Original subtitles

Death has come to your little town, Sharon.

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

It changed horror forever.

Black pale emotions.

There's nothing like it.

It just blew me away.

It certainly has become a classic.

Halloween ushered in modern horror.

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

Halloween and then it's after Halloween.

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

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

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

And those three told six other people.

And within three or four days, it was huge.

The film captured the imagination of a generation.

This movie gives me the creeps.

It is really scary.

I remember getting goosebumps.

It gave its producers a chart topping franchise

as unstoppable as its central character.

You can't kill the fucking man.

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

Michael Myers is purely and simply evil.

This is not a man.

With a minuscule budget, it would be running around

inside moving lights because there weren't enough lights.

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

A group of unknown actors.

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

And Jamie Lee Curtis is in the movie.

Well, who's Jamie Lee Curtis?

I was surprised I was cast, period.

And little hope of financial success.

The reviews came in.

They were awful.

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

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

Every scene is put together perfectly.

It is.

The magical movie.

It's an exercise in style.

There's something very beautiful about it.

The lighting.

The mask.

The music is unbelievable.

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

And scaring the hell out of audiences.

Happy Halloween.

I saw the boogeyman.

I saw him outside.

What do you look like?

The boogeyman.

With a thin storyline.

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

Every kid in America knows what the babysitter is.

A shoestring budget.

The pressures were tremendous.

Twenty-some days of shooting.

And a director barely out of film school.

Happened in here and then you leave.

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

We're just a bunch of kids.

We just wanted to make a movie.

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

It didn't feel like a movie.

This is going to be the worst film ever made.

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

I mean, who's going to watch that?

A short answer.

Everyone.

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

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

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

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

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

killed his sister in the creepy house down the street.

We're not supposed to go up there.

Ex-book out.

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

It seems absurd that at some time that seemed completely

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

Michael Myers is faceless and he's psychotic.

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

As Luma says, he is purely and simply evil.

What do we do?

He's been here once tonight.

I think he'll come back.

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

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

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

Makes the senseless acts all the more horrifying.

And it makes the poem feel like an unsafe place.

I'm babysitting the doils.

It's only three houses down.

We can keep each other comfortable.

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

Paul, drag me into the boys locker.

Exploring uncharted territory.

It's totally charged.

A large portion where we take place in daylight hours

with these characters running around being teenagers.

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

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

You had three choices for girls.

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

I forgot my chemistry book.

I have the cheerleader.

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

Or the snarky smart alec girl.

Hey, jerk!

Speak, kill!

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

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

I saw the boogeyman.

The children in their care are helplessly

aware of the boogeyman lurking in the shadows.

No, buddy boogey.

I believe you tell me.

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

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

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

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

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

but unhinged Dr. Loomis.

Maybe Ken Padko thinks his place is haunted.

He's this weird character.

Michael Myers isn't just a patient for him.

Michael Myers is a crusade.

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

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

whose mission in life is to shoot his patient.

You're listening to me.

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

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

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

To its thrilling finale.

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

That guy's going to kill somebody eventually.

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

as Michael Myers begins to get closer to these characters

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

He's getting closer.

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

It's this incredible tension relief.

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

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

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

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

Don't show it to them.

They can think they saw it.

Don't give them blood and gore.

Theater of the mind.

That formula would work tomorrow.

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

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

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

Here we were, this kind of guerrilla film unit.

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

Those days, kids making movies was rare.

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

I was right by my house.

Okay, I'll do it.

It was my first real speaking part in the film.

Don't get dressed.

It was everybody's big chance.

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

something that would really, really be great.

Carpenter delivered a film that transcended its meager budget.

This low budget gave the film certain, haunting,

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

That added to the success of it.

A finite number of people, one principle set

and the people were killed off one by one.

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

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

which added immeasurably to the film's

effectiveness and became a classic in its own right.

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

most recognizable movie scores of all time.

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

Come on, the music is unbelievable.

Unbelievable.

That he did that by himself.

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

I think he gets all the credit for this franchise.

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

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

have derailed his career before it had even started.

Between

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

the wall, looking at this night in humanly patient.

Over the past three decades, John Carpenter's Halloween

has become the gold standard of the slasher genre.

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

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

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

I think probably the film that influenced me the

most was a film called It Came From Outer Space.

It was in 3D of all things.

Back in 1953, I was a little tight.

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

Terrified me.

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

There's nothing going to happen to me here.

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

That's pretty cool.

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

I wanted to write movies.

That looks cool.

I was stupid and young.

He was filmmaking when he was a mere lad.

It was cool.

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

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

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

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

He was a director himself in many different

genres, producing and directing a slew of classics.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I would love to working on sound stages, having

that kind of control, that kind of style.

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

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

We had these guys out in space for 20 years,

and the women, and they were bombing planets.

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

catch the attention of a group of independent film investors.

Who agreed to back Carpenter's next film, an

urban reimagining of Howard Hulk's Rio Bravo.

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

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

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

This is exciting.

It's got energy.

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

I knew that this band had talent, and how could I use it?

Horror films were my first thought, because horror films are bread and butter,

in that they are easy to make and easy to sell.

He said, why don't we make a low-budget movie about these babysitters?

Because every girl in American can relate to babysitting,

and we'll have some killer out there stalking them.

And we'll call it the babysitter murders.

And I thought I'd have to do a sell on him.

He was a USC film school graduate, and all that.

I thought he was going to think it was too crass.

I wanted to make Westerns.

I didn't want to make this crap.

But Westerns died off.

So, you know, what are you going to do?

Because I wanted to direct movies, and I wanted to work.

I said, sure.

No problem.

And I told him the idea, and what do you think we can do a picture like this for?

Because you've got to shoot it.

And he threw out the figure of $300,000.

Well, I said, John, if you can do it for $300,000, I'll find a way to get the money.

Halloween was made for peanuts.

The budget was so small in the movie that they

had to have the actors wearing their own clothes.

By 1982, a movie like E.T., which is considered a low-budget movie,

is made for $10 million.

The young director had only two conditions.

I get Final Cut, and I get my name out of the title.

Both requests were unheard of for a novice filmmaker.

John Carpenter is a maverick.

I always call him Hollywood's Dark Star.

And I love the balls on Carpenter.

He had that cockiness, but he had the talent to back it up.

How dare I?

Well, I was a film school student.

I had studied a lot of film history, and my favorite directors.

I saw how they could brand themselves.

And I knew that it was a way to people remember me.

If you can do it for $300,000, I said you could have anything you wanted.

Had it been done by a major studio on a big budget, I think it's fairly certain he

wouldn't have had his name above the title.

Now I had to figure out I get the $300,000.

Ublans began to pursue financing for their film.

He set up a meeting with Mustafa Akad, a colleague and occasional business partner.

Ublans knew that Akad was on the lookout for projects to fund.

He said I have a film and a low budget and he said $300,000.

I was worried.

I mean, you get worried when the budget is low

and you get worried when the budget is high.

He couldn't even conceive that a movie could be made for $300,000.

I knew it could be because I had been around that world.

I said $300,000.

He said, well, yeah.

I said, what's the story about?

He said he's about a babysitter to be killed by the boogeyman.

I said to John, John, here's what I want you to do.

I want you to go in there and I'm going to range a meeting for you and Mustafa.

I want you to call me from his office when

you're sitting with him and just do that for me.

At everyone's request, I met Mustafa.

He said, why should I give you this movie?

How do I know you're going to be able to pull this off?

And I just simply said, you have to trust me.

When he spoke to me, he was speaking to me with images.

He was editing in front of me, so I was very impressed.

They called me from his office and I got on the phone.

And I proceeded to shame Mustafa, who was a very proud man.

And I little reset the moustache.

I know it's a lot of money and I know that you don't want to take the risk.

And with John sitting across from him, I knew he wouldn't back down.

And we got the $300,000.

With financing secured, Carpenter set out to begin building the team he needed to

bring the film in on a 21-day shooting schedule.

To that end, he made another bold request.

And lobby to have his girlfriend, 27-year-old Deborah

Hill, brought on board to produce the babysitter murders.

At the time, Hill's experience was limited to script

supervisor work on a handful of low-budget films.

One of my first jobs was a script supervisor

working on a movie called Goodbye, Norma Jean.

And then I met John Carpenter when he directed Assault on Precinct 13.

And I was his script supervisor and assistant editor.

So there's a lot of trust going on.

And I knew Deborah could handle the job.

It's alright with me.

If you think she's good, put her in there.

All of a sudden, it's John and Deborah are going to make a movie.

And of course, wait, she was script supervisor on the last picture.

So everybody's kind of looking at each other like, how's this going to work?

We were searching for a story.

You know, what could the story be?

And I think it was because of a Halloween time

that suddenly Halloween popped into my mind.

I got on the phone.

I called John Carpenter.

And I said, John, I told me the idea.

And I said, what if I told you I wanted to call it Halloween?

He got it immediately.

He got really excited.

He said, that's brilliant.

When he called and came up with a brilliant idea of using the themes of

Halloween to tell our story, it was like a gold mine.

And they looked into it and the assumption was, well,

somebody's made a movie called Halloween by now.

I mean, you know, it was 1977, 78.

Nobody had ever made a movie called Halloween.

Nobody had ever made a movie with Halloween in the title.

It was hard to believe there had never been a movie with that title before.

Hard to figure that out.

With a new title and a distinctive hook, Hill

and Carpenter began to work on the script.

We went to a list of scares.

You know, like, imagine if, you know, you're in bed with your boyfriend and he

goes down to get some water or a coke or something.

And he comes back with a sheet trying to pretend he's a ghost.

But it's not him.

And then we decided to weave the scares into the story.

I wrote the first draft and John came back with a pass for the Sam Loom's character.

The blackest guy.

The devil's eye.

So all the stuff about evil and everything is really John's.

The screenwriting pair went to great pains to

ground the film's characters and events in reality.

Deborah Hill wrote the girl's dialogue and she brought

a real palpable sense of what girls talked about.

The kind of thing that you usually didn't see in exploitation movies.

You didn't hear girls talk like girls.

You usually just saw girls who were hot.

Deborah really wrote dialogue that sounded like, you know, the real people.

This movie was just ordinary conversation that could happen in any city anywhere.

Which makes their killing all the more senseless and all the more realistic.

Once the real world was established, the unimaginable could exist.

Only now the mythic monster wouldn't rise from a coffin in Transylvania.

This time he would live right next door.

Modern horror films really began with Psycho.

Psycho began this trend with a maniac killer with shocking horror.

Before then horror movies were pretty much in agothic

situations with old castles and cobwebs and costume melodramas.

And they were the werewolves and mummies and they were

always related to castles and sort of Victorian romance.

And Psycho kind of moved it to the modern stage.

It literally had a motel and in back of it, here was this gothic house.

If Alfred Hitchcock moved horror away from the gothic and into the real world,

it was Carpenter's plan to turn realistic horror into modern myth.

So what am I going to do with this Halloween thing?

Well, I'll try to kick it into another place with the screenplay.

This killer masked a known faceless and a

force of nature, as opposed to a human being.

Into this narrative, Hill and Carpenter were of a number of inside references.

Hadn't Field was in fact the town in New Jersey where Deborah Hill grew up.

Sam Loomis was named after the character played by John Gavin in Hitchcock's Psycho.

Sheriff Lee Brackett shared a name with the screenwriter of Howard Hawk's Rio Bravo.

And the film's relentless antagonist was a tribute to a film distributor who

championed assault on Precinct 13 in the UK.

There was a man named Michael Myers who wanted to see me about the film.

And he did an incredible film festival.

And lo and behold, it became a great success.

Carpenter was very grateful and thought he'd

give him a very strange sort of thank you.

Because I guess the guy's like the sweetest guy in the world.

And he names this psychotic killer after him.

There'd been worse tributes, but yeah.

To help bring the script to life, Carpenter

recruited a childhood friend from Kentucky.

Tommy Lee Wallace would also move to Hollywood to try his hand at the movie business.

I was hired ostensibly as the production designer and also the editor.

Those two jobs don't work well together.

You know, you can forget sleep.

One of Wallace's first responsibilities was to develop the look for the film's killer.

The escaped mental patient Michael Myers referred to in the script only as the shape.

Wearing a mask depicting the blank neutral features of a man,

Wallace knew that the mask itself could make or break the film.

John instructed me to go out and find something that hopefully was plain and

didn't call attention to itself in some strange way.

The choices, Richard Nixon, Mr. Spock, Captain Kirk.

I also picked up an Emmett Kelly mask, which is the classic sad clown.

Enit Castle was there doing the modeling for us.

And he came out in that Emmett Kelly mask and

it was unmistakable that the effect was eerie.

Then Nick came out with the Captain Kirk mask.

He won by default because he was the plainest face.

We changed a lot.

We opened up the eye sockets.

We changed the hair.

Yanked off the sideburns.

And spray painted the whole thing white, fish belly white.

Oh, shit.

It was horrifying.

It was so scary that we immediately knew if nothing else our movie was going on.

Maybe nobody would go see it, but it was going to be scary.

Tommy Lee Wallace's creation exceeded everyone's expectations.

He's got the devil's eyes, the darkest eyes, but all around him is white.

That's enormously creepy.

It reflects sort of all your fears.

I mean, there are no features in it.

We sort of put onto it our own feelings about it.

It's almost like a Rorschach test.

With the film's central image in place, Wallace

turned his attention to his many other duties.

His next job to make Southern California look like Haddonfield, Illinois,

a fictional Midwest suburb.

The streets out there have these big California live oaks that although they're

not native to Haddonfield, Illinois, which doesn't even

exist, they were gnarly and strange and it didn't matter.

I think most of the audience bought that.

It was like, oh, spooky trees.

That's all we needed.

As the film's visuals took shape, the production

now needed a cinematographer to capture them.

He'll turn to Dean Candy, the director of photography she'd worked with on such

B-movies as Bear Knuckles and Satan's cheerleaders.

It was the time of the drive-in theater and B-movies had a place.

And so I was fortunate to be able to learn on a lot of these old, you know,

action movies.

You don't believe that they're going to kill us.

Come on, we've got to get it back.

There's no time.

Come on.

It was a great serendipitous moment to meet with John

and to go off on this adventure that became Halloween.

The filmmakers then had to cast the film.

With a minuscule budget, the famous faces were out of the question.

The film would rely on the uncertain shoulders of a 19-year-old newcomer,

but she would bring with her some serious horror pedigree.

In the spring of 1978, 30-year-old John Carpenter agreed to deliver a low-budget

horror film to producers urbanie blans and Mustafa Akad.

With his core crew in place, Carpenter turned his attention to the other side of

the lens, determined to fill his frame with attractive, professional,

and most importantly, affordable talent.

For the fun-loving, slightly bubble-headed Linda, Carpenter set his sights on PJ

Soles, an actress who'd impressed him two years earlier in Brian De Palma's Carrie.

I thought she was just great in Carrie, and just real great, great actress.

When I got the call to meet with a director, I was like, wow, I mean,

not a casting agent first.

You actually got to see the director.

So we proceeded to read a scene, and it was one

of the scenes where I had to say the word totally.

Three new cheers to learn the more.

The game is in the action.

I have to get my hair done at five, and the dance is eight.

I'll be totally wiped out.

I don't think they have enough to do tomorrow.

Totally.

And after I finished reading, he said, wow, you're the

only one that said the word totally the way I hear it.

And I said, are you kidding?

What other way is there to say totally?

And he said, well, that's why you got the part.

Totally.

Totally.

Well, she's totally not here today.

Among the cast of new faces, PJ's was the most recognizable.

PJ's Souls was the big star, really, and she was great fun.

Anything you like?

To cast the role of Annie Brackett, production didn't look far.

Nancy Kais, then Loomis, my ex-wife.

I had known her through Tommy Wallace.

He was a husband at the time.

And she was a very accomplished actress.

I really liked her.

I worked on a cell phone precinct 13.

And that's how I got involved.

You know, just through those connections.

I've got a shirt on.

That's all you ever think about.

For the central role of Laurie Strode, the producer Debra Hill, saw an

opportunity to give their scrappy little film something of a horror pedigree.

She suggested a 19-year-old unknown with a

unique connection to another horror classic.

Her mother was Janet Lee, the star of Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

Debra brought up Jimmy Lee Curtis.

She was under contracting universal.

And Debra thought it'd be a great idea to tie

into that whole Janet Lee Psycho business.

I'm sure that it was an added, kind of fun added bonus for them.

We saw a lot of girls to play the Laurie Strode character.

And Jamie was just so vulnerable and so real and so fresh.

And Jamie came in and she was 19 and she was really

sweet and just did a great reading so we cast her.

Was that simple?

Well, kiddo, I thought you had grew superstition.

I was surprised I was cast, period, because I'm an actor

and you can't ever imagine somebody's going to hire you.

Producer, when your plans run with the idea.

I'm going to have a picture of Jamie Lee Curtis here.

And a picture of Janet Lee here.

I want you to pose her just like her mother did in Psycho.

You know, there are two ways to sell a movie.

There's publicity and there's advertising

advertising, because money publicity is free.

And more effective, I might add.

Apart from her familial association with the Hitchcock classic, the casting seemed

an odd choice to the effervescent young actress.

And she didn't mind saying so.

I remember Jamie said, well, you have the

fun part and I went, well, you have the lead.

And that was just the coveted part, no matter what it is.

He had three choices for girls.

And the weird thing is I'm a combo of all three.

Lindsay is gone for the night.

I was a cheerleader in high school, so I am naturally a cheerleader.

And I'm naturally a sarcastic little bitch.

I hate a guy with a car, no sense of humor.

And then I am ultimately a good girl.

And so, in a weird way, they chose that one.

Which turned out to be good for me.

But you could have cast me as any of them.

Ultimately, Curtis came to understand the logic of carpenters casting.

I was a little worried because he used the word vulnerable.

I didn't really understand what it meant.

I understood the word.

But I really now understand that what John wanted was to be

vulnerable means that somebody else wants to take care of you.

That there's something about you that other people want to protect.

We're watching her, and we know something's going to happen to her.

We're powerless to help her.

But we're in her world, and we feel almost like we're alongside her.

Offsetting the largely team cast was the role of Dr. Sam Loomis.

Carpenter and Yablands agreed that a recognizable character actor was crucial.

It was another, or when Yablands suggested.

We should cast somebody as a psychiatrist that the audience would know.

He hasn't spoke the word in 15 years.

Dr. Loomis is the voice of exposition on Michael Myers history in Halloween.

And we get all of this great, really sort of, flowery dialogue about Michael Myers,

about his eyes, the devil's eyes, the darkest eyes.

And it helps to have a classically trained actor

and someone with a great voice playing this part.

The production approached the veteran horror

actors Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

I really got upset with that.

I said, look, you put those guys in this movie, and it's

just another Christopher Lee and another Peter Cushing movie.

What was in there?

I told you a muscle, heartache, heartache.

Years after we had originally asked Christopher

Lee to play the Sam Loomis role, we ran into him.

He said, I made the biggest mistake of my life.

I should have been in your film.

With both actors refusing the role, Yablands couldn't have been happier.

I had seen a movie called Will Penny, and there was a man in there who played,

he was a western romer, he was with a wild, crazy eye, he was a mad man,

and it was Donald Pleasance.

And they said, what do you think of Donald Pleasance?

John immediately liked it.

That's a great idea.

I said, call Donald Pleasance up and offer him the role.

I don't think I'll take it, but give it a try.

59-year-old Donald Pleasance, who had built an impressive CV appearing in major

films such as You Only Live Twice and The

Great Escape, agreed to meet with Carpenter.

I saw it on precinct 13, and I admired it a lot.

He said, my daughter is in a rock and roll band in London,

and she liked the music from your film Assault on Precinct 13.

But otherwise, I have no clue why I'm here, or who my character is.

So there are parts of the script which I can't accept.

I believe people are behaving in a way in which

they couldn't possibly in real life behave.

And that's always difficult, because if you're one of the

people, then you're the one who's going to look like an idiot.

It scared me to death, I didn't know what to say to him.

I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him

locked up because I realized that what was living

behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil.

Pleasins accepted the role, receiving $25,000 for five

days work, effectively doubling the film's casting budget.

That became the single big budget item, $25,000, which they came back to me and

asked if I would approve, and I said, you

can get Donald Pleasins, we'll get the $3.25.

That's why the budget was $3.25 instead of $3.00, by the way.

It was a big deal when he was working.

They brought in a trailer for Donald.

On the days he was working, there was a car that brought him to work.

I mean, I think they definitely made him feel special,

because he was the big star coming in to our little movie.

There was only one more role to fill, a role one could imagine anyone playing,

but Carpenter turned to a former film school friend, Nick Castle.

He said, you know, we haven't cast the killer.

Why don't you be the killer?

And I'm not an actor.

I can't act.

I'm horrible in front of a camera.

I'm really stiff.

And he went, no, no, we're going to have a mask over the guy the whole time.

You just walk around.

And I said, well, yeah, that's a good idea.

I get to go be on the set the whole time, see how people work.

It was actually, from that standpoint too, a really good education for me.

But most of the supporting cast, the film was a short-term job.

Excuse me, Laurie.

Oh, Mr. Brackett, I'm sorry, Mr. Brackett.

I was involved maybe seven or eight days.

You know, it's Halloween.

I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare, huh?

And it wasn't great money, trust me.

No, but what the heck?

I said, it's work.

I worked four days.

You worked three?

Do you have an idea?

You know what?

I don't remember.

To me, it felt like a very long time.

I think I remember the most of sitting there watching the scary movie.

I feel like I watched that movie for six months straight.

That's what it felt like at the time.

When I look back, okay, we weren't filming.

I was shocked that we'd only filmed that many days.

I thought we were filming forever on that movie, because it felt like it at the time.

Boogie Man is coming!

Look at him low!

That's the scene we shot the most, because I could

not fall on the pumpkin and have it break open.

So they saw that it would not crush the first time, so they cut a little hole in it.

It took like seven times for me to fall on that pumpkin before it finally broke.

Three big days.

Three days.

Be right back.

Don't get dressed.

The classic line I think I have is, don't get dressed.

I'll be right back.

Whether they had small or large parts, much of the cast were shocked by

Carpenter's casual attitude towards their performances.

Rehearsing?

This is a 21 day shoot.

I remember going up to him and saying, you know, what do you want from this

character, and am I giving you what you want?

And he said, just find your spot and say your line.

And at the time I was like, oh, how, you know, it's awful.

And it wasn't until, you know, years later when I realized, you know,

the reason you were cast in the film is because of you.

The philosophy I believe he operates from is, I hired

you because I believe you have it in you to give this.

So, give it.

With casting complete and the first day of shooting approaching, Carpenter and the

cinematographer Dean Candy began designing the film's more intricate sequences.

They quickly realized that Carpenter's grandiose plans

were about to collide with the reality of a 21 day shoot.

The young director would need something close to a miracle to meet his deadlines.

With a cast of fresh faces and one veteran character actor,

production on Halloween commenced in the spring of 1978.

But as John Carpenter and his crew descended on their Southern California

locations, they discovered the real impact of the film's tight schedule.

Well, very quickly, as we were shooting, I realized the

elaborate plans that I had would have to go by the wayside.

I would have to simplify this movie because we don't have the time.

Carpenter and his cinematographer Dean Candy made a decision to utilize a brand

new device that would keep the production

moving and give the film its signature look.

The device we actually used was the Panaglide,

which was a Panavision's version of the Steadicam.

He put the camera on a gyroscopic mount on an operator and he'd run around.

For a movie that had a budget of $300,000 and just a couple of days to shoot,

that ability to go on the fly to get these amazing looking shots really takes

Halloween from just a cheap horror movie into something

that is more artistic and really more effective.

So it enabled us to move the camera in a more fluid

way in a way that was not really possible before that.

And we could turn around and go upstairs and cross streets.

It was for absolutely free, so I just used it compulsively.

The Steadicam had been used to great effect two years earlier in John

Avaldson's Rocky, but where Avaldson used the invention to build momentum and ramp

up energy, Carpenter and his crew saw on the

device an opportunity to create suspense.

And so the idea that you could do a subjective

point of view and be in the killer's eyes.

But not have to have it be jittery and handheld.

Have it be this gliding, strange effect really

added hugely to the overall tension and eariness.

Also adding to that suspense was Dean Khandi's lighting.

Some of the techniques in the lighting was creating a sense of foreboding in the

outside areas, which we did with blue light.

In addition to the film's distinctive lighting scheme, Khandi

was responsible for several innovative in-camera tricks.

Suddenly, up from the darkness coming into the light would be this wide mask.

And that's enormously creepy.

The thought was, well, in the dark, as your eyes gradually get used to being

able to see you begin to see shapes and things in a dark room.

So I put a light that was very small and specifically aimed right at Michael

Meyer's face as he's hiding in the dark right next to Jamie Lee.

And then had it on a dimmer so that I could turn it

and slowly the light would expose him just barely.

And it's these little touches that Khandi was able to bring that elevate this movie

that was meant to be seen in a drive-in, a double bill while you're making out on

the backseat with your girlfriend into something that is real, honest,

artful cinema.

Carpenter's creativity made the most of the film's limited resources so that he

could spend the money where it counted most.

He made damn sure that three things happened, that the film got shot in

Panavision with the best lenses they had, that it was processed at MGM Labs,

which is the best around, and that it do its post-production at Goldwyn Sound,

which was the best Sound House in town.

That meant that our crappy little $300,000 movie could look like millions.

The meager budget wasn't the only challenge confronted by the production.

Obviously we're shooting in California, and it's supposed to be Illinois,

and it's supposed to be Halloween, so it's supposed to be October.

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

We would scatter these colored leaves around in the foreground, you know,

you know, the opening, couple of opening shots of the film.

And at the end of the shooting of the scene,

you know, the wind might pick up or whatever.

Deborah would yell, everybody, come on, get the leaves, and we would

gather every last leaf and put it back in the

bag, because it's hard to find maple leaves.

You know, crunchy, orangey maple leaves in California, so it was always really funny.

I'm not a leaf-gatherer, I'm an actress.

Everybody did every job.

There were job specifications, but then everybody did everybody's job.

I was doing set dressing and props and costumes,

because if you're just doing acting, it's so boring.

While the crew dealt with logistical problems behind the scenes, Halloween's

inexperienced cast was confronting its own issues in front of

the lens, especially its first-time star, Jamie Lee Curtis.

Jamie Lee had a lot to prove.

She had a big name, and she wanted to show that she had the talent to go with it,

and that she wasn't just skating by on who her parents were, but she was scared.

I had done a day's work on this movie, and was sitting home in my roommate,

answered the phone, and she said it's John Carpenter.

And it is often in show business that you get fired.

People get fired after a day or two of work.

John called her after the first day's shooting to let her know how happy he was

with the way things were going, and she thought she was being fired.

It was just very sweet.

He called to say that he was really happy.

How good he thought it was, and how happy he was of this first day's work.

And fuck good.

In contrast to Curtis's uncertainty was PJ Soles, who

eased Carpenter through directing his first nude scene.

The scene in the bedroom was interesting because John was more nervous than I was.

It wasn't in the script, but he wanted some kind of nudity.

And she shows her breasts in the script, so I just assumed she was okay to do it.

He approached me really kind of silently and embarrassed, and he said, is there any

way that we could show whatever you want, whatever you're comfortable with,

and will clear the room and just be me and Dean.

I don't ever remember having a conversation about the nude scene with PJ.

I put down the sheet and did a quick flash.

Anything you like?

That has become a pretty popular phrase.

See anything you like?

We shot it on that day.

It was wonderful.

It was wonderful.

It was great.

John was like, oh, that was great, but he didn't want to talk about it beyond that.

So I always thought it was very sweet and very

considerate, and I really liked that about John.

That's all bullshit.

One thing everyone could agree on.

The man behind the mask was decidedly unscary.

I always thought Michael Myers was really funny,

you know, because I know that it's Nick Castle.

Standing behind that mask.

I just remember him as being a young father, who happened

to be walking around in a latex mask with a knife.

He had to put a telephone cord around my neck and he just wouldn't pull it hard.

He kept tickling my throat.

And I was laughing most of the time and finally I said,

Nick, please, you're going to have to put some pressure on.

He said, I don't want to hurry.

I don't want to hurry.

I'm not an actor.

I don't do this all the time.

You're kind of concerned.

What are you doing to another human being, even if it is pretend?

I said, I know, but I have to die here.

So you're going to have to just pull a little harder.

And he just really never would.

I mean, ultimately he did it a little bit, but I really had to act.

You want to make it look real, but you also want

to make sure that she can live to act again.

And unlike his on-screen counterpart, Castle was decidedly vulnerable.

The worst scene I can remember was the one which

is supposedly outside of the insane asylum.

What I was supposed to do is jump onto the car and I went, okay, at the rehearsal,

I jump onto the car.

Good.

Let's go.

We're four in the morning at really, really cold.

And then John said, okay, turn on the hoses.

And I said, this is the rain scene.

So they turn on the hoses.

And that's when I realized that John had put me at

40 degrees in cold water, with just a hospital gun.

That was supposed to be my friend.

It was the most painful time I ever had, probably on a set.

I never tortured him.

He's lying to you.

Despite Castle's hard work, the film would ultimately require no less than five

people to dawn the iconic mask, including another

newcomer to portray the face behind the mask.

Up to this point in horror, the villains were colorful, larger than life characters.

Halloween pioneered the idea of an impenetrable, unknowable antagonist.

On the call sheet, it says the shape, which is right away kind of an interesting

insight, because there was something about that

as more of an idea, rather than a specific person.

The only other character I think who is similar to

Michael Myers in modern horror is the shark and jaws.

It's just an unstoppable thing.

How do you stop it?

You probably can.

It's going to keep coming back.

And it just does what it does.

And in this case, what it does is stop kids and kill them.

If you make Michael Myers more than Michael Myers, if you make him the shape,

if you make him the embodiment of evil and the boogie man, we will believe,

for instance, that if there's a window anywhere, he's already climbed through it.

Oh, no.

So Michael Myers, of course, the man who can catch you while you're running and

he's walking at a slow pace, has to be more than

just a man, because a man can't do those things.

We hear an awful lot about his character, but

when he appears, we don't see him very well.

And it's mindless killing.

Nothing really explains what Michael is.

So to make him the shape, we can also take human psychology out of it.

We can say that's not even an issue, as Luma says, he is purely and simply evil.

Nevertheless, a character did start to come through, largely due to the work of Castle.

Nick had a way of moving.

When he moved, he kind of glided around in a eerie way.

There wasn't a lot of direction per se.

I remember asking John initially, I had to walk across the street.

I said, so what do you want me to do?

You know, I'm trying to figure out what my method should be.

And he said, just walk across the street.

Okay, just walk, and it'll be fine.

Despite Castle's misgivings, he and Carpenter collaborated to successfully

give the film's faceless killer just the right amount of personality.

The thing I love is that he was able to actually make it a character.

He does some really good work in this.

There are a couple moments where he's just very effective.

Come on now.

The shape signature moment comes during the death of Linda's boyfriend,

Bob, played by John Graham.

Actually, opening the doors where he jumps out

at me with a knife was actually really scary.

The only scary moment on the set while I was there was that moment.

What played out as a relatively straightforward piece of action in the

script required a considerable amount of cinematic sleight of hand.

When you see my feet going off the ground, I'm actually being lifted up by two guys.

They had a two by four that I was sort of

hanging over, and two big guys lifted me up.

When he's pushing me up against the wall, I'm

standing on a box and just sort of standing up.

The long shot of me hanging on the wall, I'm actually holding the knife under my arm.

I think my best performance in the film are my feet.

The brilliant foot death, I think, is really classic.

You know, a little tragic little feet dying.

The scene became famous for a piece of body language direction from John Carpenter.

After he sticks Bob to the wall with the knife, he steps back and he cocks his head.

And it's like a dog.

There's something so removed from human about him at that point.

As an actor where you're expressionless, there's nothing really you bring to the

party other than however you wind up standing.

And John was the one that basically directed this character.

John could have been this character because he's the one that did things like,

okay, just tilt your head like this after you

stab him so that you're kind of admiring him.

It's creepy.

It's creepy.

That's the beauty of the film.

The shape represents another cinematic first.

The killer who will not die.

Horror fans were used to their classic monsters returning in sequel after sequel,

but never before was a seemingly human antagonist so hard to kill.

That's scary to see him coming back again and again.

That was one of the first films of that time to do that.

You can't kill the booking man.

Michael just slowly rises and turns his head.

And it's out of focus and it's in the back and it's perfect.

I don't know that John directed him to do that.

I think he figured out that little moment.

Though Castle had provided the shape with much of its on-screen personality,

when it became time for the climatic unmasking scene in which audiences briefly

glimpsed the adult Michael Myers, it was quickly

decided that Nick Castle's face just wouldn't do.

Michael Myers needed a face and a moment in the movie too, because Nick just didn't

look like what John's vision of Michael Myers should be too old for one thing.

A casting call was sent out to find the face behind the mask of evil.

21-year-old Tony Moran was interviewed.

John Carpenter said they were looking for somebody with an angelic face.

And that's the exact word he used.

And I'm like, well, okay.

I never thought I had an angelic face, but...

After a brief meeting with Carpenter and Erwin Jablans, Moran was cast.

When I got there, I talked to John Carpenter

a little bit and he had shown me the mask.

I didn't even know I had to wear a mask until I got to the set.

Nobody said anything about that.

The inexperienced young actor was impressed with the level of efficiency on set.

John Carpenter had everything meticulously planned down to centimeters, so that we

didn't have to do more than two or three takes.

It was an incredible experience.

It was a crazy, crazy day.

In total, apart from Moran and Castle, five people wore the mask in the film.

Stuntman, Jim Winber and Don the Outfit for several shots.

And Debra Hill even suited up for a one wide shot when no one else was available.

Well, I needed to go pick up some trick-or-treat shot second unit,

so not only was I going to direct the second unit, but

I brought the costume and I was going to be the shape.

I put this shape costume on, and of course, I'm so much tinier than Nick.

And in dailies, it was so hilarious because the shape had shrunk.

Lastly, the production designer Tommy Lee Wallace played

the shape for one of the film's most harrowing scenes.

I got my chance because we could move faster.

We found if I put on the outfit and the mask when we had

to break something, because I would have prepared that set.

I knew how to hit the thing to make it break

correctly on take one, rather than take four.

It was as simple as that.

And I thought I'd performed pretty well in that closet.

Carpenter's film was coming together and without the chaos and

strain that normally accompanied such shoestring productions.

It's a real confidence builder for the director to walk on the set and say,

here's the list, here's what we're doing today, and

it's going to start right over here with the 35mm lens.

I think let him pull his gun out.

Let's get to work.

And it gave everyone confidence that we could really pull this off.

Carpenter's confidence had got them this far, but that same confidence was about to

taste the limits of the small production, as Carpenter decided

to gamble the entire last day of filming on one single shot.

As the final day of shooting on Halloween drew near, John

Carpenter's film was shaping up to beat everything he'd hoped.

Just as importantly, the film was coming in on budget,

thanks to meticulous planning and creative shooting.

As the production wound to a close, Carpenter prepared his crew for the film's

most ambitious shot, a four-minute-long, single-tracking shot that would introduce

the audience to the young and psychotic Michael Myers.

The opening shot of Halloween, the long, continuous

camera move that starts across the street,

goes up to the house,

looks in the windows of the house, and then enters the house, and

then goes upstairs to see the young girl get killed.

It was the kind of shot that was notoriously difficult to achieve,

even in big-budget studio films like Orson Welles, Touch of Evil, famous for its

three-and-a-half-minute long unbroken shot.

For a low-budget horror film, it was unheard of.

With no money and no time left, Carpenter, who had

never attempted such a challenging shot, was determined.

It was going to be the opening of the film and needed to be the storytelling shot,

but also perhaps even remembered.

As Carpenter's camera team mapped out a way to capture the shot, the rest of the

cast and crew turned their attention to the dilapidated Myers house.

Pitching into paint and wallpaper portions of

the house to make it appear 15 years younger.

They finished the regular filming, and then the entire crew on the last day

of the movie, me included, White Wash, the old house in Pasadena, to make it look

like the house at the beginning of the movie.

John took me through, and I asked him to be very

precise about what the camera was going to do.

And believe me, if you pan the camera a little to the right or to the left,

just an old, skanky house, it was only nice through the lens.

Just that much wallpaper, just that little chandelier,

just that little table with the nice setting on it.

Everywhere else, it was just a really trashed out old house.

Once the house was restored, cinematographer Dean Candy worked out the

choreography of the shot with his Panaglide operator, Rhys Dela.

The difficulty was that as we approached the house and looked in the window,

you have to hide lights to light the various walls and kids watching television.

And then as you enter the house, the camera was now going to be looking at

the places where we had hidden all of the lights.

We go around the house and as we're coming in the back door to look the other

direction, all you hear on the soundtrack is the

crew switching lights in a different direction.

They're right ahead of us.

As we come in and everything is lit, we go up the

stairs and they're switching it back around again.

It was incredible.

There would be this sigh if they cut the camera,

because then you know that they didn't get the shot.

And you know people would be like running around inside

moving lights because there weren't enough lights.

It was all, it was amazing to watch.

Rhys Dela was running up and down steps with the Panaglide and it was killing him.

It was really wearing him out.

Still I performed take after take of the shot while wearing the £70 apparatus.

I tried it on and I would never wear it again.

You have to be really strong.

It's rough.

But it was like a new frontier.

It was beautiful.

We did it all the way through successfully

maybe once and then we broke it into pieces.

There are actually cuts in the shot.

We had a couple of excuses.

You know, the mask goes on to the camera.

That was a breaking place.

The scene ends with yet another actor playing

Michael Myers, this time as a six-year-old boy.

When I see the movie now, I saw myself kind of flinch a little bit.

It was a plastic mask with the rubber band around the ears.

And as he was taking it off, there were times where it was just painful.

That was the hardest part of the whole scene

was just taking off the mask without it hurting.

With the film's signature opening sequence in

the can, the film wrapped on time and on budget.

We didn't know what we had there.

I mean, it seemed like it was kind of suspenseful.

It was a movie.

I mean, it was a full movie and I was in it.

I mean, I was and it worked and I knew it worked.

Carpenter's demand for creative control seemed to have paid off.

One person's in control.

You don't have to stop and go and have a phone call, consult a committee,

have the group from the front office come down.

Have late night meetings.

The buck stops right there so you can get on with it.

Carpenter's planning on set revealed itself in the editing room where Wallace

began to assemble the carefully considered shots into a rough cut.

Halloween cut together pretty much like butter.

It was a great experience in the cutting room.

My first time in the driver's seat.

Every scene is put together perfectly.

There's no fat on this movie.

For one reason, I think they didn't have the money to make fat scenes.

In other words, I would bet very few scenes landed on the cutting room floor.

And that was great for a director.

In that sense, Carpenter was like Hitchcock who planned

every scene in his head, they say, before he shot.

And he did it because he had to.

What can I get by with here?

What can I play in one shot?

It's all necessity.

It's the mother I've invented.

But as tightly mapped out as the film was, several crucial

creative decisions were made during post-production.

Donald Pleasant shoots the shape, he falls off his balcony and lands in the yard.

And there's a scene where Donald Pleasant comes up to the balcony to look down.

And the shape's not there.

He says, there are two ways I can play this.

One is, oh my God, he's gone.

He's gone.

Or I knew this would happen.

I thought, wow, that's a choice.

Can you do both for me, Donald?

So he did.

And I knew this would happen was the chilling take.

The exact right ending is Loomis, this guy, this Ahab who is chasing his

white whale of Michael Myers, knows that in the end he can't stop him.

The shape's unstoppable nature was cemented in the film's final montage,

designed to send audiences out of the cinema

terrified that the shape was still out there.

The ending was manufactured to some degree in the cutting room.

It turned out to be an important choice because the whole idea of the shape never

dying was just totally reinforced by the idea that he could be anywhere.

So you have this string of shots that were really just grabbed just before a slate

would come in or just before the action would stop or just before an actor would

enter the frame, but it was usually just from...

This is just barely enough to have a shot, you know.

But that worked out pretty well.

The filmmakers were on a creative high as their film moved through post-production,

but critical reaction to Halloween would soon bring them back down to Earth.

There was an executive from a studio who was trying to get jobs.

I showed him my latest movie.

To Carpenter's surprise, the executive was unimpressed.

She said movies like this don't scare me.

They aren't scary.

Carpenter was stunned, but it taught him an important lesson.

The film's score had not yet been added.

And without it, the film was utterly ineffective.

Carpenter rolled up his sleeves and began

the considerable task of composing the score.

For inspiration, he recalled a lesson from his father, himself a musician.

The main theme is simply a piano version of a fine-four

time that my father taught me how to play when I was young.

On a pair of bongos.

It's really basic, which I think is why it's effective.

It's a piano score.

It's effective because it's repetitious, it's simple.

And that's about it.

It was done in three days.

The score literally transformed the film.

The picture with music obviously was a whole other entity.

It was just an incredible experience.

The music was another character.

It alerts you to danger, but it was used judiciously, and that's what I liked.

It wasn't overbearing.

I felt like it was the music box from hell.

It had a slight nursery feeling to the music, but then

it was electronic and metallic and kind of insistent.

It's about building the tension with the repetitive, simplistic nature of the music.

And it's maybe the greatest horror score of all time,

and it's one of the greatest cinema scores of all time.

You hear that theme and you know exactly what it is that you're in for.

His vision and his sense of music match.

It's not overpowering.

It's just right below the level of subconscious.

The music freaked me out.

Now I hear that I think that music is so genius.

It's unbelievable.

When I saw it with the music, it was terrifying.

And the sound effects, and I saw it on the big screen.

It was a dramatic shift in my point of view.

I truly believe he was sitting at home and went...

I really do think he just sat there.

Carpenter saw his role of composer as a pragmatic decision.

I wrote and performed the music for Halloween because I'm cheap and I'm fast.

As you can imagine, after months in the

cutting room, I was getting pretty sick of it.

Because... But man, effective.

Are you kidding?

You know, I hear it on the street now in ringtones.

I've subsequently taken it off, but I used to, my phone

would ring and you'd hear the Halloween theme song.

You know, it's impressive.

Carpenter once again screened the film for

the previously unimpressed studio executive.

Six months later, with the music in place, she came back and

said it was one of the scariest movies that she had ever seen.

After I put the music on it, she had seen it again and said, I was really wrong.

And I said, that's okay.

I don't know.

That's all right.

But it shows the effective music.

The completed film made its premiere in October 1978, but film distribution was

very different in the late 70s than it is today.

When Halloween premiered in 1978, it was given this sort of very piecemeal release.

Meaning you start in California and you have a certain amount of prints.

You show them in Los Angeles.

And they move them to San Diego.

Then they move them to Phoenix.

They move them around the country.

You might open a picture in New York City and it might

not find its way into Kansas City for two or three months.

It's not like today where a film opens in, you know, 3,000 theaters.

And it's the one film you go see that weekend.

It was a very different time.

The United States only 40 or 50 years ago, each market was a whirl into itself.

But as the film moved from one city to the next,

it only achieved a pile of negative reviews.

The reviews came in, they were awful.

You know, just putting the movie down.

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

And I got a call from Deborah and she said, well, this one didn't make it.

The lowest point for the filmmakers came during a screening at USC's film school

where Carpenter had studied what they had hoped to be the triumphant return of one

of its own turned out to be a less than warm reception.

We all went down and they ran the movie for an audience of students.

And then afterwards we sat on the stage and we answered questions regarding it.

And there was one guy who raised his hand.

And John said, yes, you in the back.

And the guy said, well, first of all, why in the world, here you are a film

student, why in the world would you make that kind of movie?

I mean, this is just a low-class, trashy horror film.

And with that he got up and left.

And as Halloween continued to stumble from market to market,

most critics seemed to agree with the outrage student.

But two significant reviews were about to transform Halloween from a low-budget

failure into a word-of-mouth box office phenomenon.

In October of 1978, John Carpenter's Halloween was released

on an unsuspecting audience who promptly ignored it.

I think we were a little disappointed in the very beginning.

I'm a little bit embarrassed and ashamed.

I actually got an invitation to the premiere.

I threw it away.

Because I figured it's a horror flick with a guy with a mask.

I mean, who's going to watch that?

Limping along a regional release pattern one city at a

time, the film was shaping up to be a box office bomb.

As the receipts trickled in, its makers accepted its fate.

As far as I knew, Halloween was just another movie I could show as something

for my reel, but was not particularly successful at the box office.

Writing off the film as little more than another

entry on their CVs, the cast and crew moved on.

I did a love boat episode with my mother.

I did a Charlie's Angels where I played a pro golfer.

Alan Arkish says he saw Halloween and wanted me

to play Riff Randall in rock and roll high school.

The film also led to an unusual follow-up job for its director.

I got Elvis right after I had finished directing

Halloween because they said well he knows music.

Because he did the music to Halloween so he'll

know music and he'll be able to direct this.

As Halloween's theatrical run began to peter out, its cast, crew and financiers

were all ready to write it off as a low-budget blip on the Hollywood radar.

But in late 1978, two critics rescued the film from its inglorious fate.

The first was Tom Allen from The Village Voice.

Halloween didn't really take off until The Village Voice critic Tom Allen reviewed it

and said, you know, just what a superb thriller

it was, how perfectly executed the film was.

Soon after Roger Ebert gave Halloween four stars

favorably comparing the film to Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho.

I remember doing an interview with Roger Ebert who had

seen it and I could figure out why he's talking to me.

What does he care about?

He's very flattering about the movie and I thought well that's nice.

The glowing glowing glowing reviews of the picture, they got it.

They both raved about it and then the snowball

just kind of started rolling and rolling.

I remember the grosses very well, they were

about two and three hundred dollars per theater.

Word quickly sprayed that this low-budget horror film was in fact something special.

And by the weekend, it was two and three thousand dollars.

It was the most amazing example, the power of word of mouth.

You know, Halloween became this huge hit and it was the movie everybody had to say.

Batman, that everybody who would see that film that

night, got on the phone and told three other people.

And those three told six other people.

And with the three or four days, it was huge.

I was so excited.

I knew we had something special.

Your plans might have known but Carpenter was still in the dark.

Apparently it grew and it grew without me.

I didn't know about it.

And finally a movie company came by and said well we want to make movies with you.

So I figured something's up here because they don't just do that.

So I must have made somebody some money.

Eventually the cast and crew were able to witness the public's reaction first hand.

I did go to see Halloween in a regular theatre and

I was sitting in the theatre and I'm watching it.

I'm like oh my god, this thing is really really good.

This is a really scary movie, you know.

And everybody in the audience was screaming and stuff and I was just blown away.

I'll never forget, there was a scene where Jamie Lee Curtis keeps dropping the knife,

you know.

And if she dropped it for the third time, some guy in the back yelled out.

You deserved to die.

That's how involved the audience was.

John puts you up on the screen.

That's not Jamie being stalked by a shape.

That's you.

And people are cheering.

When Michael gets stabbed for the first time in the

neck, people are actually cheering because they're saved.

Because it was done in a very sort of pure and stylish way.

Not obviously exploitation.

That's what made the audience really identify with the characters and the situation.

All of those details accumulate and give you a sense of confidence so that from

frame one in Halloween, you know you're watching a real well told story.

Although Halloween's success was rooted in its craftsmanship and attention to detail,

today fans delight in its handmade feel and enjoy

spotting the occasional flaw inside the gym.

Everyone talks about how this movie is so perfect,

but it's really riddled with imperfections.

There was one scene with a palm tree in the background.

There's a scene in Halloween where after Michael steps out from behind the bush,

Annie goes walking over and says, and then of course Michael's gone.

And then she turns to Laurie and says, you know, so-and-so wants to talk with you.

Come on over here.

And as she's doing it, you just sees John Carpenter's smoke drifting into the frame.

And it's just one of those things where you go,

couldn't you have just taken that shot that again?

As the girls are finally walking away from the bush, you see one of the crew members'

heads pop up over the bush in the background.

What are you gonna do?

Low budget gaffes notwithstanding, the film was a bona fide hit.

Eventually, Halloween would gross over $50 million and it rained for over a decade as

the most profitable independent film in history.

But what the film's cast and crew viewed at the time

as a happy ending was in fact only the beginning.

Everything changed for everybody after Halloween.

John Carpenter, all of a sudden he had options.

Deborah Hill, all of a sudden finds doors

opened up to her, she's able to move forward.

Jamie Lee Curtis is totally thrust into the spotlight as the Scream Queen.

I had never prepared to be that.

It wasn't something I liked.

I don't like those kind of movies.

I'm not a fan of them.

But obviously I wrote that train to the degree that I did, made a little money,

and certainly became known for that.

But these sort of create the foundation of a career that she

was able to sort of climb out of and do something bigger.

As the film's cast and crew graduated to larger budgets and flourishing careers,

they didn't quite realise just what they've done to the horror genre.

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

Halloween and then it's after Halloween.

People didn't only take the ideas that Halloween put forth, it also took the idea

of, well, we're going to set a horror film on a holiday.

So we had prom night, Friday the 13th, happy birthday to me.

You know, the fact that there wasn't an Arbor Day movie surprises me, because,

you know, there's an axe that comes naturally with that one.

But every holiday that people could sort of graduation day even, every holiday,

any moment on the calendar that somebody

could drench in blood, they drenched in blood.

I think maybe, because Halloween was so cheap to make and it made a bunch of

money, a lot of people copied it because they could see dollars.

I think it was a cheap way of making a lot of money.

Some they copied a bunch of things about it.

After a monstrously successful release, the film's producers began to entertain

the idea of continuing the story of Laurie Strode and her relentless pursuer.

Jamie Lee Curtis decided to make 1981's Halloween 2, her Scream Queen Swan Song.

Despite writing the sequel's script, John

Carpenter had no interest in directing a follow-up.

And it was at this point in the franchise history that the mythology came up around

Halloween that Michael was really Laurie Strode's brother.

And I couldn't think of anything to do, so I didn't do a very good job with it.

There was some attempt to put some meat on the bones of

this very almost minimalist thriller that Halloween was.

And in some ways, I think that actually was ruined in the Halloween films,

because suddenly now we're starting to understand what drives Michael.

He's out to teach, he just out to kill his sister.

But it was successful and they wanted to make another one.

And another one, and another one.

Fed by a fan base, hankering for more, the franchise

cranked out four more installments over the next 15 years.

With the exception of Halloween 3, each film added more and more flesh to the

bones of a character, whose initial appeal was his complete lack of background.

Jamie Lee Curtis no longer wants to be involved.

Oh, he's out to kill his niece.

You know, you take away some of the specialness of Michael Myers when you

start ascribing human motives to him, and they're

well, he's just killing his family members.

But the increasingly absurd plot twists didn't phase Donald Pleasens.

He'd grown comfortable in the role he'd crafted

over five days of shooting back in 1978.

Mustafa said that Donald Pleasens told him he would do 22 Halloween movies.

So Mustafa said, okay, if you do 22, I'll do 22.

However, it was not to be.

The film series Beloved Star died on the 2nd of February

1995, eight months before Halloween 6 was due to be released.

He was a generous, funny, delightful human being.

Donald Pleasens was such an asset to that series and really brought something that

people overlook because they always think it's about Michael.

But, you know, there's a little bit of Dr. Loomis and everybody.

He's the guy that's out to save the world.

On the 20th anniversary of the original film, the idea for

the seventh installment came from Laurie Stode herself.

I said, let's make a movie where she makes a moment's choice.

I'm willing to fight for my life because to live

another minute in fear is no life and I'd rather die.

And let's frickin' end it.

Halloween H20 received the best review since the original film was released in 1978.

And the return of Curtis gave the film a cache missing from subsequent installments.

It was interesting to see an actor first take on what

is essentially part seven of horror series again.

And I think without her, I don't think that

the series ever would have really came back.

Although Curtis thought she was giving the franchise some much needed closure,

she soon found herself relearning the lessons of the first film.

You can't kill the boogeyman.

There was something in the contract that says they can never kill Michael Myers.

They never told me.

I said, guys, this entire movie is predicated on the fact that I chop his head off.

So there is no possibility that he could ever come back.

I'm not gonna string along an audience again.

I've kind of spent 20 years having people go.

Why'd you drop the scissors?

Why'd you drop the thing?

Why'd you drop the knife?

They said, okay, so if you think he's dead and the audience thinks he's dead,

but he's not dead, is that good enough for you?

So I thought, uh, yeah, I guess?

Yes?

2002's Halloween Resurrection would be the last film produced by Mustafa Akad.

Tragedy struck on the 11th of November, 2005, when Mustafa and his daughter,

Rema, were killed by a suicide bomber in a hotel lobby in Jordan.

Mustafa was a shrewd man, and he had incredible intuition.

Mustafa was one of the most intelligent men I've ever known.

He had incredible instincts.

Sadly, Mustafa Akad wasn't the only member of the original team who died in 2005.

The same year, Deborah Hill succumbed to cancer at the age of 54.

She left behind a legacy and an example from which

women in Hollywood draw inspiration to this day.

When I think about Deborah, I think she was really a pioneer.

She was one of my heroes.

She really made inroads for women in the industry, because

she was one of the first women producers and so good at it.

It was her natural calling.

Deborah and I were best girlfriends.

I wouldn't be sitting here today if it weren't for Deborah Hill.

I'm just truly, truly to my core grateful for that

opportunity because it gave me everything I have.

As the film approached its 30th year, it seemed

as if the franchise had finally run out of steam.

But as the horror genre entered the 21st century, a wildly successful remake room

was reimagining nearly every horror film of the 1970s.

The Halloween franchise was not immune.

Taking up the challenge was the critically acclaimed director Rob Zombie.

If only Halloween had ever existed the single film, it would seem kind of insane.

But the way I looked at it was there was the one classic film, and with each

sequel, I felt like they've ruined it more and more and more

until it felt so far away from what I ever loved about it.

After eight films spanning four decades, Zombie's Challenge in 2007 was to find a

new place to take the franchise, his destination inside

the mind of the previously unknowable Michael Myers.

Why don't we just make the whole movie about him?

The whole movie, he's our lead character.

He's not a secondary character.

And that was really the approach I took.

Zombie's interpretation of the Michael Myers

legend received a cool response from critics.

As a movie on its own, it might have worked when you're calling it Halloween,

when you have a character named Michael Myers who's wearing that mask.

It's a missed opportunity.

Zombie himself encountered a somewhat chilly reaction from Carpenter.

You know, I call them up.

In the conversation, pretty much went exactly like this.

I was like, hey, John, it's Rob.

Hey, just want to tell you, I'm doing a remake of Halloween.

And then there's like a weird sign that goes, so what do you want me to say?

I don't want you to say anything, I just want to tell you.

It was okay.

Have fun with it.

Okay.

Halloween is Halloween.

Why would anybody want to touch that?

To be remade, to have a movie of mine remade is very flattering.

And some of these remakes, I get to collect a check, which is even nicer.

Rob Zombie's Halloween grossed over $80 million

worldwide, possibly starting the cycle all over again.

A sequel was released in 2009.

The fans found their ways to the sequels.

They found their ways to other directors' movies, which imitated this movie.

And they're welcome to it.

Just acknowledge this.

John Carpenter's Halloween is the master of that kind of a genre.

His creators had known for some time that there was no stopping Michael Myers.

What's the argument?

As a matter of fact, it was.

And in recent years, the cast and crew of the original film

have discovered that that's truer than they'd ever imagined.

There are conventions that are just dedicated to Halloween, where you can meet

the actors from every single movie, you can debate the finer details of

Michael Myers' very complicated, weird chronology and mythology.

And then people do things like build the Myers house.

We replicated the railing here and the bottom down here.

We got that exactly replicated like the original house.

I built a life-size replica of John Carpenter's Myers house from Halloween.

Wow, these people are really serious, and they really,

really love and adore this movie and this whole franchise.

As its creators have watched the phenomenon endure, they're only now

beginning to understand the impact of what they

created over 21 days in the spring of 1978.

Deeply proud of it.

I think it deserves all the praise.

It's really a small little film.

It's like a work of art.

It was just the magic of everyone coming together.

The fact that the interest in it has lasted this long.

And that's really sort of the magic of film in general.

And the great satisfaction of being able to

work on films like that for people like myself.

It was a movie that I made when I was 30 years old.

So it's part of my past.

It will always be there.

I've made my piece with it sure.

Forever I will be grateful to Halloween.

I now never have to dress up on Halloween.

I get to just go as me.

I think it's an extraordinary movie.

And it has given me my life.

I don't think you ought to question too much about the legacy of Halloween.

It just is.

Let it be.

Don't question it.

It might go away.