00:31:26,555 --> 00:31:28,580
Great Escape, agreed
to meet with Carpenter.

592
00:31:29,260 --> 00:31:33,720
I saw it on precinct 13, and I admired it
a lot.

593
00:31:34,340 --> 00:31:36,438
He said, my daughter is in a
rock and roll band in London,

594
00:31:36,439 --> 00:31:39,840
and she liked the music from
your film Assault on Precinct 13.

595
00:31:40,460 --> 00:31:43,980
But otherwise, I have no clue why I'm
here, or who my character is.

596
00:31:45,740 --> 00:31:48,400
So there are parts of the script which I
can't accept.

597
00:31:49,100 --> 00:31:50,839
I believe people are
behaving in a way in which

598
00:31:50,840 --> 00:31:53,601
they couldn't possibly
in real life behave.

599
00:31:53,860 --> 00:31:56,990
And that's always difficult,
because if you're one of the

600
00:31:56,991 --> 00:31:59,661
people, then you're the one
who's going to look like an idiot.

601
00:32:00,240 --> 00:32:02,440
It scared me to death, I didn't know what
to say to him.

602
00:32:02,820 --> 00:32:07,380
I spent eight years trying to reach him,
and then another seven trying to keep him

603
00:32:07,381 --> 00:32:09,495
locked up because I
realized that what was living

604
00:32:09,496 --> 00:32:13,220
behind that boy's eyes
was purely and simply evil.

605
00:32:15,380 --> 00:32:18,944
Pleasins accepted the role,
receiving $25,000 for five

606
00:32:18,945 --> 00:32:22,500
days work, effectively doubling
the film's casting budget.

607
00:32:23,200 --> 00:32:27,100
That became the single big budget item,
$25,000, which they came back to me and

608
00:32:27,101 --> 00:32:28,328
asked if I would
approve, and I said, you

609
00:32:28,329 --> 00:32:31,101
can get Donald Pleasins,
we'll get the $3.25.

610
00:32:31,400 --> 00:32:33,800
That's why the budget was $3.25 instead of
$3.00, by the way.

611
00:32:34,740 --> 00:32:38,340
It was a big deal when he was working.

612
00:32:38,620 --> 00:32:40,020
They brought in a trailer for Donald.

613
00:32:40,021 --> 00:32:43,360
On the days he was working, there was a
car that brought him to work.

614
00:32:43,680 --> 00:32:48,060
I mean, I think they definitely
made him feel special,

615
00:32:48,061 --> 00:32:52,640
because he was the big star
coming in to our little movie.

616
00:32:53,920 --> 00:32:58,060
There was only one more role to fill,
a role one could imagine anyone playing,

617
00:32:58,680 --> 00:33:02,620
but Carpenter turned to a former film
school friend, Nick Castle.

618
00:33:03,560 --> 00:33:05,520
He said, you know, we haven't cast the
killer.

619
00:33:05,521 --> 00:33:06,636
Why don't you be the killer?

620
00:33:06,660 --> 00:33:08,500
And I'm not an actor.

621
00:33:08,740 --> 00:33:09,200
I can't act.

622
00:33:09,440 --> 00:33:10,796
I'm horrible in front of a camera.

623
00:33:10,820 --> 00:33:11,340
I'm really stiff.

624
00:33:11,520 --> 00:33:14,800
And he went, no, no, we're going to have a
mask over the guy the whole time.

625
00:33:15,060 --> 00:33:16,060
You just walk around.

626
00:33:16,840 --> 00:33:18,540
And I said, well, yeah, that's a good
idea.

627
00:33:24,640 --> 00:33:27,940
I get to go be on the set the whole time,
see how people work.

628
00:33:28,500 --> 00:33:32,120
It was actually, from that standpoint too,
a really good education for me.

629
00:33:32,720 --> 00:33:35,780
But most of the supporting cast,
the film was a short-term job.

630
00:33:38,980 --> 00:33:39,980
Excuse me, Laurie.

631
00:33:40,040 --> 00:33:41,716
Oh, Mr. Brackett, I'm sorry, Mr. Brackett.

632
00:33:41,740 --> 00:33:44,080
I was involved maybe seven or eight days.

633
00:33:44,660 --> 00:33:45,660
You know, it's Halloween.

634
00:33:45,960 --> 00:33:47,960
I guess everyone's entitled to one good
scare, huh?

635
00:33:48,140 --> 00:33:50,240
And it wasn't great money, trust me.

636
00:33:50,540 --> 00:33:51,540
No, but what the heck?

637
00:33:51,700 --> 00:33:52,700
I said, it's work.

638
00:33:55,100 --> 00:33:55,920
I worked four days.

639
00:33:56,120 --> 00:33:56,460
You worked three?

640
00:33:56,900 --> 00:33:57,160
Do you have an idea?

641
00:33:57,660 --> 00:33:58,260
You know what?

642
00:33:58,400 --> 00:33:58,720
I don't remember.

643
00:33:58,900 --> 00:34:00,560
To me, it felt like a very long time.

644
00:34:01,200 --> 00:34:04,520
I think I remember the most of sitting
there watching the scary movie.

645
00:34:05,240 --> 00:34:08,280
I feel like I watched that movie for six
months straight.

646
00:34:09,680 --> 00:34:11,096
That's what it felt like at the time.

647
00:34:11,120 --> 00:34:12,476
When I look back, okay, we weren't
filming.

648
00:34:12,500 --> 00:34:14,356
I was shocked that we'd only filmed that
many days.

649
00:34:14,380 --> 00:34:17,280
I thought we were filming forever on that
movie, because it felt like it at the time.

650
00:34:17,760 --> 00:34:18,760
Boogie Man is coming!

651
00:34:19,380 --> 00:34:20,380
Look at him low!

652
00:34:20,600 --> 00:34:22,479
That's the scene we shot
the most, because I could

653
00:34:22,480 --> 00:34:24,401
not fall on the pumpkin
and have it break open.

654
00:34:24,520 --> 00:34:28,521
So they saw that it would not crush the
first time, so they cut a little hole in it.

655
00:34:29,400 --> 00:34:32,560
It took like seven times for me to fall on
that pumpkin before it finally broke.

656
00:34:32,880 --> 00:34:33,880
Three big days.

657
00:34:34,360 --> 00:34:34,920
Three days.

658
00:34:35,360 --> 00:34:36,360
Be right back.

659
00:34:36,980 --> 00:34:38,000
Don't get dressed.

660
00:34:39,140 --> 00:34:42,980
The classic line I think I have is,
don't get dressed.

661
00:34:43,900 --> 00:34:44,900
I'll be right back.

662
00:34:47,360 --> 00:34:51,660
Whether they had small or large parts,
much of the cast were shocked by

663
00:34:51,661 --> 00:34:54,380
Carpenter's casual attitude towards their
performances.

664
00:34:56,800 --> 00:34:57,200
Rehearsing?

665
00:34:57,201 --> 00:34:58,680
This is a 21 day shoot.

666
00:35:00,540 --> 00:35:04,500
I remember going up to him and saying,
you know, what do you want from this

667
00:35:04,501 --> 00:35:07,180
character, and am I giving you what you
want?

668
00:35:07,900 --> 00:35:11,300
And he said, just find your spot and say
your line.

669
00:35:11,760 --> 00:35:16,000
And at the time I was like, oh,
how, you know, it's awful.

670
00:35:17,260 --> 00:35:19,916
And it wasn't until, you know,
years later when I realized, you know,

671
00:35:19,940 --> 00:35:22,160
the reason you were cast in the film is
because of you.

672
00:35:22,161 --> 00:35:25,804
The philosophy I believe
he operates from is, I hired

673
00:35:25,805 --> 00:35:29,460
you because I believe you
have it in you to give this.

674
00:35:29,780 --> 00:35:30,820
So, give it.

675
00:35:31,640 --> 00:35:36,120
With casting complete and the first day of
shooting approaching, Carpenter and the

676
00:35:36,121 --> 00:35:40,400
cinematographer Dean Candy began designing
the film's more intricate sequences.

677
00:35:41,180 --> 00:35:44,087
They quickly realized that
Carpenter's grandiose plans

678
00:35:44,088 --> 00:35:47,680
were about to collide with
the reality of a 21 day shoot.

679
00:35:47,681 --> 00:35:52,260
The young director would need something
close to a miracle to meet his deadlines.

680
00:35:57,410 --> 00:36:00,857
With a cast of fresh faces and
one veteran character actor,

681
00:36:00,858 --> 00:36:04,590
production on Halloween
commenced in the spring of 1978.

682
00:36:05,670 --> 00:36:09,390
But as John Carpenter and his crew
descended on their Southern California

683
00:36:09,391 --> 00:36:13,410
locations, they discovered the real impact
of the film's tight schedule.

684
00:36:14,230 --> 00:36:17,431
Well, very quickly, as we
were shooting, I realized the

685
00:36:17,432 --> 00:36:20,071
elaborate plans that I had
would have to go by the wayside.

686
00:36:20,770 --> 00:36:23,410
I would have to simplify this movie
because we don't have the time.

687
00:36:23,510 --> 00:36:28,030
Carpenter and his cinematographer Dean
Candy made a decision to utilize a brand

688
00:36:28,031 --> 00:36:29,800
new device that would
keep the production

689
00:36:29,801 --> 00:36:33,051
moving and give the
film its signature look.

690
00:36:33,170 --> 00:36:36,011
The device we actually
used was the Panaglide,

691
00:36:36,012 --> 00:36:39,830
which was a Panavision's
version of the Steadicam.

692
00:36:40,830 --> 00:36:45,410
He put the camera on a gyroscopic mount on
an operator and he'd run around.

693
00:36:45,411 --> 00:36:50,330
For a movie that had a budget of $300,000
and just a couple of days to shoot,

694
00:36:50,790 --> 00:36:55,070
that ability to go on the fly to get these
amazing looking shots really takes

695
00:36:55,071 --> 00:36:58,626
Halloween from just a cheap
horror movie into something

696
00:36:58,627 --> 00:37:01,710
that is more artistic
and really more effective.

697
00:37:02,090 --> 00:37:05,164
So it enabled us to move
the camera in a more fluid

698
00:37:05,165 --> 00:37:08,370
way in a way that was not
really possible before that.

699
00:37:08,371 --> 00:37:11,450
And we could turn around and go upstairs
and cross streets.

700
00:37:12,390 --> 00:37:15,690
It was for absolutely free, so I just used
it compulsively.

701
00:37:17,390 --> 00:37:21,370
The Steadicam had been used to great
effect two years earlier in John

702
00:37:21,371 --> 00:37:26,610
Avaldson's Rocky, but where Avaldson used
the invention to build momentum and ramp

703
00:37:26,611 --> 00:37:29,302
up energy, Carpenter
and his crew saw on the

704
00:37:29,303 --> 00:37:32,451
device an opportunity
to create suspense.

705
00:37:32,830 --> 00:37:36,198
And so the idea that
you could do a subjective

706
00:37:36,199 --> 00:37:39,171
point of view and
be in the killer's eyes.

707
00:37:41,790 --> 00:37:45,470
But not have to have it be jittery and
handheld.

708
00:37:46,290 --> 00:37:51,273
Have it be this gliding,
strange effect really

709
00:37:51,274 --> 00:37:55,930
added hugely to the
overall tension and eariness.

710
00:37:56,810 --> 00:37:59,930
Also adding to that suspense was Dean
Khandi's lighting.

711
00:38:01,210 --> 00:38:07,470
Some of the techniques in the lighting was
creating a sense of foreboding in the

712
00:38:07,471 --> 00:38:09,930
outside areas, which we did with blue
light.

713
00:38:11,550 --> 00:38:14,702
In addition to the film's
distinctive lighting scheme, Khandi

714
00:38:14,703 --> 00:38:18,450
was responsible for several
innovative in-camera tricks.

715
00:38:20,450 --> 00:38:24,770
Suddenly, up from the darkness coming into
the light would be this wide mask.

716
00:38:27,550 --> 00:38:29,310
And that's enormously creepy.

717
00:38:30,750 --> 00:38:35,770
The thought was, well, in the dark,
as your eyes gradually get used to being

718
00:38:35,771 --> 00:38:38,990
able to see you begin to see shapes and
things in a dark room.

719
00:38:40,670 --> 00:38:47,010
So I put a light that was very small and
specifically aimed right at Michael

720
00:38:47,011 --> 00:38:50,930
Meyer's face as he's hiding in the dark
right next to Jamie Lee.

721
00:38:50,931 --> 00:38:54,981
And then had it on a
dimmer so that I could turn it

722
00:38:54,982 --> 00:38:57,910
and slowly the light would
expose him just barely.

723
00:39:00,610 --> 00:39:04,210
And it's these little touches that Khandi
was able to bring that elevate this movie

724
00:39:04,211 --> 00:39:08,890
that was meant to be seen in a drive-in,
a double bill while you're making out on

725
00:39:08,891 --> 00:39:12,430
the backseat with your girlfriend into
something that is real, honest,

726
00:39:12,750 --> 00:39:13,750
artful cinema.

727
00:39:13,930 --> 00:39:18,210
Carpenter's creativity made the most of
the film's limited resources so that he

728
00:39:18,211 --> 00:39:20,270
could spend the money where it counted
most.

729
00:39:20,930 --> 00:39:24,750
He made damn sure that three things
happened, that the film got shot in

730
00:39:24,751 --> 00:39:30,410
Panavision with the best lenses they had,
that it was processed at MGM Labs,

731
00:39:30,850 --> 00:39:34,770
which is the best around, and that it do
its post-production at Goldwyn Sound,

732
00:39:35,470 --> 00:39:37,330
which was the best Sound House in town.

733
00:39:37,890 --> 00:39:42,290
That meant that our crappy little $300,000
movie could look like millions.

734
00:39:43,810 --> 00:39:47,350
The meager budget wasn't the only
challenge confronted by the production.

735
00:39:48,370 --> 00:39:51,830
Obviously we're shooting in California,
and it's supposed to be Illinois,

736
00:39:52,310 --> 00:39:55,810
and it's supposed to be Halloween,
so it's supposed to be October.

737
00:39:56,690 --> 00:40:00,370
We created Fall with three trash bags full
of painted leaves.

738
00:40:01,970 --> 00:40:07,550
We would scatter these colored leaves
around in the foreground, you know,

739
00:40:07,551 --> 00:40:10,130
you know, the opening, couple of opening
shots of the film.

740
00:40:10,390 --> 00:40:12,738
And at the end of the
shooting of the scene,

741
00:40:12,739 --> 00:40:15,931
you know, the wind
might pick up or whatever.

742
00:40:15,970 --> 00:40:19,870
Deborah would yell, everybody,
come on, get the leaves, and we would

743
00:40:19,871 --> 00:40:22,063
gather every last leaf
and put it back in the

744
00:40:22,064 --> 00:40:25,251
bag, because it's hard
to find maple leaves.

745
00:40:25,570 --> 00:40:31,230
You know, crunchy, orangey maple leaves in
California, so it was always really funny.

746
00:40:31,570 --> 00:40:33,810
I'm not a leaf-gatherer, I'm an actress.

747
00:40:35,310 --> 00:40:36,950
Everybody did every job.

748
00:40:37,470 --> 00:40:41,730
There were job specifications,
but then everybody did everybody's job.

749
00:40:41,731 --> 00:40:44,411
I was doing set dressing
and props and costumes,

750
00:40:44,412 --> 00:40:48,270
because if you're just
doing acting, it's so boring.

751
00:40:50,350 --> 00:40:54,650
While the crew dealt with logistical
problems behind the scenes, Halloween's

752
00:40:54,651 --> 00:40:58,334
inexperienced cast was
confronting its own issues in front of

753
00:40:58,335 --> 00:41:01,830
the lens, especially its
first-time star, Jamie Lee Curtis.

754
00:41:02,490 --> 00:41:03,990
Jamie Lee had a lot to prove.

755
00:41:04,610 --> 00:41:09,110
She had a big name, and she wanted to show
that she had the talent to go with it,

756
00:41:09,111 --> 00:41:14,550
and that she wasn't just skating by on who
her parents were, but she was scared.

757
00:41:15,410 --> 00:41:19,290
I had done a day's work on this movie,
and was sitting home in my roommate,

758
00:41:19,291 --> 00:41:21,550
answered the phone, and she said it's John
Carpenter.

759
00:41:25,440 --> 00:41:28,960
And it is often in show business that you
get fired.

760
00:41:29,440 --> 00:41:31,640
People get fired after a day or two of
work.

761
00:41:32,300 --> 00:41:38,020
John called her after the first day's
shooting to let her know how happy he was

762
00:41:38,021 --> 00:41:40,696
with the way things were going,
and she thought she was being fired.

763
00:41:40,720 --> 00:41:41,480
It was just very sweet.

764
00:41:41,660 --> 00:41:43,340
He called to say that he was really happy.

765
00:41:44,540 --> 00:41:49,600
How good he thought it was, and how happy
he was of this first day's work.

766
00:41:50,040 --> 00:41:51,040
And fuck good.

767
00:41:53,120 --> 00:41:56,966
In contrast to Curtis's
uncertainty was PJ Soles, who

768
00:41:56,967 --> 00:42:00,520
eased Carpenter through
directing his first nude scene.

769
00:42:01,020 --> 00:42:04,540
The scene in the bedroom was interesting
because John was more nervous than I was.

770
00:42:04,900 --> 00:42:07,740
It wasn't in the script, but he wanted
some kind of nudity.

771
00:42:09,440 --> 00:42:14,960
And she shows her breasts in the script,
so I just assumed she was okay to do it.

772
00:42:15,240 --> 00:42:22,100
He approached me really kind of silently
and embarrassed, and he said, is there any

773
00:42:22,101 --> 00:42:26,600
way that we could show whatever you want,
whatever you're comfortable with,

774
00:42:26,720 --> 00:42:28,780
and will clear the room and just be me and
Dean.

775
00:42:29,300 --> 00:42:33,000
I don't ever remember having a
conversation about the nude scene with PJ.

776
00:42:33,560 --> 00:42:36,900
I put down the sheet and did a quick
flash.

777
00:42:36,901 --> 00:42:38,320
Anything you like?

778
00:42:38,500 --> 00:42:41,120
That has become a pretty popular phrase.

779
00:42:41,360 --> 00:42:42,360
See anything you like?

780
00:42:42,740 --> 00:42:44,320
We shot it on that day.

781
00:42:44,820 --> 00:42:45,820
It was wonderful.

782
00:42:46,000 --> 00:42:47,680
It was wonderful.

783
00:42:47,960 --> 00:42:48,240
It was great.

784
00:42:48,680 --> 00:42:52,420
John was like, oh, that was great, but he
didn't want to talk about it beyond that.

785
00:42:52,660 --> 00:42:55,200
So I always thought it
was very sweet and very

786
00:42:55,201 --> 00:42:58,421
considerate, and I really
liked that about John.

787
00:42:58,480 --> 00:42:59,480
That's all bullshit.

788
00:43:00,320 --> 00:43:02,700
One thing everyone could agree on.

789
00:43:03,160 --> 00:43:06,300
The man behind the mask was decidedly
unscary.

790
00:43:07,460 --> 00:43:10,116
I always thought Michael
Myers was really funny,

791
00:43:10,117 --> 00:43:13,181
you know, because I
know that it's Nick Castle.

792
00:43:13,800 --> 00:43:15,400
Standing behind that mask.

793
00:43:17,200 --> 00:43:20,268
I just remember him as being
a young father, who happened

794
00:43:20,269 --> 00:43:23,180
to be walking around in
a latex mask with a knife.

795
00:43:25,260 --> 00:43:29,800
He had to put a telephone cord around my
neck and he just wouldn't pull it hard.

796
00:43:30,020 --> 00:43:31,380
He kept tickling my throat.

797
00:43:31,740 --> 00:43:33,750
And I was laughing most
of the time and finally I said,

798
00:43:33,751 --> 00:43:35,736
Nick, please, you're going to
have to put some pressure on.

799
00:43:35,760 --> 00:43:36,420
He said, I don't want to hurry.

800
00:43:36,421 --> 00:43:37,421
I don't want to hurry.

801
00:43:37,720 --> 00:43:38,500
I'm not an actor.

802
00:43:38,501 --> 00:43:39,680
I don't do this all the time.

803
00:43:39,940 --> 00:43:40,560
You're kind of concerned.

804
00:43:40,800 --> 00:43:43,700
What are you doing to another human being,
even if it is pretend?

805
00:43:44,300 --> 00:43:45,860
I said, I know, but I have to die here.

806
00:43:45,900 --> 00:43:47,876
So you're going to have to just pull a
little harder.

807
00:43:47,900 --> 00:43:49,460
And he just really never would.

808
00:43:49,660 --> 00:43:53,100
I mean, ultimately he did it a little bit,
but I really had to act.

809
00:43:54,700 --> 00:43:57,818
You want to make it look
real, but you also want

810
00:43:57,819 --> 00:44:00,520
to make sure that she
can live to act again.

811
00:44:02,300 --> 00:44:06,620
And unlike his on-screen counterpart,
Castle was decidedly vulnerable.

812
00:44:07,220 --> 00:44:10,498
The worst scene I can
remember was the one which

813
00:44:10,499 --> 00:44:14,201
is supposedly outside
of the insane asylum.

814
00:44:16,620 --> 00:44:22,860
What I was supposed to do is jump onto the
car and I went, okay, at the rehearsal,

815
00:44:23,100 --> 00:44:23,860
I jump onto the car.

816
00:44:23,940 --> 00:44:24,060
Good.

817
00:44:24,280 --> 00:44:24,460
Let's go.

818
00:44:24,580 --> 00:44:26,560
We're four in the morning at really,
really cold.

819
00:44:27,160 --> 00:44:29,140
And then John said, okay, turn on the
hoses.

820
00:44:29,780 --> 00:44:33,380
And I said, this is the rain scene.

821
00:44:34,140 --> 00:44:35,220
So they turn on the hoses.

822
00:44:35,480 --> 00:44:38,125
And that's when I realized
that John had put me at

823
00:44:38,126 --> 00:44:41,960
40 degrees in cold water,
with just a hospital gun.

824
00:44:42,660 --> 00:44:44,020
That was supposed to be my friend.

825
00:44:44,360 --> 00:44:47,100
It was the most painful time I ever had,
probably on a set.

826
00:44:47,600 --> 00:44:48,820
I never tortured him.

827
00:44:49,720 --> 00:44:50,720
He's lying to you.

828
00:44:51,980 --> 00:44:56,540
Despite Castle's hard work, the film would
ultimately require no less than five

829
00:44:56,541 --> 00:44:59,746
people to dawn the iconic
mask, including another

830
00:44:59,747 --> 00:45:02,520
newcomer to portray
the face behind the mask.

831
00:45:06,520 --> 00:45:11,541
Up to this point in horror, the villains
were colorful, larger than life characters.

832
00:45:15,700 --> 00:45:20,040
Halloween pioneered the idea of an
impenetrable, unknowable antagonist.

833
00:45:21,680 --> 00:45:26,560
On the call sheet, it says the shape,
which is right away kind of an interesting

834
00:45:26,561 --> 00:45:30,474
insight, because there
was something about that

835
00:45:30,475 --> 00:45:34,440
as more of an idea, rather
than a specific person.

836
00:45:34,840 --> 00:45:38,098
The only other character
I think who is similar to

837
00:45:38,099 --> 00:45:41,420
Michael Myers in modern
horror is the shark and jaws.

838
00:45:42,960 --> 00:45:44,380
It's just an unstoppable thing.

839
00:45:45,220 --> 00:45:46,220
How do you stop it?

840
00:45:46,280 --> 00:45:46,820
You probably can.

841
00:45:46,960 --> 00:45:48,200
It's going to keep coming back.

842
00:45:48,800 --> 00:45:50,000
And it just does what it does.

843
00:45:50,240 --> 00:45:53,040
And in this case, what it does is stop
kids and kill them.

844
00:45:54,080 --> 00:45:58,260
If you make Michael Myers more than
Michael Myers, if you make him the shape,

845
00:45:58,580 --> 00:46:02,040
if you make him the embodiment of evil and
the boogie man, we will believe,

846
00:46:02,041 --> 00:46:05,920
for instance, that if there's a window
anywhere, he's already climbed through it.

847
00:46:06,200 --> 00:46:07,200
Oh, no.

848
00:46:08,300 --> 00:46:13,120
So Michael Myers, of course, the man who
can catch you while you're running and

849
00:46:13,121 --> 00:46:16,197
he's walking at a slow
pace, has to be more than

850
00:46:16,198 --> 00:46:18,460
just a man, because a
man can't do those things.

851
00:46:18,860 --> 00:46:21,255
We hear an awful lot
about his character, but

852
00:46:21,256 --> 00:46:23,540
when he appears, we
don't see him very well.

853
00:46:23,900 --> 00:46:25,200
And it's mindless killing.

854
00:46:25,560 --> 00:46:27,440
Nothing really explains what Michael is.

855
00:46:27,441 --> 00:46:31,660
So to make him the shape, we can also take
human psychology out of it.

856
00:46:31,960 --> 00:46:36,661
We can say that's not even an issue, as
Luma says, he is purely and simply evil.

857
00:46:40,450 --> 00:46:45,190
Nevertheless, a character did start to come
through, largely due to the work of Castle.

858
00:46:45,750 --> 00:46:47,010
Nick had a way of moving.

859
00:46:51,840 --> 00:46:54,820
When he moved, he kind of glided around in
a eerie way.

860
00:46:56,080 --> 00:46:57,920
There wasn't a lot of direction per se.

861
00:46:58,200 --> 00:47:02,320
I remember asking John initially,
I had to walk across the street.

862
00:47:02,321 --> 00:47:03,860
I said, so what do you want me to do?

863
00:47:04,200 --> 00:47:06,840
You know, I'm trying to figure out what my
method should be.

864
00:47:06,960 --> 00:47:08,600
And he said, just walk across the street.

865
00:47:08,680 --> 00:47:11,060
Okay, just walk, and it'll be fine.

866
00:47:11,840 --> 00:47:15,920
Despite Castle's misgivings, he and
Carpenter collaborated to successfully

867
00:47:15,921 --> 00:47:19,720
give the film's faceless killer just the
right amount of personality.

868
00:47:20,500 --> 00:47:25,080
The thing I love is that he was able to
actually make it a character.

869
00:47:25,820 --> 00:47:28,180
He does some really good work in this.

870
00:47:28,640 --> 00:47:30,940
There are a couple moments where he's just
very effective.

871
00:47:30,941 --> 00:47:31,941
Come on now.

872
00:47:34,820 --> 00:47:38,740
The shape signature moment comes during
the death of Linda's boyfriend,

873
00:47:39,020 --> 00:47:40,280
Bob, played by John Graham.

874
00:47:41,200 --> 00:47:44,209
Actually, opening the
doors where he jumps out

875
00:47:44,210 --> 00:47:47,140
at me with a knife was
actually really scary.

876
00:47:47,380 --> 00:47:51,600
The only scary moment on the set while I
was there was that moment.

877
00:47:53,040 --> 00:47:57,180
What played out as a relatively
straightforward piece of action in the

878
00:47:57,181 --> 00:48:01,000
script required a considerable amount of
cinematic sleight of hand.

879
00:48:02,180 --> 00:48:07,020
When you see my feet going off the ground,
I'm actually being lifted up by two guys.

880
00:48:07,180 --> 00:48:08,707
They had a two by
four that I was sort of

881
00:48:08,708 --> 00:48:11,961
hanging over, and two
big guys lifted me up.

882
00:48:12,060 --> 00:48:15,152
When he's pushing me
up against the wall, I'm

883
00:48:15,153 --> 00:48:18,581
standing on a box and
just sort of standing up.

884
00:48:21,040 --> 00:48:26,061
The long shot of me hanging on the wall,
I'm actually holding the knife under my arm.

885
00:48:27,180 --> 00:48:29,660
I think my best performance in the film
are my feet.

886
00:48:30,120 --> 00:48:33,400
The brilliant foot death, I think,
is really classic.

887
00:48:34,040 --> 00:48:35,760
You know, a little tragic little feet
dying.

888
00:48:36,680 --> 00:48:41,361
The scene became famous for a piece of body
language direction from John Carpenter.

889
00:48:41,580 --> 00:48:45,740
After he sticks Bob to the wall with the
knife, he steps back and he cocks his head.

890
00:48:45,741 --> 00:48:48,580
And it's like a dog.

891
00:48:49,000 --> 00:48:52,760
There's something so removed from human
about him at that point.

892
00:48:53,580 --> 00:48:58,160
As an actor where you're expressionless,
there's nothing really you bring to the

893
00:48:58,161 --> 00:49:02,040
party other than however you wind up
standing.

894
00:49:02,960 --> 00:49:06,140
And John was the one that basically
directed this character.

895
00:49:06,700 --> 00:49:09,920
John could have been this character
because he's the one that did things like,

896
00:49:09,921 --> 00:49:12,082
okay, just tilt your
head like this after you

897
00:49:12,083 --> 00:49:14,460
stab him so that you're
kind of admiring him.

898
00:49:14,461 --> 00:49:15,461
It's creepy.

899
00:49:15,920 --> 00:49:16,100
It's creepy.

900
00:49:16,760 --> 00:49:17,960
That's the beauty of the film.

901
00:49:20,060 --> 00:49:22,620
The shape represents another cinematic
first.

902
00:49:24,200 --> 00:49:25,640
The killer who will not die.

903
00:49:26,240 --> 00:49:30,540
Horror fans were used to their classic
monsters returning in sequel after sequel,

904
00:49:31,000 --> 00:49:36,020
but never before was a seemingly human
antagonist so hard to kill.

905
00:49:36,580 --> 00:49:39,320
That's scary to see him coming back again
and again.

906
00:49:39,660 --> 00:49:41,780
That was one of the first films of that
time to do that.

907
00:49:41,781 --> 00:49:43,460
You can't kill the booking man.

908
00:49:43,860 --> 00:49:47,580
Michael just slowly rises and turns his
head.

909
00:49:48,180 --> 00:49:51,260
And it's out of focus and it's in the back
and it's perfect.

910
00:49:51,700 --> 00:49:53,980
I don't know that John directed him to do
that.

911
00:49:54,160 --> 00:49:58,560
I think he figured out that little moment.

912
00:49:59,220 --> 00:50:02,920
Though Castle had provided the shape with
much of its on-screen personality,

913
00:50:03,680 --> 00:50:07,960
when it became time for the climatic
unmasking scene in which audiences briefly

914
00:50:07,961 --> 00:50:10,871
glimpsed the adult
Michael Myers, it was quickly

915
00:50:10,872 --> 00:50:14,080
decided that Nick Castle's
face just wouldn't do.

916
00:50:14,400 --> 00:50:19,680
Michael Myers needed a face and a moment
in the movie too, because Nick just didn't

917
00:50:19,681 --> 00:50:24,820
look like what John's vision of Michael
Myers should be too old for one thing.

918
00:50:25,640 --> 00:50:29,440
A casting call was sent out to find the
face behind the mask of evil.

919
00:50:30,100 --> 00:50:31,940
21-year-old Tony Moran was interviewed.

920
00:50:32,580 --> 00:50:36,360
John Carpenter said they were looking for
somebody with an angelic face.

921
00:50:37,300 --> 00:50:39,180
And that's the exact word he used.

922
00:50:39,360 --> 00:50:41,580
And I'm like, well, okay.

923
00:50:42,260 --> 00:50:45,360
I never thought I had an angelic face,
but...

924
00:50:46,040 --> 00:50:50,020
After a brief meeting with Carpenter and
Erwin Jablans, Moran was cast.

925
00:50:50,880 --> 00:50:53,310
When I got there, I
talked to John Carpenter

926
00:50:53,311 --> 00:50:55,600
a little bit and he had
shown me the mask.

927
00:50:55,980 --> 00:50:58,460
I didn't even know I had to wear a mask
until I got to the set.

928
00:50:58,580 --> 00:50:59,860
Nobody said anything about that.

929
00:51:00,440 --> 00:51:04,660
The inexperienced young actor was impressed
with the level of efficiency on set.

930
00:51:04,661 --> 00:51:12,540
John Carpenter had everything meticulously
planned down to centimeters, so that we

931
00:51:12,541 --> 00:51:14,381
didn't have to do more than two or three
takes.

932
00:51:17,830 --> 00:51:19,830
It was an incredible experience.

933
00:51:20,770 --> 00:51:22,190
It was a crazy, crazy day.

934
00:51:24,830 --> 00:51:29,810
In total, apart from Moran and Castle,
five people wore the mask in the film.

935
00:51:34,630 --> 00:51:37,730
Stuntman, Jim Winber and Don the Outfit
for several shots.

936
00:51:39,090 --> 00:51:42,870
And Debra Hill even suited up for a one
wide shot when no one else was available.

937
00:51:43,810 --> 00:51:46,410
Well, I needed to go pick up some
trick-or-treat shot second unit,

938
00:51:46,650 --> 00:51:48,707
so not only was I going to
direct the second unit, but

939
00:51:48,708 --> 00:51:50,811
I brought the costume and
I was going to be the shape.

940
00:51:51,130 --> 00:51:55,550
I put this shape costume on, and of
course, I'm so much tinier than Nick.

941
00:51:55,551 --> 00:51:58,950
And in dailies, it was so hilarious
because the shape had shrunk.

942
00:51:59,890 --> 00:52:02,456
Lastly, the production designer
Tommy Lee Wallace played

943
00:52:02,457 --> 00:52:05,150
the shape for one of the
film's most harrowing scenes.

944
00:52:05,870 --> 00:52:08,970
I got my chance because we could move
faster.

945
00:52:09,310 --> 00:52:13,042
We found if I put on the outfit
and the mask when we had

946
00:52:13,043 --> 00:52:16,610
to break something, because
I would have prepared that set.

947
00:52:17,130 --> 00:52:19,664
I knew how to hit the
thing to make it break

948
00:52:19,665 --> 00:52:21,930
correctly on take one,
rather than take four.

949
00:52:21,931 --> 00:52:23,410
It was as simple as that.

950
00:52:24,190 --> 00:52:27,750
And I thought I'd performed pretty well in
that closet.

951
00:52:30,530 --> 00:52:34,118
Carpenter's film was coming
together and without the chaos and

952
00:52:34,119 --> 00:52:36,910
strain that normally accompanied
such shoestring productions.

953
00:52:37,710 --> 00:52:42,290
It's a real confidence builder for the
director to walk on the set and say,

954
00:52:42,590 --> 00:52:44,945
here's the list, here's
what we're doing today, and

955
00:52:44,946 --> 00:52:48,950
it's going to start right over
here with the 35mm lens.

956
00:52:49,710 --> 00:52:51,310
I think let him pull his gun out.

957
00:52:51,350 --> 00:52:52,350
Let's get to work.

958
00:52:52,710 --> 00:52:56,550
And it gave everyone confidence that we
could really pull this off.

959
00:52:57,750 --> 00:53:02,130
Carpenter's confidence had got them this
far, but that same confidence was about to

960
00:53:02,131 --> 00:53:05,116
taste the limits of the small
production, as Carpenter decided

961
00:53:05,117 --> 00:53:09,770
to gamble the entire last day
of filming on one single shot.

962
00:53:16,060 --> 00:53:19,648
As the final day of shooting
on Halloween drew near, John

963
00:53:19,649 --> 00:53:22,700
Carpenter's film was shaping
up to beat everything he'd hoped.

964
00:53:24,500 --> 00:53:27,891
Just as importantly, the
film was coming in on budget,

965
00:53:27,892 --> 00:53:30,820
thanks to meticulous
planning and creative shooting.

966
00:53:32,020 --> 00:53:36,300
As the production wound to a close,
Carpenter prepared his crew for the film's

967
00:53:36,301 --> 00:53:41,200
most ambitious shot, a four-minute-long,
single-tracking shot that would introduce

968
00:53:41,201 --> 00:53:44,160
the audience to the young and psychotic
Michael Myers.

969
00:53:44,720 --> 00:53:48,442
The opening shot of
Halloween, the long, continuous

970
00:53:48,443 --> 00:53:50,520
camera move that
starts across the street,

971
00:53:54,590 --> 00:53:56,270
goes up to the house,

972
00:54:03,870 --> 00:54:18,920
looks in the windows of the house,
and then enters the house, and

973
00:54:28,350 --> 00:54:32,370
then goes upstairs to see the young girl
get killed.

974
00:54:44,540 --> 00:54:47,840
It was the kind of shot that was
notoriously difficult to achieve,

975
00:54:48,440 --> 00:54:52,900
even in big-budget studio films like Orson
Welles, Touch of Evil, famous for its

976
00:54:52,901 --> 00:54:55,080
three-and-a-half-minute long unbroken
shot.

977
00:54:55,700 --> 00:54:58,480
For a low-budget horror film, it was
unheard of.

978
00:54:59,160 --> 00:55:01,940
With no money and no
time left, Carpenter, who had

979
00:55:01,941 --> 00:55:04,420
never attempted such a
challenging shot, was determined.

980
00:55:05,100 --> 00:55:10,060
It was going to be the opening of the film
and needed to be the storytelling shot,

981
00:55:10,280 --> 00:55:11,680
but also perhaps even remembered.

982
00:55:13,420 --> 00:55:17,900
As Carpenter's camera team mapped out a
way to capture the shot, the rest of the

983
00:55:17,901 --> 00:55:21,300
cast and crew turned their attention to
the dilapidated Myers house.

984
00:55:21,301 --> 00:55:23,911
Pitching into paint and
wallpaper portions of

985
00:55:23,912 --> 00:55:27,341
the house to make it
appear 15 years younger.

986
00:55:28,000 --> 00:55:31,380
They finished the regular filming,
and then the entire crew on the last day

987
00:55:31,381 --> 00:55:37,820
of the movie, me included, White Wash,
the old house in Pasadena, to make it look

988
00:55:37,821 --> 00:55:39,581
like the house at the beginning of the
movie.

989
00:55:41,820 --> 00:55:44,723
John took me through,
and I asked him to be very

990
00:55:44,724 --> 00:55:47,120
precise about what the
camera was going to do.

991
00:55:47,121 --> 00:55:50,081
And believe me, if you pan the camera a
little to the right or to the left,

992
00:55:50,440 --> 00:55:54,120
just an old, skanky house, it was only
nice through the lens.

993
00:55:58,200 --> 00:56:01,939
Just that much wallpaper,
just that little chandelier,

994
00:56:01,940 --> 00:56:04,700
just that little table with
the nice setting on it.

995
00:56:06,680 --> 00:56:10,120
Everywhere else, it was just a really
trashed out old house.

996
00:56:11,220 --> 00:56:15,260
Once the house was restored,
cinematographer Dean Candy worked out the

997
00:56:15,261 --> 00:56:18,760
choreography of the shot with his
Panaglide operator, Rhys Dela.

998
00:56:19,500 --> 00:56:23,920
The difficulty was that as we approached
the house and looked in the window,

999
00:56:24,700 --> 00:56:30,161
you have to hide lights to light the
various walls and kids watching television.

1000
00:56:30,600 --> 00:56:34,780
And then as you enter the house,
the camera was now going to be looking at

1001
00:56:34,781 --> 00:56:37,720
the places where we had hidden all of the
lights.

1002
00:56:37,721 --> 00:56:41,000
We go around the house and as we're coming
in the back door to look the other

1003
00:56:41,001 --> 00:56:44,576
direction, all you hear
on the soundtrack is the

1004
00:56:44,577 --> 00:56:47,341
crew switching lights
in a different direction.

1005
00:56:47,580 --> 00:56:48,620
They're right ahead of us.

1006
00:56:52,720 --> 00:56:54,557
As we come in and
everything is lit, we go up the

1007
00:56:54,558 --> 00:56:56,701
stairs and they're switching
it back around again.

1008
00:56:57,280 --> 00:56:58,280
It was incredible.

1009
00:56:58,500 --> 00:57:00,973
There would be this sigh
if they cut the camera,

1010
00:57:00,974 --> 00:57:03,561
because then you know
that they didn't get the shot.

1011
00:57:03,820 --> 00:57:06,701
And you know people would
be like running around inside

1012
00:57:06,702 --> 00:57:08,480
moving lights because
there weren't enough lights.

1013
00:57:08,700 --> 00:57:10,200
It was all, it was amazing to watch.

1014
00:57:10,460 --> 00:57:16,940
Rhys Dela was running up and down steps
with the Panaglide and it was killing him.

1015
00:57:17,460 --> 00:57:18,660
It was really wearing him out.

1016
00:57:19,100 --> 00:57:23,120
Still I performed take after take of the
shot while wearing the £70 apparatus.

1017
00:57:23,920 --> 00:57:25,720
I tried it on and I would never wear it
again.

1018
00:57:26,040 --> 00:57:27,580
You have to be really strong.

1019
00:57:28,280 --> 00:57:29,280
It's rough.

1020
00:57:29,660 --> 00:57:31,540
But it was like a new frontier.

1021
00:57:31,960 --> 00:57:32,960
It was beautiful.

1022
00:57:33,120 --> 00:57:36,249
We did it all the way
through successfully

1023
00:57:36,250 --> 00:57:39,140
maybe once and then
we broke it into pieces.

1024
00:57:39,580 --> 00:57:41,020
There are actually cuts in the shot.

1025
00:57:41,980 --> 00:57:43,440
We had a couple of excuses.

1026
00:57:43,860 --> 00:57:45,980
You know, the mask goes on to the camera.

1027
00:57:46,240 --> 00:57:47,920
That was a breaking place.

1028
00:57:56,430 --> 00:57:59,202
The scene ends with
yet another actor playing

1029
00:57:59,203 --> 00:58:01,971
Michael Myers, this
time as a six-year-old boy.

1030
00:58:05,940 --> 00:58:09,300
When I see the movie now, I saw myself
kind of flinch a little bit.

1031
00:58:09,860 --> 00:58:12,900
It was a plastic mask with the rubber band
around the ears.

1032
00:58:13,660 --> 00:58:16,500
And as he was taking it off, there were
times where it was just painful.

1033
00:58:16,800 --> 00:58:19,307
That was the hardest
part of the whole scene

1034
00:58:19,308 --> 00:58:22,780
was just taking off the
mask without it hurting.

1035
00:58:24,800 --> 00:58:27,512
With the film's signature
opening sequence in

1036
00:58:27,513 --> 00:58:30,220
the can, the film wrapped
on time and on budget.

1037
00:58:30,680 --> 00:58:32,140
We didn't know what we had there.

1038
00:58:32,880 --> 00:58:37,260
I mean, it seemed like it was kind of
suspenseful.

1039
00:58:37,840 --> 00:58:38,840
It was a movie.

1040
00:58:38,880 --> 00:58:40,600
I mean, it was a full movie and I was in
it.

1041
00:58:40,760 --> 00:58:43,620
I mean, I was and it worked and I knew it
worked.

1042
00:58:44,920 --> 00:58:47,780
Carpenter's demand for creative control
seemed to have paid off.

1043
00:58:48,280 --> 00:58:49,720
One person's in control.

1044
00:58:50,000 --> 00:58:53,340
You don't have to stop and go and have a
phone call, consult a committee,

1045
00:58:54,100 --> 00:58:55,940
have the group from the front office come
down.

1046
00:58:56,920 --> 00:58:58,740
Have late night meetings.

1047
00:58:59,200 --> 00:59:02,260
The buck stops right there so you can get
on with it.

1048
00:59:02,800 --> 00:59:06,780
Carpenter's planning on set revealed
itself in the editing room where Wallace

1049
00:59:06,781 --> 00:59:10,420
began to assemble the carefully considered
shots into a rough cut.

1050
00:59:11,120 --> 00:59:13,620
Halloween cut together pretty much like
butter.

1051
00:59:14,560 --> 00:59:17,000
It was a great experience in the cutting
room.

1052
00:59:17,660 --> 00:59:20,900
My first time in the driver's seat.

1053
00:59:20,901 --> 00:59:22,740
Every scene is put together perfectly.

1054
00:59:23,000 --> 00:59:24,136
There's no fat on this movie.

1055
00:59:24,160 --> 00:59:27,340
For one reason, I think they didn't have
the money to make fat scenes.

1056
00:59:27,500 --> 00:59:30,800
In other words, I would bet very few
scenes landed on the cutting room floor.

1057
00:59:31,200 --> 00:59:32,560
And that was great for a director.

1058
00:59:32,840 --> 00:59:35,350
In that sense, Carpenter was
like Hitchcock who planned

1059
00:59:35,351 --> 00:59:37,401
every scene in his head,
they say, before he shot.

1060
00:59:37,780 --> 00:59:39,060
And he did it because he had to.

1061
00:59:39,480 --> 00:59:40,800
What can I get by with here?

1062
00:59:40,960 --> 00:59:42,080
What can I play in one shot?

1063
00:59:43,040 --> 00:59:44,040
It's all necessity.

1064
00:59:44,780 --> 00:59:45,980
It's the mother I've invented.

1065
00:59:47,780 --> 00:59:51,090
But as tightly mapped out
as the film was, several crucial

1066
00:59:51,091 --> 00:59:53,800
creative decisions were
made during post-production.

1067
00:59:55,980 --> 01:00:02,301
Donald Pleasant shoots the shape, he falls
off his balcony and lands in the yard.

1068
01:00:02,620 --> 01:00:05,820
And there's a scene where Donald Pleasant
comes up to the balcony to look down.

1069
01:00:07,020 --> 01:00:08,060
And the shape's not there.

1070
01:00:09,400 --> 01:00:11,540
He says, there are two ways I can play
this.

1071
01:00:12,880 --> 01:00:14,600
One is, oh my God, he's gone.

1072
01:00:14,720 --> 01:00:15,720
He's gone.

1073
01:00:16,520 --> 01:00:18,280
Or I knew this would happen.

1074
01:00:20,680 --> 01:00:22,380
I thought, wow, that's a choice.

1075
01:00:22,720 --> 01:00:23,960
Can you do both for me, Donald?

1076
01:00:24,120 --> 01:00:25,120
So he did.

1077
01:00:26,040 --> 01:00:28,860
And I knew this would happen was the
chilling take.

1078
01:00:35,520 --> 01:00:40,240
The exact right ending is Loomis,
this guy, this Ahab who is chasing his

1079
01:00:40,241 --> 01:00:43,660
white whale of Michael Myers, knows that
in the end he can't stop him.

1080
01:00:44,300 --> 01:00:48,880
The shape's unstoppable nature was
cemented in the film's final montage,

1081
01:00:49,040 --> 01:00:51,117
designed to send
audiences out of the cinema

1082
01:00:51,118 --> 01:00:54,041
terrified that the shape
was still out there.

1083
01:00:54,880 --> 01:00:57,800
The ending was manufactured to some degree
in the cutting room.

1084
01:00:58,580 --> 01:01:02,780
It turned out to be an important choice
because the whole idea of the shape never

1085
01:01:02,781 --> 01:01:06,020
dying was just totally reinforced by the
idea that he could be anywhere.

1086
01:01:06,021 --> 01:01:10,840
So you have this string of shots that were
really just grabbed just before a slate

1087
01:01:10,841 --> 01:01:14,160
would come in or just before the action
would stop or just before an actor would

1088
01:01:14,161 --> 01:01:19,280
enter the frame, but it was usually just
from...

1089
01:01:19,281 --> 01:01:22,220
This is just barely enough to have a shot,
you know.

1090
01:01:23,500 --> 01:01:24,780
But that worked out pretty well.

1091
01:01:25,600 --> 01:01:30,180
The filmmakers were on a creative high as
their film moved through post-production,

1092
01:01:31,100 --> 01:01:35,200
but critical reaction to Halloween would
soon bring them back down to Earth.

1093
01:01:38,140 --> 01:01:42,720
There was an executive from a studio who
was trying to get jobs.

1094
01:01:43,080 --> 01:01:44,240
I showed him my latest movie.

1095
01:01:46,060 --> 01:01:49,360
To Carpenter's surprise, the executive was
unimpressed.

1096
01:01:50,360 --> 01:01:52,000
She said movies like this don't scare me.

1097
01:01:52,560 --> 01:01:53,560
They aren't scary.

1098
01:01:54,460 --> 01:01:57,860
Carpenter was stunned, but it taught him
an important lesson.

1099
01:02:00,280 --> 01:02:02,740
The film's score had not yet been added.

1100
01:02:02,741 --> 01:02:08,730
And without it, the film was utterly
ineffective.

1101
01:02:12,650 --> 01:02:14,746
Carpenter rolled up
his sleeves and began

1102
01:02:14,747 --> 01:02:18,211
the considerable task
of composing the score.

1103
01:02:18,290 --> 01:02:21,810
For inspiration, he recalled a lesson from
his father, himself a musician.

1104
01:02:22,410 --> 01:02:25,641
The main theme is simply
a piano version of a fine-four

1105
01:02:25,642 --> 01:02:28,291
time that my father taught me
how to play when I was young.

1106
01:02:30,950 --> 01:02:32,230
On a pair of bongos.

1107
01:02:32,650 --> 01:02:36,130
It's really basic, which I think is why
it's effective.

1108
01:02:36,570 --> 01:02:37,570
It's a piano score.

1109
01:02:38,070 --> 01:02:40,150
It's effective because it's repetitious,
it's simple.

1110
01:02:41,410 --> 01:02:42,230
And that's about it.

1111
01:02:42,350 --> 01:02:43,390
It was done in three days.

1112
01:02:45,910 --> 01:02:48,750
The score literally transformed the film.

1113
01:02:52,780 --> 01:02:55,780
The picture with music obviously was a
whole other entity.

1114
01:02:55,980 --> 01:02:57,200
It was just an incredible experience.

1115
01:02:57,201 --> 01:02:58,940
The music was another character.

1116
01:02:59,540 --> 01:03:03,360
It alerts you to danger, but it was used
judiciously, and that's what I liked.

1117
01:03:03,520 --> 01:03:04,520
It wasn't overbearing.

1118
01:03:05,720 --> 01:03:08,800
I felt like it was the music box from
hell.

1119
01:03:09,780 --> 01:03:15,156
It had a slight nursery
feeling to the music, but then

1120
01:03:15,157 --> 01:03:18,520
it was electronic and
metallic and kind of insistent.

1121
01:03:19,420 --> 01:03:23,140
It's about building the tension with the
repetitive, simplistic nature of the music.

1122
01:03:23,141 --> 01:03:26,395
And it's maybe the greatest
horror score of all time,

1123
01:03:26,396 --> 01:03:29,380
and it's one of the greatest
cinema scores of all time.

1124
01:03:29,640 --> 01:03:32,500
You hear that theme and you know exactly
what it is that you're in for.

1125
01:03:35,780 --> 01:03:39,360
His vision and his sense of music match.

1126
01:03:40,000 --> 01:03:41,060
It's not overpowering.

1127
01:03:41,100 --> 01:03:43,100
It's just right below the level of
subconscious.

1128
01:03:43,940 --> 01:03:45,460
The music freaked me out.

1129
01:03:46,220 --> 01:03:48,720
Now I hear that I think that music is so
genius.

1130
01:03:49,020 --> 01:03:49,280
It's unbelievable.

1131
01:03:49,760 --> 01:03:52,720
When I saw it with the music, it was
terrifying.

1132
01:03:53,660 --> 01:03:55,860
And the sound effects, and I saw it on the
big screen.

1133
01:03:56,080 --> 01:03:58,720
It was a dramatic shift in my point of
view.

1134
01:03:59,560 --> 01:04:02,280
I truly believe he was sitting at home and
went...

1135
01:04:07,660 --> 01:04:09,900
I really do think he just sat there.

1136
01:04:10,920 --> 01:04:14,120
Carpenter saw his role of composer as a
pragmatic decision.

1137
01:04:15,740 --> 01:04:19,360
I wrote and performed the music for
Halloween because I'm cheap and I'm fast.

1138
01:04:20,140 --> 01:04:22,083
As you can imagine,
after months in the

1139
01:04:22,084 --> 01:04:25,961
cutting room, I was
getting pretty sick of it.

1140
01:04:27,440 --> 01:04:31,740
Because... But man, effective.

1141
01:04:32,160 --> 01:04:32,580
Are you kidding?

1142
01:04:32,940 --> 01:04:35,340
You know, I hear it on the street now in
ringtones.

1143
01:04:36,140 --> 01:04:38,866
I've subsequently taken it
off, but I used to, my phone

1144
01:04:38,867 --> 01:04:41,140
would ring and you'd hear
the Halloween theme song.

1145
01:04:41,680 --> 01:04:42,720
You know, it's impressive.

1146
01:04:44,780 --> 01:04:46,725
Carpenter once again
screened the film for

1147
01:04:46,726 --> 01:04:49,581
the previously unimpressed
studio executive.

1148
01:04:49,960 --> 01:04:52,701
Six months later, with the music
in place, she came back and

1149
01:04:52,702 --> 01:04:55,241
said it was one of the scariest
movies that she had ever seen.

1150
01:04:55,480 --> 01:04:58,760
After I put the music on it, she had seen
it again and said, I was really wrong.

1151
01:04:59,620 --> 01:05:00,620
And I said, that's okay.

1152
01:05:01,000 --> 01:05:01,260
I don't know.

1153
01:05:02,000 --> 01:05:02,620
That's all right.

1154
01:05:02,840 --> 01:05:04,160
But it shows the effective music.

1155
01:05:05,220 --> 01:05:10,680
The completed film made its premiere in
October 1978, but film distribution was

1156
01:05:10,681 --> 01:05:13,340
very different in the late 70s than it is
today.

1157
01:05:14,120 --> 01:05:18,901
When Halloween premiered in 1978, it was
given this sort of very piecemeal release.

1158
01:05:18,960 --> 01:05:21,756
Meaning you start in California and you
have a certain amount of prints.

1159
01:05:21,780 --> 01:05:22,940
You show them in Los Angeles.

1160
01:05:23,900 --> 01:05:25,180
And they move them to San Diego.

1161
01:05:25,420 --> 01:05:26,456
Then they move them to Phoenix.

1162
01:05:26,480 --> 01:05:27,840
They move them around the country.

1163
01:05:28,100 --> 01:05:30,115
You might open a picture
in New York City and it might

1164
01:05:30,116 --> 01:05:32,760
not find its way into Kansas
City for two or three months.

1165
01:05:33,080 --> 01:05:36,100
It's not like today where a film opens in,
you know, 3,000 theaters.

1166
01:05:36,420 --> 01:05:38,220
And it's the one film you go see that
weekend.

1167
01:05:38,660 --> 01:05:39,480
It was a very different time.

1168
01:05:39,481 --> 01:05:44,060
The United States only 40 or 50 years ago,
each market was a whirl into itself.

1169
01:05:46,020 --> 01:05:48,623
But as the film moved
from one city to the next,

1170
01:05:48,624 --> 01:05:51,861
it only achieved a pile
of negative reviews.

1171
01:05:52,120 --> 01:05:53,740
The reviews came in, they were awful.

1172
01:05:54,680 --> 01:05:56,460
You know, just putting the movie down.

1173
01:05:57,000 --> 01:05:58,820
As far as I knew, it was a complete bomb.

1174
01:05:59,760 --> 01:06:02,300
And I got a call from Deborah and she
said, well, this one didn't make it.

1175
01:06:02,301 --> 01:06:07,540
The lowest point for the filmmakers came
during a screening at USC's film school

1176
01:06:07,541 --> 01:06:12,140
where Carpenter had studied what they had
hoped to be the triumphant return of one

1177
01:06:12,141 --> 01:06:14,880
of its own turned out to be a less than
warm reception.

1178
01:06:15,620 --> 01:06:19,960
We all went down and they ran the movie
for an audience of students.

1179
01:06:20,680 --> 01:06:25,080
And then afterwards we sat on the stage
and we answered questions regarding it.

1180
01:06:25,960 --> 01:06:29,000
And there was one guy who raised his hand.

1181
01:06:29,840 --> 01:06:31,420
And John said, yes, you in the back.

1182
01:06:31,900 --> 01:06:37,360
And the guy said, well, first of all,
why in the world, here you are a film

1183
01:06:37,361 --> 01:06:40,580
student, why in the world would you make
that kind of movie?

1184
01:06:44,700 --> 01:06:49,300
I mean, this is just a low-class,
trashy horror film.

1185
01:06:53,730 --> 01:06:55,110
And with that he got up and left.

1186
01:06:57,390 --> 01:07:01,466
And as Halloween continued to
stumble from market to market,

1187
01:07:01,467 --> 01:07:04,370
most critics seemed to
agree with the outrage student.

1188
01:07:05,150 --> 01:07:09,330
But two significant reviews were about to
transform Halloween from a low-budget

1189
01:07:09,331 --> 01:07:12,450
failure into a word-of-mouth box office
phenomenon.

1190
01:07:16,910 --> 01:07:20,569
In October of 1978, John
Carpenter's Halloween was released

1191
01:07:20,570 --> 01:07:24,170
on an unsuspecting audience
who promptly ignored it.

1192
01:07:25,110 --> 01:07:27,770
I think we were a little disappointed in
the very beginning.

1193
01:07:28,350 --> 01:07:29,990
I'm a little bit embarrassed and ashamed.

1194
01:07:30,230 --> 01:07:32,690
I actually got an invitation to the
premiere.

1195
01:07:33,490 --> 01:07:34,490
I threw it away.

1196
01:07:34,950 --> 01:07:37,610
Because I figured it's a horror flick with
a guy with a mask.

1197
01:07:37,930 --> 01:07:39,290
I mean, who's going to watch that?

1198
01:07:39,370 --> 01:07:42,252
Limping along a regional
release pattern one city at a

1199
01:07:42,253 --> 01:07:45,230
time, the film was shaping
up to be a box office bomb.

1200
01:07:45,950 --> 01:07:48,650
As the receipts trickled in, its makers
accepted its fate.

1201
01:07:49,270 --> 01:07:53,550
As far as I knew, Halloween was just
another movie I could show as something

1202
01:07:53,551 --> 01:07:58,550
for my reel, but was not particularly
successful at the box office.

1203
01:07:59,650 --> 01:08:02,371
Writing off the film as
little more than another

1204
01:08:02,372 --> 01:08:05,291
entry on their CVs, the
cast and crew moved on.

1205
01:08:05,510 --> 01:08:07,750
I did a love boat episode with my mother.

1206
01:08:08,210 --> 01:08:11,110
I did a Charlie's Angels where I played a
pro golfer.

1207
01:08:13,070 --> 01:08:15,830
Alan Arkish says he saw
Halloween and wanted me

1208
01:08:15,831 --> 01:08:18,711
to play Riff Randall in
rock and roll high school.

1209
01:08:20,510 --> 01:08:24,190
The film also led to an unusual follow-up
job for its director.

1210
01:08:25,250 --> 01:08:27,659
I got Elvis right after I
had finished directing

1211
01:08:27,660 --> 01:08:30,391
Halloween because they
said well he knows music.

1212
01:08:32,210 --> 01:08:33,832
Because he did the
music to Halloween so he'll

1213
01:08:33,833 --> 01:08:36,231
know music and he'll
be able to direct this.

1214
01:08:37,650 --> 01:08:42,810
As Halloween's theatrical run began to
peter out, its cast, crew and financiers

1215
01:08:42,811 --> 01:08:46,850
were all ready to write it off as a
low-budget blip on the Hollywood radar.

1216
01:08:47,970 --> 01:08:55,130
But in late 1978, two critics rescued the
film from its inglorious fate.

1217
01:08:56,450 --> 01:08:58,291
The first was Tom Allen from The Village
Voice.

1218
01:08:58,830 --> 01:09:03,990
Halloween didn't really take off until The
Village Voice critic Tom Allen reviewed it

1219
01:09:03,991 --> 01:09:06,364
and said, you know,
just what a superb thriller

1220
01:09:06,365 --> 01:09:09,051
it was, how perfectly
executed the film was.

1221
01:09:09,650 --> 01:09:12,807
Soon after Roger Ebert
gave Halloween four stars

1222
01:09:12,808 --> 01:09:15,870
favorably comparing the film
to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

1223
01:09:16,610 --> 01:09:18,775
I remember doing an interview
with Roger Ebert who had

1224
01:09:18,776 --> 01:09:20,911
seen it and I could figure
out why he's talking to me.

1225
01:09:22,190 --> 01:09:23,790
What does he care about?

1226
01:09:23,910 --> 01:09:26,630
He's very flattering about the movie and I
thought well that's nice.

1227
01:09:28,390 --> 01:09:32,390
The glowing glowing glowing reviews of the
picture, they got it.

1228
01:09:32,550 --> 01:09:35,243
They both raved about
it and then the snowball

1229
01:09:35,244 --> 01:09:37,210
just kind of started
rolling and rolling.

1230
01:09:37,650 --> 01:09:39,094
I remember the grosses
very well, they were

1231
01:09:39,095 --> 01:09:41,490
about two and three
hundred dollars per theater.

1232
01:09:41,910 --> 01:09:46,330
Word quickly sprayed that this low-budget
horror film was in fact something special.

1233
01:09:47,010 --> 01:09:49,890
And by the weekend, it was two and three
thousand dollars.

1234
01:09:50,090 --> 01:09:53,670
It was the most amazing example,
the power of word of mouth.

1235
01:09:54,350 --> 01:09:57,770
You know, Halloween became this huge hit
and it was the movie everybody had to say.

1236
01:09:58,190 --> 01:10:00,435
Batman, that everybody
who would see that film that

1237
01:10:00,436 --> 01:10:02,310
night, got on the phone
and told three other people.

1238
01:10:02,730 --> 01:10:04,250
And those three told six other people.

1239
01:10:04,450 --> 01:10:06,210
And with the three or four days,
it was huge.

1240
01:10:07,270 --> 01:10:08,270
I was so excited.

1241
01:10:08,890 --> 01:10:10,290
I knew we had something special.

1242
01:10:11,270 --> 01:10:14,250
Your plans might have known but Carpenter
was still in the dark.

1243
01:10:14,650 --> 01:10:16,870
Apparently it grew and it grew without me.

1244
01:10:17,090 --> 01:10:18,090
I didn't know about it.

1245
01:10:18,210 --> 01:10:21,990
And finally a movie company came by and
said well we want to make movies with you.

1246
01:10:22,130 --> 01:10:24,890
So I figured something's up here because
they don't just do that.

1247
01:10:25,670 --> 01:10:27,270
So I must have made somebody some money.

1248
01:10:28,750 --> 01:10:33,010
Eventually the cast and crew were able to
witness the public's reaction first hand.

1249
01:10:33,650 --> 01:10:36,552
I did go to see Halloween
in a regular theatre and

1250
01:10:36,553 --> 01:10:38,730
I was sitting in the
theatre and I'm watching it.

1251
01:10:38,870 --> 01:10:41,310
I'm like oh my god, this thing is really
really good.

1252
01:10:41,610 --> 01:10:43,450
This is a really scary movie, you know.

1253
01:10:45,150 --> 01:10:49,250
And everybody in the audience was screaming
and stuff and I was just blown away.

1254
01:10:49,970 --> 01:10:54,050
I'll never forget, there was a scene where
Jamie Lee Curtis keeps dropping the knife,

1255
01:10:54,330 --> 01:10:54,470
you know.

1256
01:10:54,471 --> 01:10:57,650
And if she dropped it for the third time,
some guy in the back yelled out.

1257
01:10:58,250 --> 01:10:59,250
You deserved to die.

1258
01:11:00,830 --> 01:11:02,550
That's how involved the audience was.

1259
01:11:03,310 --> 01:11:05,670
John puts you up on the screen.

1260
01:11:06,070 --> 01:11:07,890
That's not Jamie being stalked by a shape.

1261
01:11:08,110 --> 01:11:09,110
That's you.

1262
01:11:09,450 --> 01:11:10,450
And people are cheering.

1263
01:11:10,930 --> 01:11:12,534
When Michael gets
stabbed for the first time in the

1264
01:11:12,535 --> 01:11:15,990
neck, people are actually
cheering because they're saved.

1265
01:11:17,270 --> 01:11:21,770
Because it was done in a very sort of pure
and stylish way.

1266
01:11:22,710 --> 01:11:24,430
Not obviously exploitation.

1267
01:11:24,890 --> 01:11:30,051
That's what made the audience really identify
with the characters and the situation.

1268
01:11:30,150 --> 01:11:35,070
All of those details accumulate and give
you a sense of confidence so that from

1269
01:11:35,071 --> 01:11:39,610
frame one in Halloween, you know you're
watching a real well told story.

1270
01:11:40,970 --> 01:11:45,370
Although Halloween's success was rooted in
its craftsmanship and attention to detail,

1271
01:11:45,371 --> 01:11:48,719
today fans delight in its
handmade feel and enjoy

1272
01:11:48,720 --> 01:11:51,631
spotting the occasional
flaw inside the gym.

1273
01:11:52,190 --> 01:11:53,872
Everyone talks about
how this movie is so perfect,

1274
01:11:53,873 --> 01:11:56,051
but it's really riddled
with imperfections.

1275
01:11:56,170 --> 01:11:58,590
There was one scene with a palm tree in
the background.

1276
01:12:02,490 --> 01:12:07,090
There's a scene in Halloween where after
Michael steps out from behind the bush,

1277
01:12:07,630 --> 01:12:11,830
Annie goes walking over and says,
and then of course Michael's gone.

1278
01:12:12,850 --> 01:12:16,870
And then she turns to Laurie and says,
you know, so-and-so wants to talk with you.

1279
01:12:17,050 --> 01:12:17,670
Come on over here.

1280
01:12:17,970 --> 01:12:22,050
And as she's doing it, you just sees John
Carpenter's smoke drifting into the frame.

1281
01:12:22,750 --> 01:12:24,006
And it's just one of those
things where you go,

1282
01:12:24,007 --> 01:12:26,490
couldn't you have just
taken that shot that again?

1283
01:12:31,580 --> 01:12:34,776
As the girls are finally walking away from
the bush, you see one of the crew members'

1284
01:12:34,800 --> 01:12:36,980
heads pop up over the bush in the
background.

1285
01:12:38,140 --> 01:12:39,140
What are you gonna do?

1286
01:12:39,760 --> 01:12:43,780
Low budget gaffes notwithstanding,
the film was a bona fide hit.

1287
01:12:44,800 --> 01:12:49,700
Eventually, Halloween would gross over $50
million and it rained for over a decade as

1288
01:12:49,701 --> 01:12:52,340
the most profitable independent film in
history.

1289
01:12:53,460 --> 01:12:56,276
But what the film's cast
and crew viewed at the time

1290
01:12:56,277 --> 01:12:58,900
as a happy ending was
in fact only the beginning.

1291
01:13:01,600 --> 01:13:04,440
Everything changed for everybody after
Halloween.

1292
01:13:04,441 --> 01:13:06,720
John Carpenter, all of a sudden he had
options.

1293
01:13:07,360 --> 01:13:08,917
Deborah Hill, all of
a sudden finds doors

1294
01:13:08,918 --> 01:13:10,460
opened up to her, she's
able to move forward.

1295
01:13:11,000 --> 01:13:15,500
Jamie Lee Curtis is totally thrust into
the spotlight as the Scream Queen.

1296
01:13:18,780 --> 01:13:20,920
I had never prepared to be that.

1297
01:13:21,060 --> 01:13:22,096
It wasn't something I liked.

1298
01:13:22,120 --> 01:13:23,480
I don't like those kind of movies.

1299
01:13:23,520 --> 01:13:24,660
I'm not a fan of them.

1300
01:13:25,080 --> 01:13:29,560
But obviously I wrote that train to the
degree that I did, made a little money,

1301
01:13:30,260 --> 01:13:32,920
and certainly became known for that.

1302
01:13:32,921 --> 01:13:36,031
But these sort of create the
foundation of a career that she

1303
01:13:36,032 --> 01:13:39,880
was able to sort of climb out
of and do something bigger.

1304
01:13:40,960 --> 01:13:45,660
As the film's cast and crew graduated to
larger budgets and flourishing careers,

1305
01:13:46,260 --> 01:13:49,300
they didn't quite realise just what
they've done to the horror genre.

1306
01:13:52,980 --> 01:13:54,985
You can sort of look
at horror and it's before

1307
01:13:54,986 --> 01:13:57,541
Halloween and then
it's after Halloween.

1308
01:13:59,200 --> 01:14:03,420
People didn't only take the ideas that
Halloween put forth, it also took the idea

1309
01:14:03,421 --> 01:14:06,120
of, well, we're going to set a horror film
on a holiday.

1310
01:14:08,160 --> 01:14:12,560
So we had prom night, Friday the 13th,
happy birthday to me.

1311
01:14:13,240 --> 01:14:16,160
You know, the fact that there wasn't an
Arbor Day movie surprises me, because,

1312
01:14:16,161 --> 01:14:18,980
you know, there's an axe that comes
naturally with that one.

1313
01:14:19,360 --> 01:14:23,780
But every holiday that people could sort
of graduation day even, every holiday,

1314
01:14:24,020 --> 01:14:25,900
any moment on the
calendar that somebody

1315
01:14:25,901 --> 01:14:27,760
could drench in blood,
they drenched in blood.

1316
01:14:28,500 --> 01:14:33,260
I think maybe, because Halloween was so
cheap to make and it made a bunch of

1317
01:14:33,261 --> 01:14:36,820
money, a lot of people copied it because
they could see dollars.

1318
01:14:37,080 --> 01:14:39,400
I think it was a cheap way of making a lot
of money.

1319
01:14:39,920 --> 01:14:41,640
Some they copied a bunch of things about
it.

1320
01:14:42,860 --> 01:14:47,540
After a monstrously successful release,
the film's producers began to entertain

1321
01:14:47,541 --> 01:14:52,240
the idea of continuing the story of Laurie
Strode and her relentless pursuer.

1322
01:14:53,440 --> 01:14:59,300
Jamie Lee Curtis decided to make 1981's
Halloween 2, her Scream Queen Swan Song.

1323
01:15:00,200 --> 01:15:02,518
Despite writing the
sequel's script, John

1324
01:15:02,519 --> 01:15:05,200
Carpenter had no interest
in directing a follow-up.

1325
01:15:05,500 --> 01:15:10,640
And it was at this point in the franchise
history that the mythology came up around

1326
01:15:10,641 --> 01:15:14,160
Halloween that Michael was really Laurie
Strode's brother.

1327
01:15:14,700 --> 01:15:17,760
And I couldn't think of anything to do,
so I didn't do a very good job with it.

1328
01:15:17,761 --> 01:15:20,548
There was some attempt to
put some meat on the bones of

1329
01:15:20,549 --> 01:15:23,540
this very almost minimalist
thriller that Halloween was.

1330
01:15:24,020 --> 01:15:27,260
And in some ways, I think that actually
was ruined in the Halloween films,

1331
01:15:27,300 --> 01:15:30,800
because suddenly now we're starting to
understand what drives Michael.

1332
01:15:31,080 --> 01:15:33,040
He's out to teach, he just out to kill his
sister.

1333
01:15:33,460 --> 01:15:35,741
But it was successful and they wanted to
make another one.

1334
01:15:36,020 --> 01:15:38,160
And another one, and another one.

1335
01:15:38,660 --> 01:15:41,479
Fed by a fan base, hankering
for more, the franchise

1336
01:15:41,480 --> 01:15:45,080
cranked out four more
installments over the next 15 years.

1337
01:15:45,081 --> 01:15:50,360
With the exception of Halloween 3,
each film added more and more flesh to the

1338
01:15:50,361 --> 01:15:54,660
bones of a character, whose initial appeal
was his complete lack of background.

1339
01:15:56,600 --> 01:15:58,900
Jamie Lee Curtis no longer wants to be
involved.

1340
01:15:59,460 --> 01:16:00,700
Oh, he's out to kill his niece.

1341
01:16:00,840 --> 01:16:04,740
You know, you take away some of the
specialness of Michael Myers when you

1342
01:16:04,741 --> 01:16:06,493
start ascribing human
motives to him, and they're

1343
01:16:06,494 --> 01:16:08,661
well, he's just killing
his family members.

1344
01:16:09,040 --> 01:16:12,920
But the increasingly absurd plot twists
didn't phase Donald Pleasens.

1345
01:16:15,080 --> 01:16:17,102
He'd grown comfortable
in the role he'd crafted

1346
01:16:17,103 --> 01:16:20,061
over five days of
shooting back in 1978.

1347
01:16:20,900 --> 01:16:26,780
Mustafa said that Donald Pleasens told him
he would do 22 Halloween movies.

1348
01:16:27,160 --> 01:16:29,520
So Mustafa said, okay, if you do 22,
I'll do 22.

1349
01:16:32,840 --> 01:16:34,540
However, it was not to be.

1350
01:16:34,960 --> 01:16:39,256
The film series Beloved Star
died on the 2nd of February

1351
01:16:39,257 --> 01:16:42,760
1995, eight months before
Halloween 6 was due to be released.

1352
01:16:43,530 --> 01:16:46,740
He was a generous, funny, delightful human
being.

1353
01:16:48,760 --> 01:16:53,500
Donald Pleasens was such an asset to that
series and really brought something that

1354
01:16:53,501 --> 01:16:55,901
people overlook because they always think
it's about Michael.

1355
01:16:56,460 --> 01:16:58,980
But, you know, there's a little bit of Dr.
Loomis and everybody.

1356
01:16:59,480 --> 01:17:01,360
He's the guy that's out to save the world.

1357
01:17:02,640 --> 01:17:05,832
On the 20th anniversary of
the original film, the idea for

1358
01:17:05,833 --> 01:17:09,100
the seventh installment came
from Laurie Stode herself.

1359
01:17:09,101 --> 01:17:14,220
I said, let's make a movie where she makes
a moment's choice.

1360
01:17:15,460 --> 01:17:19,338
I'm willing to fight for
my life because to live

1361
01:17:19,339 --> 01:17:22,980
another minute in fear is
no life and I'd rather die.

1362
01:17:25,640 --> 01:17:28,120
And let's frickin' end it.

1363
01:17:29,620 --> 01:17:35,081
Halloween H20 received the best review since
the original film was released in 1978.

1364
01:17:35,460 --> 01:17:39,801
And the return of Curtis gave the film a
cache missing from subsequent installments.

1365
01:17:40,560 --> 01:17:44,103
It was interesting to see
an actor first take on what

1366
01:17:44,104 --> 01:17:46,861
is essentially part seven
of horror series again.

1367
01:17:47,340 --> 01:17:49,504
And I think without
her, I don't think that

1368
01:17:49,505 --> 01:17:52,461
the series ever would
have really came back.

1369
01:17:52,940 --> 01:17:56,260
Although Curtis thought she was giving the
franchise some much needed closure,

1370
01:17:56,261 --> 01:17:59,860
she soon found herself relearning the
lessons of the first film.

1371
01:18:00,480 --> 01:18:02,320
You can't kill the boogeyman.

1372
01:18:02,920 --> 01:18:07,460
There was something in the contract that
says they can never kill Michael Myers.

1373
01:18:10,830 --> 01:18:12,010
They never told me.

1374
01:18:12,990 --> 01:18:19,811
I said, guys, this entire movie is predicated
on the fact that I chop his head off.

1375
01:18:19,930 --> 01:18:22,430
So there is no possibility that he could
ever come back.

1376
01:18:23,170 --> 01:18:25,670
I'm not gonna string along an audience
again.

1377
01:18:26,550 --> 01:18:29,270
I've kind of spent 20 years having people
go.

1378
01:18:30,070 --> 01:18:31,210
Why'd you drop the scissors?

1379
01:18:31,850 --> 01:18:32,850
Why'd you drop the thing?

1380
01:18:33,310 --> 01:18:34,330
Why'd you drop the knife?

1381
01:18:35,450 --> 01:18:40,270
They said, okay, so if you think he's dead
and the audience thinks he's dead,

1382
01:18:40,790 --> 01:18:42,790
but he's not dead, is that good enough for
you?

1383
01:18:43,850 --> 01:18:47,010
So I thought, uh, yeah, I guess?

1384
01:18:47,011 --> 01:18:48,011
Yes?

1385
01:18:51,030 --> 01:18:55,630
2002's Halloween Resurrection would be the
last film produced by Mustafa Akad.

1386
01:18:57,850 --> 01:19:02,270
Tragedy struck on the 11th of November,
2005, when Mustafa and his daughter,

1387
01:19:02,550 --> 01:19:06,070
Rema, were killed by a suicide bomber in a
hotel lobby in Jordan.

1388
01:19:12,230 --> 01:19:15,130
Mustafa was a shrewd man, and he had
incredible intuition.

1389
01:19:16,070 --> 01:19:18,910
Mustafa was one of the most intelligent
men I've ever known.

1390
01:19:18,911 --> 01:19:20,610
He had incredible instincts.

1391
01:19:21,850 --> 01:19:26,850
Sadly, Mustafa Akad wasn't the only member
of the original team who died in 2005.

1392
01:19:27,450 --> 01:19:30,850
The same year, Deborah Hill succumbed to
cancer at the age of 54.

1393
01:19:31,750 --> 01:19:34,324
She left behind a legacy
and an example from which

1394
01:19:34,325 --> 01:19:37,110
women in Hollywood
draw inspiration to this day.

1395
01:19:38,170 --> 01:19:40,990
When I think about Deborah, I think she
was really a pioneer.

1396
01:19:41,930 --> 01:19:43,230
She was one of my heroes.

1397
01:19:43,750 --> 01:19:46,522
She really made inroads for
women in the industry, because

1398
01:19:46,523 --> 01:19:50,550
she was one of the first women
producers and so good at it.

1399
01:19:50,750 --> 01:19:52,310
It was her natural calling.

1400
01:19:52,810 --> 01:19:54,250
Deborah and I were best girlfriends.

1401
01:19:54,330 --> 01:19:57,230
I wouldn't be sitting here today if it
weren't for Deborah Hill.

1402
01:19:58,830 --> 01:20:03,111
I'm just truly, truly to
my core grateful for that

1403
01:20:03,112 --> 01:20:06,451
opportunity because it
gave me everything I have.

1404
01:20:09,810 --> 01:20:12,643
As the film approached
its 30th year, it seemed

1405
01:20:12,644 --> 01:20:15,530
as if the franchise had
finally run out of steam.

1406
01:20:16,870 --> 01:20:22,570
But as the horror genre entered the 21st
century, a wildly successful remake room

1407
01:20:22,571 --> 01:20:26,450
was reimagining nearly every horror film
of the 1970s.

1408
01:20:26,990 --> 01:20:28,670
The Halloween franchise was not immune.

1409
01:20:29,410 --> 01:20:32,710
Taking up the challenge was the critically
acclaimed director Rob Zombie.

1410
01:20:33,830 --> 01:20:38,410
If only Halloween had ever existed the
single film, it would seem kind of insane.

1411
01:20:38,411 --> 01:20:43,350
But the way I looked at it was there was
the one classic film, and with each

1412
01:20:43,351 --> 01:20:46,952
sequel, I felt like they've ruined
it more and more and more

1413
01:20:46,953 --> 01:20:49,511
until it felt so far away from
what I ever loved about it.

1414
01:20:50,210 --> 01:20:55,970
After eight films spanning four decades,
Zombie's Challenge in 2007 was to find a

1415
01:20:55,971 --> 01:20:59,287
new place to take the
franchise, his destination inside

1416
01:20:59,288 --> 01:21:02,530
the mind of the previously
unknowable Michael Myers.

1417
01:21:02,531 --> 01:21:04,690
Why don't we just make the whole movie
about him?

1418
01:21:07,190 --> 01:21:08,830
The whole movie, he's our lead character.

1419
01:21:09,070 --> 01:21:10,310
He's not a secondary character.

1420
01:21:10,950 --> 01:21:12,550
And that was really the approach I took.

1421
01:21:13,390 --> 01:21:15,753
Zombie's interpretation
of the Michael Myers

1422
01:21:15,754 --> 01:21:17,810
legend received a cool
response from critics.

1423
01:21:18,470 --> 01:21:21,510
As a movie on its own, it might have
worked when you're calling it Halloween,

1424
01:21:21,990 --> 01:21:24,751
when you have a character named Michael
Myers who's wearing that mask.

1425
01:21:25,370 --> 01:21:26,410
It's a missed opportunity.

1426
01:21:27,950 --> 01:21:31,170
Zombie himself encountered a somewhat
chilly reaction from Carpenter.

1427
01:21:32,170 --> 01:21:33,170
You know, I call them up.

1428
01:21:33,310 --> 01:21:35,830
In the conversation, pretty much went
exactly like this.

1429
01:21:36,070 --> 01:21:37,350
I was like, hey, John, it's Rob.

1430
01:21:37,390 --> 01:21:39,850
Hey, just want to tell you, I'm doing a
remake of Halloween.

1431
01:21:41,050 --> 01:21:44,050
And then there's like a weird sign that
goes, so what do you want me to say?

1432
01:21:44,650 --> 01:21:46,746
I don't want you to say anything,
I just want to tell you.

1433
01:21:46,770 --> 01:21:47,770
It was okay.

1434
01:21:48,550 --> 01:21:49,550
Have fun with it.

1435
01:21:50,090 --> 01:21:51,090
Okay.

1436
01:21:51,550 --> 01:21:52,550
Halloween is Halloween.

1437
01:21:53,270 --> 01:21:55,330
Why would anybody want to touch that?

1438
01:21:57,670 --> 01:22:00,550
To be remade, to have a movie of mine
remade is very flattering.

1439
01:22:01,290 --> 01:22:04,170
And some of these remakes, I get to
collect a check, which is even nicer.

1440
01:22:05,170 --> 01:22:08,378
Rob Zombie's Halloween
grossed over $80 million

1441
01:22:08,379 --> 01:22:11,950
worldwide, possibly starting
the cycle all over again.

1442
01:22:12,370 --> 01:22:14,450
A sequel was released in 2009.

1443
01:22:15,770 --> 01:22:17,690
The fans found their ways to the sequels.

1444
01:22:17,970 --> 01:22:21,370
They found their ways to other directors'
movies, which imitated this movie.

1445
01:22:21,790 --> 01:22:22,470
And they're welcome to it.

1446
01:22:22,471 --> 01:22:23,650
Just acknowledge this.

1447
01:22:24,230 --> 01:22:27,450
John Carpenter's Halloween is the master
of that kind of a genre.

1448
01:22:28,550 --> 01:22:32,530
His creators had known for some time that
there was no stopping Michael Myers.

1449
01:22:33,390 --> 01:22:34,390
What's the argument?

1450
01:22:35,230 --> 01:22:37,330
As a matter of fact, it was.

1451
01:22:39,490 --> 01:22:43,045
And in recent years, the cast
and crew of the original film

1452
01:22:43,046 --> 01:22:46,090
have discovered that that's
truer than they'd ever imagined.

1453
01:22:48,470 --> 01:22:52,870
There are conventions that are just
dedicated to Halloween, where you can meet

1454
01:22:52,871 --> 01:22:56,670
the actors from every single movie,
you can debate the finer details of

1455
01:22:56,671 --> 01:23:00,070
Michael Myers' very complicated,
weird chronology and mythology.

1456
01:23:00,790 --> 01:23:03,190
And then people do things like build the
Myers house.

1457
01:23:03,570 --> 01:23:07,670
We replicated the railing here and the
bottom down here.

1458
01:23:07,870 --> 01:23:10,090
We got that exactly replicated like the
original house.

1459
01:23:10,650 --> 01:23:15,010
I built a life-size replica of John
Carpenter's Myers house from Halloween.

1460
01:23:16,250 --> 01:23:19,971
Wow, these people are
really serious, and they really,

1461
01:23:19,972 --> 01:23:23,190
really love and adore this
movie and this whole franchise.

1462
01:23:24,850 --> 01:23:28,970
As its creators have watched the
phenomenon endure, they're only now

1463
01:23:28,971 --> 01:23:31,480
beginning to understand
the impact of what they

1464
01:23:31,481 --> 01:23:34,951
created over 21 days
in the spring of 1978.

1465
01:23:35,830 --> 01:23:36,750
Deeply proud of it.

1466
01:23:36,810 --> 01:23:38,710
I think it deserves all the praise.

1467
01:23:39,170 --> 01:23:40,970
It's really a small little film.

1468
01:23:41,190 --> 01:23:42,190
It's like a work of art.

1469
01:23:42,350 --> 01:23:44,730
It was just the magic of everyone coming
together.

1470
01:23:46,250 --> 01:23:49,070
The fact that the interest in it has
lasted this long.

1471
01:23:49,430 --> 01:23:52,090
And that's really sort of the magic of
film in general.

1472
01:23:52,470 --> 01:23:54,877
And the great
satisfaction of being able to

1473
01:23:54,878 --> 01:23:57,330
work on films like that
for people like myself.

1474
01:23:57,910 --> 01:24:00,130
It was a movie that I made when I was 30
years old.

1475
01:24:00,750 --> 01:24:01,910
So it's part of my past.

1476
01:24:01,911 --> 01:24:02,911
It will always be there.

1477
01:24:03,270 --> 01:24:04,550
I've made my piece with it sure.

1478
01:24:04,770 --> 01:24:06,450
Forever I will be grateful to Halloween.

1479
01:24:07,130 --> 01:24:08,950
I now never have to dress up on Halloween.

1480
01:24:09,510 --> 01:24:10,510
I get to just go as me.

1481
01:24:11,210 --> 01:24:13,670
I think it's an extraordinary movie.

1482
01:24:14,330 --> 01:24:16,030
And it has given me my life.

1483
01:24:16,770 --> 01:24:20,230
I don't think you ought to question too
much about the legacy of Halloween.

1484
01:24:20,530 --> 01:24:20,930
It just is.

1485
01:24:21,290 --> 01:24:22,290
Let it be.

1486
01:24:22,430 --> 01:24:22,910
Don't question it.

1487
01:24:22,990 --> 01:24:23,990
It might go away.