While the detective sub-plot is interesting, it’s ultimately unnecessary. The two officers never do anything to justify their place in the story. Detective Blake is killed and used as a prop to scare Keri while Detective Carter fails to reach the school in time to help fight the Shape. Keri rightly scoffs at their offer to protect her. The only thing these two uncover in their entire investigation is that Keri Tate is Laurie Strode, something the audience is already aware of. That we already know this makes their discovery a little underwhelming.
Zappia’s early drafts continued efforts to incorporate the Return/Revenge/Curse trilogy into the storyline. This was achieved by expanding on a scene from the Williamson treatment in which one of Keri’s students delivers a report on “The Haddonfield Murders,” a true crime book by Marion Whittington. Not only was this scene going to reference the prior three films, but per the script also feature flashbacks in tandem with the student’s report. This sorely unnerves an already tense Keri, who is seen running from the classroom. She barely makes it to the restroom before throwing up her breakfast. (Student: “The book maintains there is truth to the rumor that Laurie Strode is actually alive and well and living under a new identity. Claiming that she gave up her daughter for adoption to protect the eight-year- old from her psychotic uncle. Bad idea. Last Halloween, Jamie’s mutilated body was found in a barn just outside of Haddonfield.”)
THE ZAPPIA/GREENBERG DRAFT
Early 1998 saw development on Halloween 7 barreling forward. Robert Zappia turned in numerous rewrites of the script, each moving further away from the Williamson treatment. These drafts became so far removed from Williamson’s work that a Writer’s Guild arbitration panel ruled that the Scream writer should no longer receive credit. Despite this, Williamson continued consulting on Halloween 7, now titled Halloween H20, and offered extensive notes on its direction. These included the re-introduction of Marion Chambers from the first two films and changing the school’s security guard from the elderly Hatti to the younger, hipper Ronny.
In return for his now uncredited contributions, the Weinsteins would name Williamson an executive producer. Zappia worked closely with Moustapha Akkad to further develop the script and also with producers Malek Akkad and Paul Freeman. The screenwriter would exit H20 for another project several weeks before filming. This led producers to hire screenwriter Matt Greenberg for a last-minute script polish. Ultimately, Greenberg and Zappia would share credit for H20’s screenplay with the latter also receiving story credit.
H20’s final draft opens with the Shape tracking down Marion Chambers from the first two Halloween’s. (Previous drafts saw Marion living in Langley, though this draft relocates her to the fictional Langdon, Illinois.) Once inside her home, the Shape scours the files of the late Dr. Loomis to learn that Laurie Strode faked her death and is now living in Northern California as Keri Tate. He murders Marion and two local teens before heading west. A pair of crime scene detectives mull the possibility that this was the work of Michael Myers. One officer mentions that, since Michael’s body was never found, he’s technically been missing for twenty years.
The story then cuts to the fictional town of Summer Glen, California where Keri Tate is the headmistresses of Hillcrest Academy, a posh co-ed preparatory school. Her seventeen-year-old son John is frustrated that she won’t allow him to attend the upcoming school field trip to Yosemite National Park. In this version of the story, John is aware of and sympathetic to his mother’s past in Haddonfield, but tired of her overprotective parenting nonetheless. Keri eventually relents and signs his permission slip, though John has already made alternate plans. With Hillcrest abandoned due to the field trip, he and three friends intend to spend Halloween night partying on an empty campus. Keri’s Halloween plans involve spending the night with her boyfriend, guidance counselor Will Brennan. In an intimate moment that evening, she reveals to him her darkest secret, that she is actually Laurie Strode from Haddonfield.
The Shape descends upon a desolate Hillcrest just after nightfall and promptly kills two of John’s friends, Sarah and Charlie. John and his girlfriend Molly manage to get away and are saved by Keri and Will. This brings Keri face to face with the ghostly countenance of her estranged brother. While trying to escape the darkened school, a trigger-happy Will mistakes security guard Ronny for the Shape and shoots him in the head. The real Shape appears a moment later and murders Will in front of a Keri. She flees and manages to get an injured John and Molly to safety. Keri then disables Hillcrest’s front gate, grabs a fire axe, and heads back into the school while screaming her brother’s name. A brutal fight unfolds with Keri stabbing the Shape multiple times and throwing him off a balcony, rendering him unconscious. The somehow-not-dead Ronny suddenly appears and drags her to safety before she can do any more stabbing. (It turns out that Ronny was only grazed by Will’s bullet.)
First responders declare the Shape dead and load his bagged corpse into a coroner’s van. An unconvinced Keri retrieves her fire axe and hijacks the van, which she drives far from campus. The somehow-not-dead Shape comes back to life and immediately attacks. Slamming on brakes, she sends him crashing through the windshield. In an attempt to run him over, Keri crashes the van down a large embankment, badly injuring them both. Pinned beneath the van, Michael reaches out to her, seeming almost innocent. She starts to extend her hand in return, but stops short of making contact... and swiftly decapitates him with a swing of her axe.
This final version of Halloween H20 is a truncated amalgamation that fine-tunes several issues leftover from earlier drafts. First, John Tate is no longer presented as a cocky asshole. He and his schoolmates at last become fairly likable characters. As such, he is now aware of his mother’s past and no longer pranks her by dressing as Michael Myers. In fact, it is his understanding and accommodation of his mother’s plight that furthers his anger towards her overbearing nature. Secondly, the detective subplot has been removed in order to concentrate more on the events at Hillcrest. According to editor Patrick Lussier, this material was nixed just prior to shooting at the suggestion of Kevin Williamson. The subplot’s deletion was so last minute that actor Charles S. Dutton of Alien³ and A Time to Kill had already been cast as Detective Carter. As arguably unnecessary as this subplot was, its absence leaves H20 as the shortest film in the whole franchise. Thirdly, the writers do well to replace the school’s Halloween dance with an overnight field trip to Yosemite National Park. This allows the final act to play out on a deserted campus rather than with hundreds of partying students hanging about. A scenario in which the heroes battle the Shape with no one around conjures the spirit of the original Halloween.
“The original plot of H20 had the same plot as Halloween, where you see these parallel stories going on simultaneously,” Curtis told Femme Fatales Magazine. “You had the Laurie Strode story and then you had a cop. […] Then, about three weeks before shooting just as Kevin Williamson was polishing the draft, Steve said, ‘I want to try a draft without this cop because we’ve seen it a million times.’ It was absolutely the best call because it just keeps you right here in the movie. You don’t need that other character.”
While H20’s general plot was locked in months before filming began, the dialogue remained in flux. With Robert Zappia’s last-minute departure, both Matt Greenberg and Kevin Williamson performed dialogue polishes, the latter still uncredited. Among Greenberg’s contributions was the scene in which a mother and her young daughter encounter the Shape at a rest stop, one of Zappia’s favorite moments in the film. Jamie Lee Curtis also liked this scene and unsuccessfully lobbied producers to use the obscured shot of Michael peering through the stall door as the film’s theatrical poster.
As far as titles go, Halloween H20 may have been marketing-friendly but The Revenge of Laurie Strode was more apt. Keri is out for bloody revenge. Not just for the friends she’s lost, but for the pieces of herself she never got back after Halloween II. Time has not healed her wounds and the only coping skill she has left comes in a bottl
e. This makes for what may be the most interesting characterization in the franchise. Curtis later revealed that this dark take on the heroine was met with resistance from the Akkad camp. According to her, producers were concerned that audiences might not want to root for such a flawed lead. Curtis argued that a trauma survivor with addiction issues still facing her fears was a winning example of heroism.
“I saw an opportunity to be realistic and show the horror of horror movies,” Curtis said while promoting the film. “Here’s an opportunity for this girl, who’s supposedly a survivor, but in fact, she’s not a survivor - because she has no soul. That’s what was ripped from her. Her ability to trust. Her ability to love. So even though she’s done everything a woman is supposed to do to make her happy - she’s gone to college, gotten a degree, got married and has a child - she’s empty. She’s a wreck, because he stole this from her. […] She can get away and keep running, but ultimately by running, she’ll die. Because she’ll either blow her brains out or she’ll get in a car wreck or whatever happens down the road. But if she stops running and faces him head on, she may die but she gets her soul back. That is a slightly long-winded and lofty goal for a horror movie, but if you can pull that off, then you have a movie to commemorate the first movie.”
Tonally, H20 feels much more like Scream than Halloween, something many fans took issue with. The irony is that Halloween had such tremendous influence on the Wes Craven thriller and was directly referenced throughout the film. Rather than draw from John Carpenter’s original, H20 emulates the style of a Halloween-inspired slasher. Looking back, it’s no mystery how this came to be. H20 was developed under the guidance of Scream’s Kevin Williamson and released by the same studio. Halloween’s seventh was also directed by Steve Miner, who helmed several episodes of Williamson’s Dawson’s Creek, which pioneered teenage drama in the late 90s. The filmmakers also replaced large portions of John Ottman’s music with tracks from Marco Beltrami’s Scream score. Even the posters are similar. If that wasn’t enough, one scene in H20 finds two teenagers watching Scream 2 on television. This meta-tribute echoes the moment in Scream where teenagers gather to watch Halloween at a party. Additional cross-references abound. How well you take to a Halloween sequel mimicking another film’s style will depend entirely upon the mileage you derive from Scream. Good or bad, such clear imitation does mark an otherwise original franchise first.
“Halloween is my favorite movie of all time. Scream was a love letter to that entire movie [...] I connected Halloween to Scream to Halloween H20. It’s like a mirror looking into a mirror.” - Kevin Williamson, The Los Angeles Times
With H20’s final shooting draft, the sequel ceases all efforts to connect with earlier installments. In fact, dialogue delivered early in the film suggests that Michael Myers has been missing for the past twenty years, effectively erasing everything from the Return/Revenge/Curse storyline. The new film instead operates as though a direct sequel to Halloween II, which might have also been ignored were it not for the sibling development so crucial to H20’s story. Even still, H20 struggles to commit to its own simplified continuity. The ending of Halloween II saw the Shape blinded by gunshots and left to burn inside the hospital inferno. Yet this film finds him with full vision and blemish-free skin. It’s not even as though the filmmakers forgot about Halloween II’s ending as John Tate remarks, “You said yourself you saw him burn.”
Fans have long debated the first sequel’s invention of making Michael and Laurie siblings – some even saying that this aspect would hinder the following films. To its credit, H20 adds gravitas to the scenario. When Will asks Laurie, “Who was that?” she emphatically responds, “My brother.” No longer are we watching a simple slasher sequel, but a morbid expose on family dysfunction and, in the case of Michael, perhaps even mental illness and its effects on others. These faint themes are emboldened towards the finale in which, during a moment of fleeting tenderness, Laurie tearfully smiles and extends her hand to touch the tips of Michael’s outreached fingers. Brother and sister reunited once more. H20 and its ending might not have been nearly as emotionally compelling had it not been for Halloween II.
H20 is notable not only for the monumental return of Laurie Strode but also for the absence of Dr. Loomis. This anniversary sequel marks the first in the series produced after the death of Donald Pleasence in 1995. While Curtis would remark to Fangoria that she missed Pleasence, she stated that she did not miss the lack of a Loomis surrogate, stating, “In the first movie, She never saw [Dr. Loomis]. She didn’t even know he existed until the last three minutes of the movie. In the second movie, she did not see him until the last three minutes of the movie. So, for all intents and purposes, Laurie never really knew who this man was.”
Still, H20 pays tribute to the role with an opening credit montage set inside his home office. The room is littered with articles and crime scene documentation. While it’s established that Loomis has passed on, he does still cameo in the opening via ghostly narration. (This voice belongs not to Pleasence but to actor Tom Kane, best known for his turn as Master Yoda in the animated Star Wars universe.) With this opening sequence, the franchise bridges the Loomis and Laurie stories and, in a sense, passes back the narrative torch. Like Halloween 6, this chapter also pays tribute to Pleasence with an end credit dedication in his memory.
H20’s filmmakers also tip their hat to Psycho with a cameo by original “scream queen” Janet Leigh. (This would mark the second time that she and Curtis appear onscreen together after John Carpenter’s The Fog.) Fans will recall that Carpenter named Dr. Loomis after Sam Loomis, the boyfriend of Leigh’s role in Psycho. In H20, Leigh plays Hillcrest’s kindly secretary Norma, whose very name brings to mind Psycho’s Norman Bates. Norma tells Keri Tate that “the shower drains in the girls locker room are clogged again,” a clear nod toward Leigh’s infamous murder in the 1960 film. In her final scene, Leigh exits in the same car she drove in Psycho as a motif from that film’s score plays on the soundtrack. Curtis viewed her mother’s cameo as a poignant curtain call on a long and distinguished career. As such, she was heavily involved in their writing. Leigh’s performance as Norma did eventually prove to be her final role on the big screen. Fittingly, her last words in the film are to wish her daughter a “Happy Halloween.”
For most involved, H20 was truly meant to conclude the long running Michael Myers storyline. Within the continuity of this installment’s final moments, the Shape is actually beheaded by Laurie Strode and thus finally dead. This was the preferred ending of the screenwriters, the Weinsteins, and Jamie Lee Curtis herself. Director Steve Miner even told Fangoria, “You’ve got to see the ending to decide if this is the end of Halloween or not. But I don’t know how they could go on with it. We tie everything up. Nobody is going to feel disappointed at the end. This movie is as final as you can get.” The singular holdout to this plan was, of course, Moustapha Akkad, who was banking on his ability to produce future sequels. “There is no way the series will be finished with this film,” Akkad told Fangoria. “This series will never be finished.”
Halloween H20’s script was developed extensively from early 1997 to early 1998 with none of the creative conflict that plagued its predecessor. With the same executives involved in both, what made Halloween 6’s development a train wreck and H20’s uneventful? There are several factors to consider. For one, H20’s story is so much simpler than Halloween 6 with no twists or supernatural elements to be had. The filmmakers never attempt to explain what makes the Shape tick. H20 instead delivers a straightforward story grounded in reality. Secondly, H20 disregards much of the existing continuity and builds to an actual conclusion instead of to another maddening cliffhanger. (Looking at you, Halloweens 4, 5, and 6.) This liberated the filmmakers from having to resolve lingering plot issues from earlier installments. Furthermore, H20 benefited from the creative guidance of Kevin Williamson, whom the Weinstein’s trusted implicitly. Halloween 6, on the other hand, was written by a freshman scribe without such confide
nces. With only the Akkads behind him, Daniel Farrands lacked the political pull to defend his creative choices. Above all else, Halloween 6 was a lesson to everyone involved on the importance of getting the script right before cameras rolled.
THE BROADCAST VERSION
While a workprint of Halloween H20 did eventually leak to the fanbase, it proved dreadfully uninteresting as far as changes go. Fans would receive a much more substantial alternate cut in 2003 when H20’s television debut on the FX Network. The additional scenes contained within this version have yet to surface anywhere else, not even on special edition home video releases.
The opening scene plays out a little differently here with several shots added and removed. Jimmy no longer steals the beers from Marion’s fridge. We might assume Jimmy and Tony survive in this version as Marion never discovers their corpses. Theatrically, the chase sequence begins when she tries to leave and happens upon Tony’s propped-up corpse. In the broadcast cut, the chase begins when Marion notices the Shape entering through the back door. There are several additional shots of Marion being stalked through her neighbor’s house.
H20’s rest stop scene is a bit longer with more focus on the Shape’s stolen Buick Skylark parked out front. In this cut, we’re barely able to see the slasher peeking out from the men’s room as the mother and daughter approach. The scene then plays out as usual. Another brief addition to the film occurs as Charlie and John stroll through town during their off-campus lunch. John rebuffs his friend’s encouragements to make the most of his evening with Molly. Unbeknownst to them, the Shape drives by in his recently acquired green Harvester Travelall.
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