In the actual film, the Shape spends several minutes slashing around the room with a scalpel in a deadly game of Marco Polo. Per this first draft, he was originally far more subdued after being shot in the face, even as Loomis and Laurie begin turning on the gas. “The Shape stands in the middle of the room. Suspended. Swaying back and forth. Hands at his side. Blood pouring from the eye holes in his mask.”
As the sun rises the following morning, authorities work to put out the blaze at Haddonfield Memorial. Deputy Hunt asks how many victims have been recovered and is told “eight,” which lines up with what we’ve seen. (Theatrically, ten victims are mentioned, but who are the extra two?) An added line of dialogue here confirms that Jimmy survived the film and was taken to a hospital in Scottsville for treatment. As paramedics load an exhausted Laurie into the ambulance, she mutters: “I can lie down. I can go to sleep now.”
THE ETCHISON NOVEL
Like the original film, Halloween II received a novelization that expanded upon its story, albeit to a much lesser extent. Written by Dennis Etchison under the pseudonym Jack Martin, the novel was released by Zebra Books on November 1, 1981 – two days after the sequel’s theatrical release. Some of the added material hailed from earlier script drafts, though much of it came from Etchison himself.
The novel contained a different opening that backtracked even further into its predecessor’s timeline. Etchison begins his adaptation with the pink-robed Mrs. Elrod - whom the Shape would later steal a knife from - as she greets trick-or-treaters. By this point in the night, she’s run out of treats and instead gives out coins for the kids to buy candy with in the morning. These children next stop at the old Myers house and dare each other to go inside. The Shape watches from a distance. One boy, Lonnie Elam, starts to approach the front door, but a voice calls out: “Lonnie, get your ass away from there!” It’s Loomis hiding in the bushes, of course, but the children don’t know this and run away scared. Loomis then encounters Sheriff Brackett and delivers his famous “Death has come to your little town,” speech. From here, the novel continues from Halloween’s ending into Halloween II’s opening.
Etchison’s take on the story more strongly emphasizes that Laurie doesn’t want to be sedated and even gives a reason: “She can feel the dream coming.” Her violent encounter with the Shape has somehow jolted free the long-repressed memory of her true heritage, which she senses will emerge more fully in her dreams. Laurie’s pleas to remain awake begin before she’s even loaded into the ambulance. The subsequent dream-flashbacks are mostly the same with the exception of an additional flashback, not to her childhood, but to the previous day. She remembers her teacher lecturing on fate and walking home with Annie and Lynda (“I always forget all of my books.”)
As in the original script, the WWAR news producer’s role is expanded and she later becomes a victim of the news story she’s covering. The character also features into an additional scene before being killed. While en route to Haddonfield Memorial, she’s pulled over by police who tell that Sheriff Brackett gave orders for press to stay away from the hospital until Laurie Strode can be interviewed by police. The producer flirts her way out of the traffic stop and continues driving until the flat tire that leads to her demise. She’s also a little less likable in the novel: “I’m bucking for a way out of this chicken outfit, Barry. By whatever means it takes. If sleazy sex murders will do it for me, then bring on the blood-and-guts. Just as long as it’s not my blood and my guts.”
Another added detail involved Nurse Janet just before her death. In the film, she runs to get Dr. Mixter after Laurie is found unresponsive in her bed. Per the novel, she instead runs to the security desk, which is unmanned as Mr. Garrett is already dead. Glancing down at the security monitor, she is alarmed to see the Shape stalking one of the hallways. Just then, she hears a sound from a nearby storage closet. Going to investigate, Janet discovers Mr. Garrett’s corpse with a claw hammer embedded in his skull. (In the film, it’s Laurie who finds his body.) It’s only then that Janet runs to Dr. Mixter’s office where the Shape is waiting with a hypodermic needle.
It would seem Etchison that was banking on Halloween II being the Shape’s final appearance in the series. This would explain the following dialogue by an ambulance attendant in his book’s epilogue: “If you want to know the truth, we haven’t found a damn piece of the other guy. One thing’s for sure. Even if they do find the pieces, there’s no way in hell he’s ever gonna get put back together again. You can count on that.”
As Laurie is wheeled toward a waiting ambulance, she’s asked who her parents are so that they can finally be contacted. She replies, “I don’t know. I really don’t.” This would suggest that Laurie didn’t know she was adopted, which doesn’t exactly line up with Halloween II’s timeline. Marion Chambers tells Loomis that Laurie was born two years before Michael was committed and adopted two years after that when her parents died - making her four years old when she became a Strode. (If you haven’t met many four-year-olds, they’re quite cognitively aware by then. They know their full name and who their family is.) So the idea that Laurie wouldn’t remember her birth parents is pretty ridiculous.
INTERVIEW: Dean Cundey
(DEAN CUNDEY: H1-H3 Cinematographer)
Before we start on Halloween, I have to tell you how much I enjoyed your work on Psycho II. So many people have shot that iconic Bates Motel set, but none quite like you did.
Thank you very much. Psycho II is one of my lesser thought of movies but one I remember very fondly because we were trying to continue in the style of Hitchcock’s original.
Several generations have now grown up with Halloween and many count it among their favorite films, but what were some of the horror films you grew up with?
Well, definitely Psycho. I was born in 1946, so my earliest movies were in the mid-50’s and 1960’s. It was an interesting time because horror was far more science fiction than what we ended up doing on Halloween. As a country, we were fascinated by atomic energy and the atomic bomb. A lot of movie monsters were mutated somehow. With Them!, you had insects that had grown massive. It was also a period in time when people were spotting flying saucers in the sky, so you had all this conjecture about aliens. The original Invasion of the Body Snatchers was one of the few movies that genuinely scared me as a kid. There were an awful lot of others, although I sort of forget over time.
Last year marked Halloween’s 40th anniversary. I’m so grateful for your time today and, I guess, a little surprised that you all aren’t sick to death of discussing it yet!
I don’t mind talking about it because I’m proud of it. It’s interesting the context people sometimes have for it. Fans will come up and say, ‘Halloween was so formative to my youth. It was one of the first horror films I ever saw and I’ve always loved it.’ But there are also people who will ask what I’ve worked on and go, ‘Halloween? Oh. You worked on one of THOSE movies?’ And they group it in with the larger slasher genre not realizing that it started that genre. Those are the same people that will say, ‘Oh, you did Jurassic Park? That was one of those dinosaur movies, wasn’t it?’ No, it wasn’t. It was THE dinosaur movie. It’s sometimes frustrating to see people not appreciating these films for what they are, especially within the context of their releases, but I think Halloween is generally well appreciated and I’m happy to talk about it.
Why was Halloween different than the other films you’d worked on up until that point?
I had done maybe a dozen low-budget action movies, often involving car chases. I describe them as “girls in bikinis with machine guns and then something blows up.” The movies were very formulaic. I worked with one director who would cast has-been television stars to play zany characters as part of his formula. I always had trouble talking these directors into interesting shots. They would go, ‘Nah, it would be faster to just set the camera up over there.’ They thought of the camera only as a way of recording actors talking. I was aware of the fact that the camera should’ve been us
ed better than what we were using it for.
It was therefore a delight when I got a phone call from Debra Hill, who said that she and this young new guy were going to make a movie and they thought I would be a good partner on it. She invited me to come over and meet this guy named John Carpenter. We quickly hit it off. I was immediately interested upon reading the script for Halloween because it was obviously a different kind of movie than I’d been doing. That intrigued me. John and I watched some old movies together and spoke about how we could use the camera to capture interesting shots. This is when I became aware of the fact that he had an exceptional eye for making low-budget movies. So we went off on the journey together and made the movie that was Halloween.
The success of Halloween has been attributed to many over the years, but who would you consider the film’s unsung heroes? Or have they all been sung by this point?
There’s always a few names that don’t get mentioned. The crewmembers I relied on the most are often forgotten in the shadows, though I hold these people in high esteem. One of them is the gaffer or lighting guy, whose job it is to implement whatever vision I have. On Halloween, that was Mark Walthour. He had been on some of the earlier low-budget movies with me. Another was the camera assistant, Ray Stella, who became a camera operator and did quite a bit of the Panaglide work. Ray and I worked together for twenty-eight years. Those are two guys that I think deserve the credit of having been big contributors. They were interested in more than just plugging in lights. They were interested in the process of storytelling and were involved and contributed. There were an awful lot of people like that on the original film, which is why it came out as well as it did.
I won’t ask you to go over the legendary Panaglide shot that opens the film because I know you’ve gone over that a hundred times, but I do have a question on it. Let’s assume that the Panaglide equipment wasn’t available to you at the time. What would you have done differently and how would that have affected the film’s opening scene?
That’s a good question. The whole idea of that opening scene was predicated on the Panaglide. We wanted the audience to move through that long continuous shot in a way that they’d never seen before. I have a certain amount of pride in the fact that we utilized Panaglide as a storytelling device to create mood and apprehension and suspense. Had we not had that technology, I think we would have proceeded differently. I don’t think we would’ve done a handheld shot, which I’ve never been a fan of. With handheld, the camera moves in a way that we don’t see in real life. From our perspective, our life is one long Panaglide shot with periods of sleep. The image is very smooth when you walk because your eyes and brain compensate for that movement, so you don’t get a jerky motion. For someone viewing a handheld image, that jerky motion can make it difficult to focus on anything within the shot.
I speculate that we would’ve found a different way to convey the same story infirmation of the opening scene but with a more stylized, conventional method with dollies or handheld that was somehow smooth. We might’ve covered the cuts with creative transitions.
In 1981, Halloween received several new scenes for its television debut. John Carpenter has called these scenes pointless filler, but Debra Hill has defended them as necessary and scenes that should’ve been included from the start. How do you view this material?
I remember when John and Debra first said that Halloween was going to be on television. That was a prideful thing for me at the time because none of the other films I’d worked on ever went to television. They were strictly drive-in movies. This was long before the fascination with home video where you could watch movies in your living room. But the network needed Halloween to be longer to fit the time slot, so John felt we should shoot new material. The movie already worked so well as is. We figured this would be okay as long as the scenes were harmless and didn’t give away the plot. Debra was probably trying to justify them when she said they were essential because they weren’t. The goal was to go, ‘What can we add in that doesn’t hurt the story?’ These scenes were put there for the mechanical purpose of filling the runtime, not enhancing the story. John was pretty off-handed in filming them too. He didn’t spend much time finessing them on set. We’d do one or two takes and he’d go, ‘Okay, that’s it. We’re done.’
We’re so spoiled these days with beautiful Blu-ray transfers, but that’s not how many films originally shown on television and home video. What was it like having your artfully composed 2:35:1 presentation cropped so horribly?
It was quite disheartening, but pretty standard at the time. We were always told, ‘If we show it in its original format, there are black lines at the top and bottom. People will wonder what’s wrong. We’ll get letters from viewers wondering why they didn’t get to see the whole movie.’ That was the excuse given by the network people for why they weren’t showing letterboxed movies. People are now more accepting of that, however. Our televisions are wider and even commercials are trying to replicate that widescreen look. Had we been able to teach people what was going on, maybe they would’ve accepted letterboxing earlier.
Cropping Halloween for television took away half of the frame we had shot. This meant television audiences were literally missing out on half the film! Then they developed a pan-and-scan technique where some technician somewhere got to decide which part of the frame to show. Should it be a close-up of the girl or the doorway behind her where the killer is standing? That kind of thing was so saddening at the time. Then there was the color correction, which was also done by technicians. They would often decide that a scene was too dark and crank up the brightness until every scene looked the same. It was terrible.
I remember getting Anchor Bay’s 20th Anniversary double-videocassette release in 1998 and finally seeing Halloween in all its widescreen glory. It was like an entirely different film.
That’s the beauty of widescreen. For so many years, people didn’t realize they were missing out by watching movies cropped to fit their square televisions. They weren’t getting the full beauty of a film. And sure it affected us on Halloween, but think of all the westerns that were cropped. In the theater, you’d see huge sweeping vistas but on television it was usually cropped to just a few guys on horseback. I hope people are revisiting those films now so that they can see what they were missing out on. It was a long, sad period having our work misrepresented on television.
So go back to 1978. You’ve just finished Halloween. Were you expecting to do a sequel?
Not at all. I had never even worked on a sequel before Halloween II, so I didn’t give it any thought once we finished the original. And Halloween wasn’t an immediate success when it first came out either. It wasn’t until word of mouth grew that the film gained a bigger audience. My impression that first week was, ‘Well, I guess no one went to see it. That’s that. What’s next?’ Then it became a such a success that people began asking for a sequel.
Tommy Lee Wallace has made no secret of the fact that he declined an invitation to direct Halloween II because he disliked the script. Was that a decision you might’ve made had the script not been to your liking? Or were you there simply to do the job, no matter what?
I was always sorry that Tommy Lee didn’t direct Halloween II. He was the obvious choice to do it. I think Tommy could’ve elevated the movie into a stronger continuation of the original film. But he didn’t want to do it. Sequels also weren’t as big back then, so I don’t think anyone had any idea how important a sequel could become.
I actually had another offer come in just as Halloween II was about to happen. I’d been offered Poltergeist and I really wanted to do it, but my agent called and said, ‘You can’t. You’ve already been committed to Halloween II.’ And I said to him, ‘Halloween II? What’s that?’ And my agent said, ‘Well, it’s a new film but they want you to come back and continue the look of the first one. They want you to support the new guy coming in as director.’ It was difficult for me to pass up a Steven Spielberg movie for a sequel to something I�
��d already done, but they offered me a significant increase in salary and I finally agreed to do it.
How was your experience on Halloween II different being that Rick Rosenthal was so new to feature filmmaking? He was coming into an established filmmaking family, wasn’t he?
I had worked with several inexperienced and first-time filmmakers in the past, so I had an idea of how to go about it. Rick was challenged by the fact that he didn’t want to direct Halloween II in the shadow of John Carpenter. He wanted to add his own storytelling touches to it. Keep in mind that I had been brought on to shoot it as a continuation of the first film’s visual style, so that made things interesting. I had previously worked with directors who would read a script and envision it entirely different than how I did reading the same script. It was sometimes like that with Rick. But my job, my craft, my art – is to support the director’s vision. Sometimes that means convincing them to try something else and sometimes it means going along with their vision. It wasn’t always easy trying to support Rick while also supporting John and Debra, all the while trying to make a film that was worthy of the original Halloween.
Looking back, I think you have to give Rick credit for being brave enough to cut his teeth on a big project like this. He was a taking a risk, wasn’t he?
I think so. You can look at it two ways. On one hand, directing something high-profile like Halloween II can get you noticed very quickly. It was a risk and a bold choice on his part to direct the film. It certainly earned him subsequent opportunities later on because it was so successful. On the other hand, you wind up having a lot of preconceptions and expectations imposed upon you because of the first film.
Taking Shape Page 6