Halloween 8 went by three names – MichaelMyers.com, Halloween: The Homecoming and Halloween: Resurrection. Which was your preferred title?
My original draft was titled MichaelMyers.com, which would have been appropriate had that draft been shot. I don’t know that it’s appropriate for the film that was eventually made. I like it, though. It’s meta. I don’t think I was ever demented enough to think that title would get very far. Homecoming wasn’t terrible. It made far more sense than Resurrection. A friend once told me that you know a franchise is becoming lazy when they call something Resurrection. I kind of agree with that. It’s derivative and utterly arbitrary. Homecoming is probably the best of the three. I guess they thought it sounded edgy. I suppose I prefer Homecoming for the film that was released.
Screenwriter Ehren Krueger was also briefly attached to Halloween: Resurrection. Do you recall anything about his involvement with the project?
I shouldn’t talk bad about another writer’s work, but whatever. Fuck it. He makes a lot of money. People can and do say crappy things about me all the time. When you’re developing a script with a studio, there’s a process where people give you notes to review. Often times on the first round, you’ve got a virgin script that no one has seen yet, so you can get potent feedback even from lesser intellectuals like studio types. Out of ten notes, maybe four are good and worth going with. Some are stupid and arbitrary, but you keep the good ones. Unfortunately, on Resurrection, I kept getting the same number of notes from the studio each round. The number never dwindled or went down. I was getting notes from people without any brains or creative instincts whatsoever. They were just trying to anticipate what their idiot boss Bob Weinstein might have wanted.
There was one point where Miramax had another writer do an original draft. This was Ehren Krueger who did The Ring and some of the Transformers movies. It was so unbelievably incompetent that you’d think they never saw a Halloween movie. There were all these supernatural elements including a Ouija board. What in the hell is a Ouija board doing in Halloween? This script stole from every dumbass horror movie you’ve ever seen. One shot had Michael Myers walking down the street and all the street lamps flicker as he passes by them. As a writer, you’re always the one receiving the notes. But on this script, I got to give notes on it. I sent Moustapha over twenty pages of notes pointing out every stupid thing in the script. He forwarded them to Miramax and said, ‘We’re either moving forward with Larry’s script or we’re finding another financier.’
At a later stage, they brought on Sean Hood to write a draft based on my script. His additions were fine by me. He superimposed some things onto my story that worked for the film. He was given a lot of notes to work with and he did a good job. He was aware of how Halloween was supposed to work.
Of the film’s four endings, which did you like best?
How about none of them? My initial goal with Resurrection’s ending was to recreate the finality of Halloween H20’s ending, which everyone seemed to like. It didn’t exactly turn out as I’d hoped. I walked away from our film feeling that it lacked that sense of completion. My original idea was for the house to burn down with Michael inside. The next morning, the authorities are going through the rubble and there’s a burned body that sits up from a laying down position. It’s clearly Michael, but he’s charred. That was going to be our final scare. The authorities recognize this as just a muscular contraction, no big deal. Then the body disintegrates into ash, giving the sense of completion that we had in H20. You can come back from being beheaded, but try coming back from disintegration!
I got the idea from a real phenomenon that occurs in burned bodies where the muscles sort of contract. They can actually sit up like that. The cheat of it was that it happens during the burning and not hours later. It’s a cheat, but it’s less of a cheat than Michael getting shot nine-hundred times and still somehow surviving.
Did the film’s somewhat chilly reception among critics and fans surprise you?
No, not really. At least not with the critics. I was surprised at some of the things the fans didn’t like. I got a lot of resentment from fans for bringing Michael Myers back after H20’s ending. Of all the people in the world, you’d think Halloween fans would be thanking me for bringing him back, but they did not. Some of them were incredibly annoyed that we’d undone the ending of H20, which they had found very satisfying. That surprised me. But there is a small population of people that liked it. I still think it got a bad rap from critics. Resurrection is at least a little better than they gave it credit for. It’s an okay movie. It’s definitely not great and it’s not something I want to be especially remembered for, but it’s okay.
I’ve got to tell you, some of the worst parts of Resurrection don’t come from your script. And some of the best things in your script didn’t make it into Resurrection. How difficult was it developing your story with studio execs guiding that process?
It’s never fun, but it happens all the time in this business. It even happened to Orson Welles. Is it pleasant? No, it’s not. But once you get to the point where you’re earning your living in a creative endeavor, you’ve lost the right to complain. You’ve certainly lost the right to complain when there are people around you who would love to be doing what you do. The way I balance the unpleasantness of working for Bob Weinstein is that I make a bunch of movies that I have total control over but don’t make much money. Those are my legacy. Then I’ll make one movie I have no control over and earn a lot of income from it. I’ve done movies for fifteen-thousand-dollars and movies for several-hundred-thousand-dollars. Doing films like Halloween: Resurrection allows me to do the movies I really want to do.
Every problem I had on Resurrection had to do with the numbskulls at Miramax, the main numbskull being Bob Weinstein. I’ll tell you who weren’t a problem for me – the Akkads. Malek and Moustapha were never difficult to work with. Their notes on my work were generally supportive and helpful. They also backed me up when there was something I wasn’t willing to compromise on with the studio. Rick Rosenthal was also fine as the director. I could tell he really understood film and would ask interesting questions about the script.
Was my work on Resurrection frustrating? You bet. Was it annoying? Absolutely. Did I want to strangle those studio executives? Pretty much on a daily basis, yes. But in the larger context, what else would I be doing if not this? Teaching science to junior high kids?
What was your favorite scene in the film?
There’s one scare in Resurrection that I especially like. It’s a great camera move when Freddie and Sara are huddled together talking in the darkened house. The camera moves to reveal that Michael is standing behind them. I love that. I’m also fond of the opening sequence because it’s fairly close to how I originally wrote it into the script. Few things went unchanged, but that mostly stayed the same.
How did you view the stunt casting of Busta Rhymes and Tyra Banks as Freddie and Nora?
Stunt casting is a little unkind, isn’t it? Look, the producers loved LL Cool J in Halloween H20. He was a big box office draw and everyone said he was so great to work with. They really wanted him to come back for Resurrection, but they couldn’t afford him. He had become a bigger star by then. But they had their mind set on getting another rapper, so we had people come in to test for Freddie. We even had Coolio come in to audition, but they felt he was already on the downside of his stardom.
Freddie and Nora were an attempt to reach the black demographic. There’s this weird phenomenon in horror where people love to see people that look like themselves get killed. That’s why it’s always young people getting killed in slasher movies because young people go see slasher movies. If we set Halloween in an old folks home, nobody would go see it. The audience wants to watch a surrogate version of themselves, even if that character winds up being tortured and murdered. It’s a strange psychology, but it’s very real. So I understand why they would want an ethnically diverse cast, which is fine. Did they have to cast a rap
per as Freddie? Not at all, but they did. Busta had sort of established his acting credentials in Finding Forrester, which a lot of people liked. I can tell you that Busta was a really nice guy. I met him briefly at the premiere and he was very ingratiating. I liked him a lot, though I know that not everyone did.
How much of the opening with Jamie Lee Curtis did you come up with?
The general structure was in place before I came on, though I was able to come up with the details of that. The dialogue is definitely mine, particularly that opening speech. They already knew how they wanted to resurrect Michael, that he had switched places with an EMS worker and she had killed the wrong guy. I believe they also wanted Laurie to be in a psychiatric institution, but that was it.
I was aware that Jamie Lee didn’t really want to do the film. She was quite tired of the whole operation and didn’t want to do any more Halloweens. In the beginning, we were only going to have her for thirty seconds in the film, which was not enough. I made it clear to the producers that we would need more than thirty seconds if we were going to close out her story properly. They went to her and coughed up a few more dollars in order to get her to agree to a larger appearance. My recollection is that she donated that money to charity.
Had you been approached to do Halloween 9, would you have returned to the franchise?
I don’t think so. Malek Akkad was pretty aware that I was less than enthusiastic about my experience dealing with Miramax. Had they come to me for Halloween 9, I don’t think I would’ve been very receptive. They did hire several sets of writers to do that one, but it never got off the ground. I eventually did have a conversation with Malek where he asked if I’d be interested in coming on board to pitch something. In my response to that, I quoted Voltaire when he was asked to attend an orgy in Paris. I said, ‘No, my friend. Once a philosopher, twice a pervert.’
I couldn’t bring myself to do Halloween 9 because I knew it wouldn’t turn out well. And I was flush enough with money at the time that I didn’t need to do it. It would’ve been one thing for them to come with me holding a suitcase full of money and asking me to write something original. But to ask me to pitch something to them, then pitch it to Miramax, then go back and forth with notes, without any promise of getting paid or the film being produced – no way. I never seriously entertained it.
FILM: ROB ZOMBIE'S HALLOWEEN
The Dimension Films era of the Halloween franchise was a rollercoaster of creative and commercial success. With decent reviews and the highest box office yield of any sequel yet, it’s easy to count Halloween H20 among the triumphs. Halloween: Resurrection, however, was a different story. Widely panned, the sequel grossed half what its predecessor did. With Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode now dead, the franchise lacked a direction. Halloween was again dangerously close to becoming a direct-to-video franchise.
On October 10, 2002, less than two months after Resurrection’s release, the official Halloween website posted a survey asking fans to voice their opinion on the next sequel. The survey listed several possible directions including a new Shape-less story à la Halloween III, the inclusion of a colleague or relative of Dr. Loomis, the discovery of a new Strode/Myers blood relative, the reintegration of the Halloween 4-6 continuity, and potentially abandoning Haddonfield for a new location. The poll closed just before Halloween that year.
Trancas International Pictures would spend the next several years developing potential screenplays for Halloween 9, none of which received a greenlight. “We actually had three commissioned screenplays for a sequel,” Malek Akkad told Fangoria. “One script touched on prequel elements and one was a return to Smith’s Grove. Jake Wade Wall had written one, Matt Venne did another and then we had two British writers to do the last. All of them touched on Smith’s Grove in some way. But when you get to part nine in this series, the storylines get convoluted and you have to have answers for all of these characters. There were so many different ways we could have gone, but it just didn’t feel right.”
Development on Halloween 9 stalled in early 2005 with the Weinsteins’ highly publicized split from Disney to form The Weinstein Company. Their exit deal stipulated that both Miramax and its library would stay at Disney, but that the Weinsteins would retain the Dimension brand. Halloween 9 efforts were suspended altogether later that year due to the tragic death of Moustapha Akkad and his daughter from a terrorist attack in Jordan. Malek Akkad, who had produced Halloweens 6-8, would assume his father’s supervisory role over the franchise. Development would resume the following year.
On June 4, 2006, rocker-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie was announced as the writer, director, producer, and music supervisor of Dimension’s next Halloween installment. This would not be Halloween 9 but a remake that completely re-envisioned John Carpenter and Debra Hill’s original story. Circa 2006, Zombie was on the rise as a filmmaker as was the Hollywood reboot machine. If remakes could breathe new life into dormant franchises like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Amityville Horror, and The Omen, what it could do for Halloween? With fan-favorites like House of 1,000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects under his belt, Zombie had already cemented a reputation as a grunge-horror visionary.
Zombie was then and remains today a controversial choice to remake Halloween. His entries stand as the most divisive in the series. Stylistically, Halloween ‘07 favors The Devil’s Rejects far more than Carpenter’s original, almost co-existing within the same world. Zombie’s cinematic universe isn’t one of shared continuity but of tone and atmosphere. It’s not difficult to imagine Tyler Mane’s Michael Myers bumping into the Firefly clan and possibly even getting along. For many fans, this was a welcome change to the series. For many others, it wasn’t.
“The fans will say whatever they will say, but they don’t know how this industry works,” Zombie told Scream Magazine. “They say, ‘Rob Zombie destroyed the Halloween franchise!’ No, I pulled the franchise out of direct-to-video world, my friend. That is where it was headed when I came onboard. They had been trying to make a movie for five years with ten different scripts, and it was going nowhere.”
NOT PURELY AND SIMPLY A REMAKE
Prior to Halloween ‘07, Zombie was an outspoken critic of Hollywood’s penchant for remakes, even calling it the worst thing a filmmaker can do. “Remaking films that were already great is kind of stupid,” he told DVD Talk in 2003. “I don’t really see the point. I get it a little more when people remake films that weren’t that great to begin with.” Yet by 2006 those views had changed as he began work on the remake. In an attempt to justify this about-face, Zombie explained that his film was not a carbon copy of Carpenter’s original but a complete reinvention. He has also cited his own oppositional defiant nature as a basis for remaking Halloween, telling Rue Morgue: “It’s almost because people say you shouldn’t do it, is why I have to do it.”
In early discussions with Miramax, Zombie suggested that Halloween ‘07 be split into two films that could be shot back-to-back. The first would serve as a prequel, beginning with Michael’s crimes as a child and ending with his escape from Smith’s Grove as an adult. The second film would encompass ground covered in the original Halloween with his return to Haddonfield to track down Laurie Strode. The studio rejected this two-film approach, instead forcing Zombie to create a hybrid prequel/remake.
“It felt like my first Halloween was really two movies jammed together. Too much information in too little time. I always felt like the first half was better, because it was my vision.”
Rob Zombie, Fangoria
Per the theatrical cut, Halloween ‘07 opens in Haddonfield on October 31 in a non-specific year of the past. Ten-year-old Michael Myers has just killed his pet rat with a pocket knife, though he withholds the cause of death when telling his mother. In the wake of his father’s passing, Deborah Myers has become a stripper at the Rabbit in Red lounge to support her family. Her live-in boyfriend, Ronnie, is terrible to everyone in the household – vulgar to Deborah, cruel to Michael, screaming at baby Angel, and l
usting after seventeen-year-old Judith. Michael adores his baby sister, whom he nicknames “Boo.”
Later on at school, Michael is bullied into a fight by two older students. The principal discovers a dead cat inside Michael’s bookbag along with disturbing photos of animal cruelty. Deborah is called in to discuss the matter, though Michael leaves school to track down one of the bullies from earlier, whom he beats to death while wearing a clown mask. That night, he brutally murders Ronnie, Judith, and her boyfriend - all while wearing Halloween masks.
Eleven months later, Michael is sentenced to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium under the care of Dr. Samuel Loomis, who tries to rehabilitate him. Michael shows no signs of progress and eventually ceases all verbal communication. His only interest seems to be in making paper Halloween masks. He also kills a nurse, resulting in further isolation from peers and staff. With this fifth murder, Deborah falls into a deep depression and commits suicide. Still only a toddler, Angel Myers is renamed Laurie and adopted by the Strodes of Haddonfield. Just prior to Halloween 2007, Michael escapes Smith’s Grove during an internal transfer, killing four security guards in the process. He murders a trucker for his jumpsuit before returning to his former family home, which is now decrepit. There he retrieves a weathered Halloween mask and kitchen knife, both items used in his infamous crimes years before.
Taking Shape Page 31
