Taking Shape

by Dustin McNeill

  Judith’s boyfriend shows up to the Myers house shortly after the trick-or-treaters disperse for a quick visit. The night then plays out as in the film – Michael stabs his older sister to death in her upstairs bedroom only to be discovered in the front yard by his parents.

  THE NOVEL: SMITH’S GROVE SANITARIUM

  Following Judith’s murder, the original Halloween jumps ahead fifteen years to the night of Michael’s escape from Smith’s Grove Sanitarium. We learn of his adolescent incarceration during the same scene in which he flees custody as an adult. The Curtis novelization, however, doesn’t leave 1960’s Haddonfield quite so soon, instead spending the next chapter covering Michael’s criminal trial and hospitalization. These scenes not only serve to build up the Shape as a formidable evil but also establish a rich backstory between Michael and Dr. Loomis, which was only teased in the film itself.

  One huge difference here involves speech. The Carpenter film depicts young Michael as being speechless in the wake of his sister’s murder. When confronted in the moments following his crime, he appears silent and utterly detached from reality. That the next scene jumps ahead fifteen years to find him still mute would suggest that he ceased all verbal communication following Judith’s murder, never to speak again. The novel takes a different approach, however. Per the book’s take, young Michael testifies at his own trial, fully admitting to his sister’s murder. A macabre detail revealed during the proceedings: Michael stabbed Judith at least thirty-one times that night, if not more.

  The judge presiding over Michael’s trial feels badly for the youth, calling his crime “an act of madness.” He agonizes over the boy’s sentencing and believes he can be rehabilitated into a productive member of society. Judge Christopher decrees that Michael will be placed in the care of Dr. Loomis, the resident psychiatrist in charge of juveniles at Smith’s Grove, who shall report to the court on his patient’s condition every six months. The judge further rules that if Michael is still at Smith’s Grove by his twenty-first birthday (1978) that he ought be tried as an adult for his crime in 1963, which is legally dubious at best. This scheduled court appearance provides Michael an opportunity to escape.

  Loomis’ first report to Judge Christopher on Michael’s acclamation to Smith’s Grove goes poorly. Despite being the facility’s youngest patient, Loomis charges that Michael “may be the most dangerous person I have ever handled.” When the judge asks on what basis the doctor could make such a claim, Loomis can only offer circumstantial evidence. A boy who teased Michael came down with severe stomach cramps. A nurse that argued with Michael suffered a terrible fall down a stairwell. A peer who borrowed and forgot to return one of Michael’s games developed a bad rash. No one has yet been able to directly link Michael to any of these occurrences, but he has become widely feared by both staff and patients alike. These speculations infuriate Judge Christopher, who threatens to release Michael from Smith’s Grove should Loomis ever appear before him again with “anything but hard evidence.” Defeated, Loomis returns to the hospital to have the following exchange with his patient:

  “If you were to ask an orderly for their keys, ask a guard or trustee to turn his back at the appropriate moment, you could stroll out of here, such is the power you exert over them. That is how much they fear you. Isn’t that true Michael?”

  The boy’s eyes clouded and he shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know what you mean, sir.”

  “Ah, but you won’t do it. You won’t do it because you have it made here. Here you have your own little world. If you were to escape, why, what would await you out there but strife and hassle? So you stay here, snug and secure, isn’t that true, you little dev-----?

  Loomis caught himself. No matter what he believed, it was unprofessional to express it that way, and besides, when you got right down to it, no one had ever seen the kid do anything to anybody.

  With October’s arrival, Michael asks Dr. Loomis if the hospital could hold a Halloween party for the adolescent wing. Loomis is initially outraged at the audacity of such a request since this Halloween will mark the one-year anniversary of Judith’s murder. He suspects that Michael is experiencing “anniversary syndrome” in which disturbed individuals seek to relive previous traumas on or near the date on which they occurred. Loomis eventually relents and grants the request, expecting to finally catch Michael in the act. He is essentially setting a dangerous trap using mentally ill children as bait. (Yikes, Doc.) Staff note that the upcoming party does much to boost the spirits of their young clientele as patients are allowed to craft their own costumes.

  The Halloween celebration is held inside the hospital gymnasium. Loomis puts the staff on high alert and assigns two personnel to watch Michael exclusively. Shockingly, Michael fashions a homemade clown costume similar to the one he wore to murder his sister. At one point in the evening, the gym lights go dark for several moments. When they come back on, a girl is found drowning in the bobbing-for-apples barrel. Loomis notices that Michael is at least ten steps away, smiling, and completely dry. Staff move quickly and are able to resuscitate the girl. Loomis’ trap ultimately fails, nearly killing a child in the process.

  These additional moments help explain the extreme paranoia and superstition exhibited by Dr. Loomis upon Michael’s 1978 escape. The novel continues with Loomis set to re-testify on Michael’s condition, though Judge Christopher dies unexpectedly the night before court. His replacement is far more sympathetic to Loomis’ charge that Michael is a homicidal psychopath, even without evidence. This secures Michael’s place at Smith’s Grove for years to come.

  THE TV VERSION

  In early 1981, NBC purchased broadcast rights to Halloween for an impressive four million dollars, more than thirteen times the film’s original budget. A battle then unfolded between producers and the network over censorship. The resulting edit of the film fell considerably short of the two-hour timeslot NBC had hoped to fill. To make up for lost footage, Carpenter and Hill offered to shoot new scenes that would expand Halloween to a more desirable runtime. This additional material would be filmed in the spring utilizing crew from Halloween II once that film had wrapped production. This three-day shoot cost more than the entirety of the original production. The new material totaled eleven minutes.

  Hill addressed the new scenes in Fangoria: “The additional footage should have been there in the first place. It integrated very well and helped the movie make more sense. We filled in the time between the first pre-credit killing and when he breaks out.”

  The first new scene takes place six months after Judith’s murder on May 1, 1964. We find a concerned Dr. Loomis warning court officials against committing Michael to a minimum-security facility such as Smith’s Grove. He argues that Michael, though still a child, poses an extraordinary threat to others and should be moved to a maximum-security facility immediately. Officials counter that Loomis has no evidence upon which to make these claims and that Michael “exhibits comatose behavior” with “no reaction to external stimuli.” As such, they uphold his admission to Smith’s Grove. Loomis’ assertion that Michael is “the most dangerous patient I’ve ever observed” is pulled straight from the novelization. The only difference is that young Michael didn’t immediately go mute after killing Judith in the novel.

  Frustrated, Loomis leaves the meeting to visit his patient. The boy appears stoic. “You’ve fooled them, haven’t you Michael? But not me.” This scene brings back actor Will Sandin as young Michael from Halloween’s opening scene. Curiously, Sandin did not reprise the role for Halloween II, which cast Adam Gunn instead and featured a different hospital location.

  The next new scene jumps ahead sixteen years as Loomis inspects Michael’s cell following his escape. The room is torn apart and the word “sister” scrawled in red on the wall. To the uninitiated, this appears to reference Judith Myers. Within the context of the soon-to-be-released Halloween II, it is more likely a reference to Laurie Strode. Loomis asks, “Who was watching?” A nurse responds: “It was supposed
to be Bernardi.” This is a nod to filmmaker Barry Bernardi, associate producer on the first two Halloween sequels and a frequent Carpenter cohort. (Bernardi also played the dead mechanic in the original Halloween.)

  The final new scene brought back Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis, and P.J. Soles as Laurie, Annie, and Lynda. This takes place at the Strode residence after Laurie gets home from school. In reality, this house was located in West Hollywood and would reappear years later as 1428 Elm Street in the Nightmare on Elm Street series. (Yes, that’s right. Both Laurie Strode and Nancy Thompson live in the same house!) In the scene, an excited Lynda rushes into Laurie’s home believing that the station wagon driver from earlier is following her. (“I can’t see him very well but I think it’s Steve Todd.”) Lynda tries to borrow a blouse, but Laurie is preoccupied with the mysterious driver. Annie then calls to ask if she can also borrow a blouse. The scene ends with a pensive Laurie staring out the window.

  INTERVIEW: Richard curtis

  (Richard Curtis: Author - The Halloween Novelization)

  You’re a writer and a literary agent. How did you come to do both?

  I always wanted to write but there weren’t any such jobs when I got out of college, so I wound up working for a literary agency. That’s how I apprenticed as an agent for seven or eight years. I left once I found opportunities that allowed me to write full-time. Then some old clients approached me asking if if I would represent them. I was an agent in the mornings and an author in the afternoons. I eventually became a full-time agent because it was so much more profitable. I could make more on one sale than I could writing a book for three or four months.

  Curtis Richards has to be the greatest pen name ever. It’s like you’re hiding in plain sight!

  (laughs) I can’t remember the exact reason I went with that name, except that I was determined to be a serious writer. I had started out doing genre paperbacks and potboilers under various pseudonyms, but I wanted my main career to be something more than that. Plenty of freelance writers decide not to mix their popular writing with their more serious literary endeavors, so they use a pen name. One might contaminate the other, you know. I wanted my pen name to at least be recognizable to anyone who asked if I had actually written it.

  Do you remember how you were approached to write the film’s novelization?

  I can’t remember the exact circumstances, but I knew people at Bantam. They approached me to do the novelization. I remember seeing Halloween in the theater and taking extensive notes during it, but I was never given a copy of the script, which is what usually happens in these situations. Authors are also able to speak with the filmmakers and ask questions about the material. I didn’t have either one of those opportunities.

  Your adaptation took huge liberties with the source material, bridging gaps in the story and offering additional details not seen in the film. Tell me about that.

  Well, I had to do those things. When you see almost any horror movie, it goes by so quickly and breathtakingly that you don’t have time to question it. You don’t begin to ask yourself questions about what you’ve just seen until you’re out of the theater. There were certain events in Halloween that worked well if you’re sitting in a theater. These same events didn’t work as well if you were reading them in a book page by page. There were things in the movie that baffled me as a writer, things that I had to rationalize for the reader.

  The most significant thing was the fact that Michael behaves like a supernatural creature. You cannot, as Donald Pleasence did, shoot someone point blank off a balcony with a 357 magnum and they get up and walk it off. That might scare the hell out of you in the theater, but it’s much harder to contemplate when you read it in a book. So I came to the conclusion that Michael was a supernatural being of some kind. That was not at all in the movie. It wasn’t even implied in the movie. And it probably wasn’t even thought of by the people who made the movie because it wasn’t a concern of theirs, but it was a concern of mine. So I decided to create a supernatural characterization for Michael, which is when I came up with this Celtic ritual from a thousand years ago that ends up with a blood sacrifice. Every thousand years this supernatural being comes back for a night to terrorize people.

  What I did on Halloween was close to impossible for someone today. Movie tie-in writers essentially serve two masters, the publisher and the producer. The producer is married to the script and the publisher is married to the reader. Those two things are quite often not reconcilable. If I took the same liberties with a tie-in today, either the producer or the publisher would tear their hair out. They would yell about how these things I’d written were not in the script. But on Halloween, I felt I had to explain things. The book would have been absurd to any discerning reader had I only written what was in the film.

  Somehow, I got away with it. Maybe the filmmakers never looked at my writing. Maybe they didn’t care. Maybe the publisher didn’t care either. Whatever it was, I got away with it without anyone saying a word to me about it. Michael’s supernatural qualities were just one of the elements I had to reconcile in order to make the book palatable to a mass reading audience.

  Every once in a while, I’ll look on Amazon to see the reviews. As of right now, there are only five-star comments on the book, dozens of them. I’ve never seen anything like that on any of the books I’ve handled as an agent. There isn’t one single mixed review on there. And some of those comments even say the book is better than the movie! I really dodged a bullet in taking the creative risks that I did, but I’m so glad that the book audience ended up appreciating it.

  What other plot holes did you feel the need to address?

  One big one involved Michael driving back from where he’s been institutionalized since he was a little boy. How did he learn to drive? Nobody asks that question when they’re watching the movie because he’s an adult and he’s driving, but who taught him? I invented a whole story about how he was entrusted to drive a truck on the grounds of the institution. You won’t find it anywhere in the script because it was written by me well after the movie was released to theaters.

  The book has been long out of print. Why not re-release it?

  I have no idea. I was hired by Bantam as a writer-for-hire, so I have no ownership over the text. It was licensed to Bantam by the production company, but those rights have since reverted back to Trancas International. I wrote them about ten years ago hoping they would re-release it, but I was disregarded. Again, I have no rights whatsoever. I only have pride in my work and the knowledge that people want to read this book again. I’ve asked lawyers and agents to contact Trancas and everyone has been stonewalled. We never got an answer about it, so the book sits unreleased. The only copy you can get is on eBay, often for $200 or more. It’s very frustrating. I would’ve thought with the thirtieth, thirty-fifth, and now fortieth anniversaries that they would want to reissue it, but no. Every year I mourn over it a little, wring my hands, and then move on.

  Have you ever heard from John Carpenter about your adaptation?

  No, never.

  That’s kind of weird considering how some of your dialogue wound up in his script for Halloween II. Surely he or Debra Hill read your book.

  I didn’t know that, but I’m honored if he used any parts of it. Thanks for telling me that. They own the copyright to what I wrote, so there’s nothing I can do but feel pride that some of what I came up with was used.

  They might also have pulled Samhain from your novel. It’s never mentioned in the first film, but it’s addressed in Halloween II and some of the later sequels as well.

  I didn’t know that either, but I’m surprised and delighted. I didn’t see any of the sequels. I am, however, in touch with the writer who is doing the novelization of the new film. I told him that I was very curious to see what he came up with and what kind of leeway he is given in novelizing the new project. I’m looking forward to reading his book because I want to see how he deals with certain challenges that I faced on my novel.


  Ordinarily, it might be concerning that a writer was so dramatically altering a filmmakers’ vision, but your additions are really interesting. We never got to see Dr. Loomis interact with young Michael on the big screen, but we do get that in your novel.

  That was all created to fill gaps in our understanding of the story. I was hoping to enrich the mystery of the film without fully explaining it away. To be perfectly honest, some of it might have just been about creating enough words to make a book. Summarize a movie and you’ll have roughly 15,000 words. As a writer, I need about 75,000 words to make a book. Every tie-in writer out there knows that, at some point, you wind up padding in certain places, otherwise your book is going to be too damn short.

  But thank you for saying those things. I’m so gratified by this conversation. You have no idea. I’m not bitter about the book being out of print, by the way. Just puzzled. You’d think someone somewhere would realize they could make some money off of it. Trancas has been so stubborn about it that I can only think that their reason for withholding my book must surely be deliberate and well rationalized.

  FILM: HALLOWEEN II

  In the wake of Halloween’s runaway success, there were many behind the scenes eager to see a follow-up made, mostly producers and investors. Filmmakers John Carpenter and Debra Hill were not among those clamoring for a sequel. Their desire was to instead focus on creating original stories for the big screen. As Carpenter recalls it, they were strong armed into returning to Haddonfield. “We were literally forced into making a sequel because of business considerations,” the filmmaker revealed on the first Halloween’s commentary track. “The sequel was going to be made with us or without us. And part of the reason for making the sequel was to get the money that was owed to both Debra and I from the first film. Being nice capitalists, we decided to go ahead and do that.”