Original subtitles

The decision to bring Michael Myers back to the Halloween series was made by the

executive producer Mustaf Larkod, and I think he felt that part three had

strayed a bit from what made the Halloween series the sort of the gem that it was,

and they tried something experimental, which had its own value, but in

retrospect, I think they felt Michael Myers really was the

Halloween series and they needed a way to bring him back.

There was kind of an impasse on how to move forward, and there was a couple

potential treatments and takes on it, and it just was sort of dead in the water,

and there wasn't that much appetite to do another one after Season of the Witch.

There was an earlier treatment that I believe John and Derber were working on.

There was some discussion, and there was sort

of an impasse on how to move forward with it.

You know, because of the success of the first one, we always, everyone we do,

we always go back, we like to go back to the first one.

I mean, that's because that's the success.

We did two, it was quite a success.

And then number three, we had an argument, let's change a little bit.

I mean, at the time the sequels was not even, there was no sequels.

I mean, we started kind of a sequels on this.

So number three, they said, well, let's change, let's not change the story,

and we did number three without Michael Myers.

And it was not as successful.

So on four, I took it over and went back to the basics of number one.

And I've been working with my writing partner, Al McElroy, on another project,

and he was a fan, but also a great, great genre writer.

The scripts they had didn't work, and they were running

out of time because it was a writer's strike coming.

And he came to me and said, you know, would I look at this project?

Could I come on board and take a look at it?

And we sat down and put a pitch together that we thought would make Amoastif happy

and solve his problems, but also create a

really, a suspense story that we wanted to make.

So I went in and pitched our own story, and they really sort of leapt at it.

And we had 11 days to do the script.

So I sort of jumped in with both feet and just ran with it.

I mean, and I loved it because Halloween, too, had been one of the great experiences

for me when I was in college, going to see that with friends.

So the chance to bring the shape back to life was a dream come true for me.

We engage Paul Freeman to produce.

Paul Freeman is a great producer, but most of his experience has been,

for the most part, in TV.

And the good side of that is he just ran a really tight well of machine.

Moving to Utah was all on me.

I had shot a couple of movies there, and I knew that

there was a good acting pool, and a good shooting crew.

And it could be done as cheap, done as cheap, cheaper than doing it in LA.

The effort to recreate Hadenfield in Salt Lake City was not

problematic for me because I thought it was a perfect look.

The town of Hadenfield was really the character that Alan and I felt so committed to.

John Carpenter founded Pasadena.

We found our version in Salt Lake City, but everything that I wanted, the corn

fields, the barns, the houses, the suburban streets, the school,

everything was there.

We just had to avoid the mountains.

My original script for Halloween 4, the opening scene

was a shot down the hospital quarter, looking at a wall.

And it was sort of a beat and a beat.

And then the explosion of the wall was just burst open from that blast,

and you would see Dr. Loomis's body flying backwards, you know, kind of in a flame,

and almost right directly at the camera.

And then you would cut, so you would know he

was blasted out of that room and survived.

We decided only to reference the first movie, and I think the reason was we

didn't want to get sort of tied up with a lot of logic police questions about

Michael and exactly what happened to Dr. Loomis, but

exactly what happened at the end of the hospital.

I mean, Alan studied it very carefully, so we knew that if we were going to hit

any landmines or make any big mistakes, but I didn't really want to be influenced

artistically by anything other than Halloween 1.

Which I thought, that's what I was really trying

to recapture was the spirit of that first movie.

I still wish that we'd gone back and done that shot, because I think it would have

been a great tie-in to the continuity of the first film.

And I wish we had done that, because I just visually I

think it would have been a stunning opening for the movie.

We didn't feel it was critical to have the Myers house, because we had the

penitentiary, the criminalist, Insanis Island, where Michael had been for ten years.

And that was his house.

In our movie, that was where Michael lived, and that's where he was.

So we needed to effectively break him out of

that asylum and set him loose on head and field.

And that took some careful plotting and some careful thinking to see, you know,

how do you free Michael Myers?

And of course, the prison transfer idea was what

became the vehicle, the engine to get Michael out.

Yeah, this is where society dumps its worst nightmare.

Every movie in the history of the world has got their exposition scene,

because you've got to get that out of the way.

You know, you've got to let the audience get oriented.

And when we went down the elevator in the criminal

asylum, we got it all done in one elevator ride.

It's better to just get it out of the way it's been ten years.

He's been locked up.

He murdered sixteen people, maybe more, trying to get to his sister.

Nearly got it, too.

But his doctor of old people shot him six times.

Then he set him on fire.

Both of them nearly burnt at that.

It's a set up of the entire movie.

It's very dark, and it's raining, and it's that other thing.

And he said, and he basically said, well, I want this

guy to be really like edgy, you know what I mean?

Welcome to Hell.

We had a sequence where the guard in the criminal asylum takes our personnel down

through a hallway where there are other inmates,

serial killers, people from the criminally insane.

They were pretty good sequences, and they were nice details.

But for the sake of the overall pace of the

movie, it was just too much time setting up story.

And we needed to get going.

So we just kind of pulled those shots out and got right down to Michael.

We went all the way to New York City to find Daniel Harris.

I literally just went on an audition and walked in and read for casting,

and I think I had to cry in a scene.

It was like, scream for me, cry for me, and read the scenes.

And when she came in, she just captivated the room.

She was young, but also very precocious.

She was very poised.

She was very mature.

And we felt that with all the things that we were going to be asking of this young

actor, that she was going to be able to handle it

without being, in any way, adversely affected by it.

And she just had the confidence as a kid to do it.

I was so excited to be making a movie, because it was my first movie.

And they treated me like I was a little adult.

I mean, there really was no like, oh, she's a kid, you need to treat her like a kid.

I mean, even the stuff that we did like the stunts and just sort of emotional stuff.

I was very much a little 40-year-old trapped in this like little shrimp of a body.

But I only had, was only allowed to see the first one.

So I hadn't seen any of the other ones till I actually got much older.

We really made sure that she was cared for and knew what she was doing.

But at the same time, you know, wasn't exposed

to a lot of violence or anything like that.

Everybody on set, actually all the special effects guys, like we would be in the

trailer and they would be showing me how things were done.

And so I think they wanted to make sure that I wasn't too

traumatized as a child, to the best that they possibly could.

And it didn't really bother me.

It's Halloween.

I mean, don't you want to get dressed up in a really scary costume and get some candy?

The interesting thing with Ellie Cornell was that we were down to the last two or

three girls who we thought could play that part.

And there was some disagreement between myself

and Mustafa and the galaxy camp and Alan.

And we had different points of view about which way we should go.

And so what I finally persuaded Mustafa to do is do a proper screen test.

And in those days we did it on film in 35 millimeter.

And then we projected those dailies in a theater.

I loved the script and I loved the character of Rachel Carruthers.

She was smart and she stuck to her guns and she was a fighter.

Ellie was very real and I felt that she came from Hadenfield and I felt like she

represented a kind of wholesome quality that was going to get our empathy.

And our sympathy as a movie went along.

And a lot of 80s, you know, sort of screen

movies would have very, very glamorous leads.

And I never felt it was quite real to the town that they were from.

And when we projected the film in the theater,

then Mustafa sort of understood my point of view.

Danielle and I spent most of the shoot together day or night.

I mean, honestly, her and her mom and I hung out a lot together.

So we had the closest relationship for sure.

Why is it up to what men want, Rachel?

Or really won't be the last man you lose to another woman?

Everyone thinks we've got this long running feud or something, but it's pretty funny.

We don't.

She's a sweetie.

I was able to bring in definitely my own budding sexuality.

I think that there's a sassiness about being

that age that is kind of fun and naughty.

And so I think I was able to bring in some, you know, a little bit of back talk.

That kind of young, you know, girl who's, you know, I'm taller than you are.

My boobs are bigger than your boobs.

You know, the guy's interested in me.

I was kind of, you know, finding that like, that power.

Brady, are you coming in or what?

Kathleen, I knew, I knew in high school and she was like always the hottest girl.

Everyone always was always chasing her.

And I never even was even on the radar.

And so I thought this has been great.

And Ellie, I mean, I just loved Ellie.

She was like the hottest, she was the star.

I remember Dwight had Sasha and I go off in practice, practice the kissing before

the drugstore, which I just thought was hilarious.

He's a jokester.

We really needed help getting into these scenes.

So I kind of pushed that along, yeah.

I think Brady was trying to feel his wings of a player.

I don't think he was a player.

I think he wanted to see if he had any game whatsoever.

And I think that might have been his first foray into game.

He was having a blast.

And it was fun because we were kind of playing him a little bit.

And he was playing us a little bit.

And yeah, life imitated art a little bit.

But it was all in good fun.

And nobody got their feelings heard or tweaked.

But it was great.

It was like, oh, so you're hanging out with her at lunch today, all right?

Got it.

Well, I'll just let you get back to Little Miss Hot Panties.

When I think about how we did the love scene in front of

Fireplace, they got me to go as far as they could to keep it PG.

It was our first scene.

We arrived that night.

We did some rehearsing that night.

And the next day, we did that scene.

And it was really nervous about it.

But then an hour-ish and a half later, while the lights are there and the grips

are there and the cameras there, I was like, can you just get off me now?

It just turned into, you know, it was numbed out.

But it was exceptional.

It was good.

Cops do it by the book, but the sheriff's daughter, she does it by the fireplace.

And I think the shirt that cops do it by the book,

I think that was designed by Bucky, the prop master.

What are you, Jeff?

And the prop guy was, of course, in charge of putting

together the helmets and all the uniforms that went with that.

I just think it was an inside joke.

Bucky tried to get himself into everywhere that Bucky could get himself.

Including maybe some of the crew, but who knows?

He was a pretty funny guy.

We were all really close because it's a pretty isolated circumstance to,

you know, to be on a set that long together.

At the time I auditioned for a character named Kyle, which was the Frankenstein kid

in the school when they were teasing Jamie about her mom being dead.

Jamie's an orphan.

I didn't get that a couple days later.

Agent called me and said, hey, they liked you,

but they don't want you to play that character.

They actually want you to play a little Michael.

And it was six, seven hours of literally, Eric, come stand in front of this mirror.

There's three scenes that I'm in in Halloween for.

The first one was when they do the exterior and it says Halloween,

and it has the kids chasing after the school bus.

I'm the last kid in the line of kids chasing after the bus.

And then after that, they drove me down the street and put me in the clown costume

and they took pictures of me in the clown costume.

And that's actually in the shoe box scene.

We went over to the events and shot the exterior

events and I'm actually in that scene as well.

But for the first 10, 15 years after I found that, I had no idea how significant

that was other than I was in this movie for three seconds back in 1988.

I worked at Don Post Studios and we made the original mask for Halloween.

And this producer, he brought a mask out for me and looked at it.

It was pink with white hair.

And I thought, that isn't quite the mask, but we'll work around it, you know?

So I got hired.

I asked Don Post, Jr. when he redid it for us to use the Shatter Mode and actually

use William Shatter because we wanted the actual true face.

I didn't get a chance to see those masks until we actually got on set.

I opened a box and there were six of them.

And they were pink with white hair.

And I was going, this is not right, it's supposed to be white with brown hair.

And I told the producer that it should be changed.

I remember somebody saying at some point, Michael Myers doesn't have blonde hair.

The mask is brown and there was some kind of scrambling and shit going on.

There was tremendous upheaval about it.

A lot of discussion, a lot of committee meetings about the mask, the mask.

And I had to actually repaint the mask white and streak tip the white hair brown

to reverse it to make it look like Michael Myers.

And that's why it had that bumpy texture to it.

There's always issues with the masks, always, and I think that's created a whole

folklore to itself, you know, getting these masks and all the different looks.

There's a scene in the school, you can see

directly, that it's a pink mask with white hair.

I still believe that the reason that mask in the throwing alumas through the door in

the elementary school is off is because someone ran to the prop

truck at four in the morning and brought in the wrong mask.

And everybody was too overtired to catch it.

I really think that was a mistake.

And how do we more time or money, we probably should have gone back and reshot it.

My communication regarding the activity of Michael Myers

was always through Fred Lerner, the stunt coordinator.

He was a member of the Stuntman Association and he had the show and he

knew me and just asked me if I wanted to do it.

You know, I had one situation with our director Dwight Little.

I didn't have a lot of interaction with him.

But during the first part when we were shooting in the gas station and I was

supposed to stand behind the counter and Donald Pleasant shoots me.

He put a rope around me with a jerk line so that when Donald actually shot me,

he could pull me right out of frame.

That would be a nice clean cut.

And when we did that, the director wanted me to take a reaction.

And I thought it was kind of strange, but I did.

Next time we did the shot.

Second take, I took shot, ran, fell against

the counter, hit some plates and fell down.

And I don't think that went over too well in dailies.

I recall Tom Morgan with that situation when he was

replaced and it was early on in the shooting, as I recall.

And I believe what he came down to was the way he was portraying the shape.

There was a lot of disappointment and a lot of concern from Mustafa.

Because they were, they felt very proprietary

about Michael that it looked exactly right.

I had my eye kind of on the cast and the acting and the

photography, so I wasn't watching as carefully as they were.

But I know there were conversations and there was a lot of redoing and readjusting.

We had a problem with the mask, with the eyes being cut open.

The producer came up and wanted the eyes bigger.

And I said, there's no way I can cut these eyes open and

change the filter within three minutes when we're filming.

Because if we do, the glue would be fresh.

And Tom underneath it would actually faint and fall over and kill himself.

So we had a big argument.

And he, the stuntman had an argument with the producer.

And finally, we kind of won because we had no time to do the change.

He decided to fire me.

And he did.

He fired me right in front of the crew.

At the time, Pangora magazine was doing a big article.

The guy who was there knew me.

And he told the producer that if he didn't hire me back, he

would not do anything for him whatsoever to promote this movie.

So they turned around within a half an hour.

And they actually hired me back.

I was in the makeup department getting ready to leave.

And they knocked on the door and said, we're sorry, we want you to come back.

We don't want you to leave.

So I stayed with the company.

Unfortunately, the stuntman did get let go.

I'm the one that got the credit.

Tom got fired off the show.

And far as why or how or why.

I just don't even want to go there.

But I replaced Tom on the beginning of Halloween 4 for whatever reason.

I'm often asked about how much of the film I did

because I shared the film with George Wilbur.

The first thing I did was at the gas station.

I was in gauze.

And then I got shot at by Donald Pleasance.

And I drove the tow truck, broke the door on the garage and chased him down.

And then I was in the drug store, put the mask on in that scene.

I was shot in the face with the CO2 from the fire extinguisher.

The last part I did on the film was at the Sheriff Meeker's house.

And I had a double barrel shotgun and used it to impaler up on the door.

And that's basically about the last thing I did, at least in sequence in the film.

They interviewed three or four stunt men to possibly play the part as Michael Myers.

They wanted somebody over six foot, the last

two or first two were kind of short guys.

They wanted somebody to be six foot or bigger.

And Mustafa Cadd chose me, picked me, said, I like this George Wilbur guy here.

They, like my walk, I got my own style, Wilbur walk.

And Mustafa said, that's a good walk.

That's what I am.

That's who I am.

Who I am is this walk.

All of the guys that I've ever worked with that are these

big, bad killers are the nicest, sweetest, most loving man.

And maybe this is like the flip side of their alter ego.

Maybe I don't know that side of them.

I held her like my own daughter.

I didn't want to scare her.

I didn't want to take her acting ability away.

But Norelle said, Dania, remember, this is make-believe and I'm George.

We're going to have fun doing the scene when I grab you from under the bed with me.

I remember it's only me.

I remember a lot of times like him taking the mask.

You know, him not having the mask on until he had to

have it on so we kind of would walk through things.

I got you broke my daughter.

I used that shotgun on you.

You understand?

Honestly, my favorite actor in the movie was a bow star.

I thought, you know, he really nailed the part of the sheriff.

He was just, he just hid it out of the park.

He was exactly what I wrote.

Son of a bitch, you just created a lynch mob.

You haven't got a police force.

Well, I play a lot of police.

And it was a basic sheriff of the town.

And he was, he was the guy appointed to get the villain and help Dr. Loomis.

I thank you, Michael Myers, is here in this town.

He's here to kill that little girl and anybody who gets in his way.

He went a certain amount of stature through the entire production.

The fact that he had agreed to do Halloween for was probably the biggest and

strongest incentive for me to want to fight to get this movie.

I mean, to work as a young filmmaker to work with an

English actor of that caliber with that credit history.

It was a huge incentive for me and I enjoyed every minute of it.

You know, he was the movie star, like he was the movie star on set.

So, shit went right when Donald walked on set, that's for sure.

But he was still very cordial and super, super sweet with Danielle and I.

Way out of my week when I got to the set.

I was just a 19 year old kid and really had no real

concept of all the work that he had already done.

But he was a very sweet, genuine, kind-hearted.

You know, he would just go in and nail it on the first take.

He was a seasoned pro.

And it was a real honor to work with him.

Michael Myers is in hell now.

Married.

Where he belongs.

He was an older man at that time and he tired easily.

And of course, because of Halloween, we had a lot of night shooting.

And one of my responsibilities was to make sure that we

worked him for four or five hours to get the best from him.

And that the rest of the day would be very light driving or walking up to the house

or something that didn't require a lot of mental activity.

Not to say that he wasn't willing in game.

It's just, I did notice he would, after four or five hours of straight

shooting and dialogue scenes, he would tire.

And I didn't want to lose his energy and I didn't want to lose his enthusiasm.

So, we boarded him very carefully.

So, he was fresh, got his work done, and then we moved on to do other things.

But other than that, he was very game to do anything he asked.

Look at me.

Hoffman.

Take a good look.

They wanted him burnt.

So, we had to burn his right hand on the right cheek.

And we did the test make up on it.

And we did like, basically, it looked like a hollow circle with a boil in the middle.

And that was okayed by everybody before we started shooting the movie.

Burn makeup is very difficult.

And what we realized is we just needed enough to remind

the audience that we knew about the fire and the explosion.

But by overdoing it, it became distracting to the story.

Donald was watching the dailies with his girlfriend, and they were a little tipsy.

And his girlfriend freaked out and said, look,

Donald, you've got an egg on the side of your face.

And he freaked out.

And he goes, oh my God, it does look like an egg.

And if you really look at it, it does kind of

look like a fried egg on the side of his face.

And the next day, the director came over in the makeup department with me,

knocked on the door and said, Donald's coming in.

He wants a new scar on the side of his face.

And we really had to work to sort of find a medium.

And it was frustrating because, you know, you want

to come out of the gate and get everything right.

But it took a little work.

Every scene that we had with that scar, we had to reshoot it.

Unfortunately, in the editing, somehow, they mixed it up.

And you will see at the beginning, when he's with the preacher in the truck,

it goes back and forth, back and forth.

It didn't really make me look very good.

Matter of fact, the Halloween 4 was my last movie.

I retired after that.

The Halloween 4 was about the fourth film I worked on, but it was the first Halloween.

It was right out of high school and it was a PA.

My activities range from getting the actors drinks to raking up the leaves.

If you see all those leaves all throughout the film, you can just picture me on a

cold Utah morning raking all those up on the set.

But it was a great experience.

It was a really well-oiled machine, and it was a really smooth production.

They pretty much shot what I wrote.

You know, there were some changes for budget, but the script I wrote was pretty

much the script that they shot, which kind of set me up in a wrong way for Hollywood.

Because I thought, oh great, you shoot it,

you write a script, they shoot what you write.

This is fantastic.

That has never happened since.

I mean, Halloween 4 stands alone as kind of the best experience I've had in feature

films, because what I wrote actually made it to the screen.

Mustafa was there to give his opinions and

advice, but he mostly let me alone in the field.

He was lovely.

He was really quiet, very elegant, always kind, very respectful.

Mustafa was very supportive of the script.

He really loved the script.

That's what was great.

When he read it, he raved about it.

In fact, there's a scene in H2O where there's a chase inside

of a school where the main character is hiding under desks.

That was a scene out of Halloween 4 that we didn't have time to shoot.

And here it was then implanted into H2O.

So to me, that was a great compliment for Mustafa.

My father and Dwight had a really good, tight relationship.

I think my father respected and trusted Dwight a lot.

Let him do his thing.

Whereas I think on Dwight's hand, he also

had that respect for my father as a director.

We didn't really feel like we were doing anything

special, but we were all big horror fans.

And the one thing that kind of really got us was it was very, very atmospheric.

Dwight really leaned heavily on atmosphere, and that kind of got us into it.

I had to be crying in the closet, but, you know,

holding the box with Jamie Lee's stuff in it.

I couldn't really get there, so Dwight actually brought me into the closet.

And was like talking to me really stern about what was really going on.

And then closed the door and put the light out in the closet.

And I just got hysterical because I was completely

freaked out about the fact that I was locked in the dark.

Dear God!

You know, when you have a director that just so kind of sets the tone,

I think everybody else really takes the initiative.

And, you know, there wasn't anybody that had an ego or a tantrum or anything.

Everyone was just really happy to be there.

I didn't have a single disappointment with the cast.

They were all exactly right for their parts.

I think, honestly, one of the things that people

respond to in this movie is the quality of the casting.

I mean, from both started Kathleen and Sasha and Ellie and Danielle.

I mean, it's a really cohesive cast.

And it came together in an organic way.

And I think it makes the movie, honestly.

My death scene was the most challenging part

about it was being rigged in the harness.

There wasn't any blood.

There never was.

It was mostly engineered to just have the shock value of being right gone through

the torso and lifted and then shoved into the door.

So what they did is they put a harness on me.

They drilled a hole into the door and they stuck a little

10-speed bicycle seat on that, which is pretty uncomfortable.

No matter what, anyway.

So they got me up on that so that my legs would be dangling and then they put a

rigging on and then they pulled me back from

the back through a little hole in the wall.

So there was a wire and it was kind of cutting in.

So I did that a few times and then they took me off and

then my kidneys filled up pretty quickly, which was a shock.

That's what's fun as an actor is that you get to go and play that.

You get to go and go to that place of absolute terror and

seeing your life flash before your eyes and being so frightened.

But then knowing that you can come out of it,

you know, and then it's like that's a wrap.

The death of my character, and it was really

kind of a tribute to the old-style Western fight.

You know, it was kind of like you do a cross, you know, and you kind of miss and

go at it again and go at it again and do it with the gun and then he gets it.

That fight goes back 50 years.

And what they did is they put me on a teeter totter.

And so they put the teeter totter under my butt and I'm sitting on it and it's off

camera and the second he lifts me up, they lifted me up and then he twisted my

face and my head and then I spit the blood.

It was a blood capsule and I put it in my mouth

and I didn't know when I was supposed to do it.

And I thought they were going to cut because all of a

sudden I started gagging on it and I spit it to the side.

And I thought it was okay, we're not, we're going to have to do this again

because they were going to cut, but they kept it.

The final fight on the rooftop was a complicated stunt action camera sequence.

In the original script, Sheriff Ben Meeker actually

fought with Michael in the basement of the house.

And the fight between the two of them, that's when Ben Meeker dies, fighting the

shape, the furnace gets knocked over, a fire starts in the basement.

And so then the house becomes engulfed in flames and this

is actually what drives a racial jamie toward the roof.

And so you end up with this great sequence where the houses and flames, they're on

the roof, the shape is on the roof with them.

How are they going to survive that?

And then that leads to making their way off the roof.

But I always wanted that great visual of the flames and

the smoke and the house being consumed beneath their feet.

I think that would have been amazing.

Of course that would have been probably another

three million dollars to do something like that.

We considered it on a practical roof.

We scouted actual roofs.

We thought about how we could do it.

We thought about doing it green screen on a stage where we would just be able to

have harnesses and have everything under control.

But then we thought that might look fake.

And if there was one moment in this movie that looked like a green screen or looked

phony, then we knew we would throw the audience out of the movie.

So the solution that we came up with with the production designer was to build the

entire roof of a house with the gutters about six

feet off the ground, which we built in an open field.

And it never had that green screen kind of fake feeling because it wasn't.

It was all authentic.

It was just built.

It was still high enough to be of some danger to the actors.

But we had people stationed around that could hatch anybody if they did slip.

I did all the roof stuff except the drop.

So I was getting harnessed in and, you know, getting turned over.

And then I hung there when it was still.

It was precarious sometimes, but work with Danielle.

That was the main thing, she felt safe and comfortable.

She's a trooper.

She did very well.

It was freezing at night.

I mean, it would like there would be like a dew over

the slate on the roof and then it would ice over.

So it kept freezing and Ellie kept slipping.

And so all of that stuff is really real.

We had stuntmen all around the bottom.

So if anybody fell or slipped, they would fall into, you know,

catch pads or into stunt people.

It also gave me the freedom to actually shoot without wires.

We were pretty close to being finished and it was in one of

the sequences where I slide down with Danielle on my back.

They made the roof so fast that the bottom of it,

the little staple gun was sticking out, the staple.

And when they slit her down the roof, that's when it caught

her stomach and it cut it right open all the way down.

You know, I didn't bleed out.

There were no intestines showing.

I mean, it was not that, you know, it was just a surface wound.

But I think the set medic went bonkers just because we had more to shoot.

So they patched me up and we went back to work.

Literally the whole sequence in the pickup truck was, you know, there were two by

fours underneath the truck and prop guys jumping on

the boards to make us look like we were rolling along.

So, I mean, it was really effective how it all came together really seamlessly

because I was there and a lot of that was added after the fact.

The guys fighting on the truck and climbing up

on the truck and throwing them off and all that.

It was, again, our stunt court, a friend learning did a good job.

He worked it all out.

We had professional stunt guys, so we all worked good together as stunt guys.

So much of that was movie magic.

And, you know, once all the elements come together and you see it up on screen,

it was really cool.

You know, killing Michael Minor, that was great.

We must have shot him a thousand times.

I never expected it to be coming back.

You know, one thing that Alan and I were very committed to was this execution of

Michael Myers by the police putting him into his early grave.

We actually threw dynamite into the well at the end of Halloween 4.

We cut that, but then they used that sequence

in Halloween 5, so that was kind of interesting.

The transfer from Michael to Jamie through the hand was

very carefully thought out and that she was going to then...

the twist ending was going to be she had been, in a sense, possessed by Michael's

spirit through the bloodline and would come back at the epilogue of the movie.

And to have that shock moment of him turning that corner and seeing her at the

top of the stairs standing there with the scissors.

Now!

Now!

This harkens right back to the first film, right back to Michael standing outside.

I wanted that exact tie-in, so it's like it's

starting, it's starting again and starting again.

It was, as we all know, something that people have talked about.

It was kind of one of the highlights of the movie.

My double actually did the stabbing.

They didn't want me to do it, which is interesting considering that the whole

movie I'm being chased by somebody with a large knife trying to kill me.

That's why the twist at the end is so overwhelming.

It's because you just don't expect this girl to be possessed

by Michael's double spirit and it's why it's so shocking.

And that famous, you know, no, no of Loomis coming around.

I still don't get the shells thinking about it, so it's pretty rad anyway.

When I saw Halloween Five, I was very disappointed they didn't go in the

direction that I'd hoped they would with the

legacy and with Jamie and building on that.

There was so much potential in the series to go in a very strong and new direction,

but sadly, you know, they went in the direction they did.

It was never intended to have her take over the franchise in that way.

So how it was going to be resolved in Five was not entirely clear at the moment,

but it definitely was not for her to become the focus of the films.

We screened the movie and had a very successful screening when we cut it all

together and we had a tent mix and we had, you

know, tent effects in there and we screened it.

We had several screenings, but one of them was at Sony downstairs and all the cards

that we got and some of the reactions we got were that people loved the movie.

But it just wasn't quite edgy enough and they didn't feel like Michael really

delivered on his ability to create carnage and wreckage.

And it was because it was a different time and they wanted it to be, I don't know,

bloodier, badder, cooler, but it didn't really seem to fit.

There really wasn't a lot of blood in Halloween Four.

I think that that was a specific choice from the very beginning.

I think what they wanted to do was really create

the suspense and the fear of what suspense does.

And I think Mustafa felt like the audience

was a little bit unfulfilled in that sense.

And so he came to me and said, I need to sort of edge up this movie.

Where can we do it?

Where can we make it organic to the movie?

The additional photography was all shot in Los Angeles.

It was unnecessary to go back to Salt Lake City for those situations.

They were predominantly inserts.

The worst problem I had with Mustafa was he hated blood.

And I would say to him, you know, it's pretty hard

to do a horror film without seeing some blood.

And when he'd see blood on the night, he would go dizzy.

I had a brief meeting with Mustafa, who said,

absolutely I don't want much blood in this.

I really want almost no blood.

I wanted to remain in spirit.

Very close to the original Halloween film, which had no blood in it.

We just want to maintain that.

But we need some more visceral impact.

So fine.

The first thing was when Michael wakes up.

It was an aftermath initially where you just saw bloody interior.

You sort of like what happened.

So we thought it might be kind of fun for

Michael to wake up and kill the people inside.

No, I still don't understand.

The now famous thumb in the forehead sequence,

which was shocking and it was very effective.

It was also the most economic special effect in the history of the world.

We cut back to what is actually a mechanical hand with a retractable thumb.

So it went right into his forehead and worked very effectively.

Nobody was expecting it.

I think that was the kill that basically made everybody jump and say, yeah,

okay, I know what kind of movie this is going to be now.

The second one that we did was Michael's hand

in the neck of the driver of the pickup truck.

And the one thing that is remembered is Mostafa who wanted

absolutely no blood was the guy screaming on the set.

More blood!

More blood!

More blood!

So that was fun.

And we cut them in and they didn't feel sort of overdone or didn't feel inorganic.

They felt like they were part of the same movie.

I was happy about that.

Initially he was going to pick up a crowbar and shove it down a guy's throat.

I think it was deemed a little bit, nah, it's a little strange.

Let's not do that.

So that did not happen.

So I think it was an elegant solution to sort of have the death off-screen so that

you wouldn't necessarily see what happened.

So I don't know.

I kind of like enigmas in horror movies anyway.

Alan Howard, the composer, was all of our choices to come in and create that

continuity with Halloween 1, all the way through to Halloween 4.

I don't think there was ever really any other discussion that I was aware of,

other than that he would do the music.

I was certainly happy with the decision.

I know that Mostafa wanted him back.

We were all excited to have him do it.

So there was never, I don't think there was ever any doubt that he would be our guy.

They called me up and said, hey, would you

be willing to do the music for Halloween 4?

And because John and I were buddies, I kind of really turned to John and he

said, hey, they asked me to do Halloween 4.

Is that okay by you?

I mean, I want to make sure I wasn't crossing

lines here because do whatever you want.

Just do your thing.

So hence I launch on Halloween 4.

Now, so for my own impressions now, obviously I've inherited all the Halloween

music, but I want to put a little more Alan

Howard stamp on what it sounds like, et cetera.

So if you go, let's say, the opening scene of Halloween 4.

Rather than jumping right into the Halloween theme,

I made a whole atmospheric kind of scary thing.

We're going across to the wind blowing, the scarecrow, setting the scene.

And I really held back on playing that Halloween theme until finally Michael's up.

So the arc of Halloween 4 is really Alan Howard finally does Halloween.

In his style.

And so that's where we started.

I was driving to Westwood, California the night it premiered.

And I saw a huge line of people down the sidewalk, which I assumed was for the Jodi

Foster movie or was whatever the big house studio movie was.

As we were driving around the corner, we started to realize

that the line that we were seeing was for our movie.

For Halloween 4.

And we were shocked.

We were completely shocked.

And I remember sitting in the audience and

just listening to the gasps and the reactions.

There's nothing like that for a writer is to hear and see the audience reacting to

your words and reacting to what they're seeing on screen.

Then you know you've done your job and I felt like we did a really good job.

It was such a big deal.

I mean, I just, I was like, oh my God, this is, I mean, it's huge.

It was something that I think fans, now as an adult, I understand what it was.

They had been missing Michael.

It was a number one on the box office charts for two weeks in a row,

which was kind of unprecedented for that kind of movie.

The response was at least commercially, it was fantastic.

Critically, it was all over the map.

It was four stars, one star.

Loved it, hated it.

They ruined it.

They brought it back.

They're heroes.

They're villains.

You know, it was like whatever you wanted to

read about this movie, you know, you could.

I think it was the best of all Halloween movies, except for the first one.

Dwight Little did a great job in that.

We were lucky.

We were all young kids and we got a great script and a great franchise and people

that were really giving 100% to everything behind

the scenes and making it the classic that it is.

It's a film that will stand the test at time.

And I'm proud to be an actor who has been in something like that.

It did well.

It did very well.

And I think that's why they jumped right on Halloween V.

Staffa came to us and came to Dwight and I and

said, would we be willing to do Halloween V?

And, you know, at the time we were moving on to do, there was an action movie that

I'd written and Dwight and I were trying to get that off the ground.

So we said, you know, we weren't available to do it and, you know, moved on,

but we thought we'd set it up in a way that they'd carried on.

But it was going to be impossible to do it better.

And I think my feeling was, you know what, I tried as hard as I could.

I took my best shot, people seemed to like

it, and I should just, you know, let that go.

So I always said no to him.

I was always flattered to be asked.

And I just felt like we just got it right and let's leave it alone.

And now, looking back, I really wish we had stayed with it because it would have

been nice to follow that line the way I'd originally envisioned.

And no matter what movie I do, it's still

going to be, you're the girl from Halloween.

And they're not talking about Halloween 5.

I'm like Jamie in the clown costume at the top of the stairs with the scissors.

That's really, you know, who I am.

It's a classic movie.

People tend to like 4 and the first one.

And I kind of agree with that.

I don't think I knew if I was doing another

Halloween after 4, but it came pretty quickly.

It was, we shot one year, almost the day after we had finished.

So I had both my 11th and 12th birthday on set.

But the movie came out in between that time.

So it was, it happened very quickly.

Halloween 5 definitely was rushed into production.

They tried to capture that same lightning in a bottle that they got on 4.

So a lot of things were rushed and I feel like they didn't assemble some of the key

components of the Halloween 4 team that would have been vital.

They went a whole new direction.

We got 5, we had a partial screenplay, brought

in a new writer, got another version of it.

We actually started filming without a completed screenplay.

So it was sort of a whirlwind.

I was, I remember getting the script and being so excited because I was the lead now.

I mean, there, I so much that I got to do and had to do.

And Dominique was a director that was actually

recommended to my father by Deborah Hill.

Once I'd come on, Dominique was already writing.

He was very involved in storyboarding and putting

pieces together so they would fit like gears.

That didn't necessarily happen once we started filming.

So we brought in another writer, Shem Bitterman.

And Ramsey Thomas, who was our producer, is also our writer.

Although he may not have gotten credit, he was supervising the writing.

And helping everyone to get their good ideas onto paper.

I don't think I understood what was going on.

It had to be explained to me why I was in this hospital and why I couldn't speak.

But I think I'd wanted to come back and kill people.

I don't ever recall there being a discussion about Danielle being the killer.

It's one of those things that you don't really know

until the script, you know, comes to you and stuff.

I don't know.

I mean, where would the story go if they didn't

have Jamie turn into a sympathetic character?

If I was just running around as Michael Myers

sidekick, I don't really know what could have happened.

I think they needed to keep Jamie a sympathetic

character to have someone to root for.

Most of the film was filmed at night, so we were

limited in the number of shooting hours we had.

That whole opening of Halloween 5 was shot in

one take because we were running out of time.

It was like, son was coming out.

We had no time.

And we shot that in literally one take.

And I remember being freaked out that she had

to give me CPR and have her mouth over me.

I was a little... you know, I was a little germaphobe.

The shape.

The stunt coordinator Don Pike was a friend of mine.

We'd worked together.

And when they came in the Salt Lake, he called

me and asked me if I was available for work.

Originally, I thought they were just asking me to come in for a stunt work.

And about ten minutes later, he calls.

He goes, the director wants to meet with you.

And I thought, well, this is kind of strange for stunts.

And he goes, no, they want to see you for the Michael Myers part.

I go, oh, okay.

So I go and I meet with Dominic.

And we're in the hotel room.

And he says, I want you to walk like wood through water.

And so I got up and he did it.

He goes, perfect, perfect.

You got the part.

Yeah, I was disappointed.

But it was a director's preference.

And Mustafa wanted me to do five.

But I did get in the opening sequence in following five.

So I can claim four, five and six.

I was bummed out that George wasn't going to be back.

But I was so excited to go.

And then I met Don and he immediately bonded with me.

And he used to like give me neck rubs.

And he'd like swing me around.

And he also always had the mask off.

So we're ready to go.

And he made me feel really safe.

They didn't want me to study any of the Michael Myers before

because they didn't want me to have a preconceived nose.

Dominic had a very distinct way that he wanted to film it.

I figured that I was closer to Michael Myers

than anybody because I lived in Illinois.

We were probably about the same age.

And I like to kill.

I thought that the mask looked beat up.

But then I think I rationalized it by feeling like well

he just went through all of this stuff in the other ones.

So it would probably look a little bit different because it's so pasty white in four.

That in five it's had like a blue gray kind of tone to it.

So it looked completely different.

But I think as a kid I just went oh well it's probably just old.

Greg Nicotero had designed it after his face,

but my head was a little bit bigger than his.

So we had to go in and do moldings.

What we did was Mysophid didn't want to be able to see the eyes.

So they took nylon stockings and put it over the

eyes which cuts down your vision quite a bit.

I mean the mask looks different in every movie.

It's definitely the start of the deterioration of the Michael Myers mask.

Five definitely like sets it off.

And then it just continued to go.

And now it's a shred of a nothing.

There's some hair and a little bit of latex unfortunately.

Ellie, this is your making of Halloween five tape you wanted.

I was tapped pretty early to be involved in five and I knew I would be.

So the script arrived at my home and I had a

suspicion that I wouldn't make it through this one.

I didn't quite expect to be killed off so early.

And the way it was written was that I was

supposed to get scissors shoved down my throat.

And I just thought for Rachel it was too undignified.

I just didn't sit right.

And so, you know, I made a fuss about that and they

rewrote it so it was a little bit less graphic.

One, two, three, go.

I'm dying, I'm getting up.

I remember the vibe on set and Ellie being really

upset on the day that she had her death scene.

You know, I went from being in the shower

running outside in a towel to getting killed.

It was like, you know, there wasn't much there.

I thought there was no way that Rachel Crothers could have lived through for and

have outsmarted Michael Myers in so many ways.

And go so easily.

Like, that did not ring true at all.

I was sad when I read it that Ellie wasn't going to be around more.

And then I got to set and Wendy, Kaplan and I, had this, like, incredible bond.

I really loved the character.

Not like someone that would pop up in every movie,

especially sort of really different from the genre.

I felt like, so I guess the bad girl part of

me, it was fun to be able to express that.

Symbolically, she did take over the sister role,

but, you know, energetically we were so different.

Her part, I think, was so deliberately out there, for whatever reason.

Poor Wendy, I mean, she had big shoes to fill.

People loved Rachel, and they did not like Tina.

So maybe sometimes, you know, I was annoying as

Tina, and I said things that were sort of off-center.

I'm never sensible if I can help it.

From a character standpoint, I do think the fact that I was willing to just say

whatever I wanted and be this crazy person, it didn't always jive,

maybe, with what people were expecting, as the heroine.

Yeah, maybe you don't even need to wear a mask, baby.

I knew Wendy before I came, and I didn't know she was cast in the movie,

but when I drove up in the car to the hotel,

she knew I was in it, and she came running out.

And I'm like, oh my God.

And she's like, yeah, I'm playing your girlfriend.

And I'm like, okay, well, I'm stoked about that.

If I'm ready, shut the house, I'm bruised but ready.

I'd always been a cult fan of the horror genre, and to get

an opportunity to be in a horror film, I couldn't pass it up.

So, I studied my butt off, went in there with my best stupid spits laugh I could

muster, and fooled him into giving me the role.

I connected with Sammy so much when I went in and read, and I felt like I was so

hurt, and I was just so automatically anywhere I could be.

I mean, I was just Sammy, like, inside out, upside down, you know, whatever.

It was very, you know, a lot of fun to deal with and see where she was going,

because you couldn't, you wouldn't know from one minute to the next.

Jamie?

Max?

You know, me being mute.

I mean, I get it, kind of, but when something traumatic happens, kids,

you know, sometimes that's likely that that would

happen, but I don't know why they couldn't have me talk.

They were trying to get artsy, maybe, or trying to be real, or think outside the box.

I think sometimes things are just better left.

If it's not broke, don't fix it.

It got overly complicated when it didn't need to.

That was my sense about Jamie being mute.

These are for you.

And then, yeah, and then the stuttering sidekick, and

there was definitely some cheese factor to Halloween V.

Jamie, are you okay?

I picked Jeffrey.

Like, we were in New York, and we had auditioned boys.

My character had this infamous stutter.

You know, we talked a lot about why Billy had

a stutter, and at what moments they wanted.

The stutter to be more pronounced than others.

You don't even know where she is, but I do.

And Dominique was very aware of that, and very careful to

make sure that I was staying true to the nature of stuttering.

In that when you're more frantic, it gets worse.

When you're a little more comfortable, it's easier to speak, et cetera.

The two kids, it was sort of a symbiotic type of relationship, because one

stuttered, the other one isn't talking, you know,

and yet they were communicating the best of anybody.

St. Hollywood should never work with kids or

animals, so I guess that's the way to mitigate that.

Have one kid be a stutter and the other one not talk at all.

I've seen horror movies with actors, the kid

actors, and a lot of them were not very good.

I guess I just had a lot as a child that kind of came up.

Everyone on the film was so wonderful and so aware of the fact that Danielle and I

were children and were very patient with us and careful.

Obviously she was carrying this film so much, and I thought the way she handled

that and the way that she led everyone on the film was really wonderful.

You sent something down to me telling me what you know.

He writes, writes, writes.

Donald and I were much closer on this.

Again, he only came on set for like a week or so, so

we had a lot of stuff in a very short amount of time.

He had difficulty in getting in the country.

The head of the Utah Film Commission helped us to get the proper visa for

Donald Pleasants, because his visa had expired.

One night he did come, and I had been wrapped

for the night, and it's the scene in the woods.

I'm supposed to be in the woods, but he can't see me, yelling.

And he came and he knocked on my door, and he goes, my

name blows on you that I would like you to be out there.

Even though I can't see you, I want to know that you're there.

I said, sure.

I was scared of him too.

Donald Pleasants yelling in your face and shaking you.

I was like, oh my God.

I wondered what the smell was that was on Donald Pleasants breath.

And now I know, as an adult, it's bourbon.

You know, it's an interesting thing for someone, because he has all this stature

and he's doing a horror movie, but he treated it like it could have been Shakespeare.

When we were doing the scene, we're on the staircase, and he's

trying to talk me out of it and take the knife away from me.

Well, Donald wanted to do those stunts himself.

He wanted to be able to, you know, hit that window so they could see the expression.

So we did the window.

I slammed him into that, but they wouldn't let him do the one over the railing.

They thought that was a little too much.

I was a child.

He was an older gentleman.

We would sit at dinner together, you know, everyone.

And he would tell great stories of his wonderful career, which at 11 years old,

I did not appreciate as much as I would love to be at that dinner table now.

On set, we had something called a triple banger where there's one trailer,

but there's three different rooms.

One was for Jeffrey Landman, who played Billy.

One was for me, and one was for when we did school.

I remember seeing Donald's, like, huge trailer

and thinking, oh my gosh, there's a bed in there.

How cool is that?

Donald wrapped, and he said, my trailer stays, and it's for Danielle.

She's the star of this movie now.

So he made them keep this big-ass, like, 40-foot trailer for me.

And I just thought it was the coolest thing.

We had taken over the hotel we were at.

We took offices there, we took rooms there.

I hear on location with a fist full of money, and the

whole place is dry on Sunday because it's a Mormon state.

So we got in our party when we could.

It was a party happening nightly in our room.

I mean, we were out in my hallway of the hotel, you know, at like eight o'clock in

the morning running around music, and we probably trashed a couple hotel rooms.

It was like our version of, like, a frat party.

There was a lot of liquor, and we would dance it

until the wee hours in the morning and then get up.

It's like three or four hours worth of sleep.

This is the last night, we're going to do this, right Mark?

I can see certain things in the movie where

I'm like, ooh, okay, that was a lot of night.

Look at those bags, you know.

And there was this little bar, this big cabinet

where they kept up with little liquor bottles.

And I was the, it had like a latch on it, but it would open just a teeny bit.

And I was the only one that had a small enough arm

to reach in and grab the bottles for everybody.

And we would party in my room.

So I was, I was one of the gang.

She was like a little buddy.

And she was, she was, she was with us all the time.

A lot of dancing, a lot of crazy music, a lot of people hooking up with each other.

And I'll leave names out of it.

And hopefully that spirit of genuine care for each

other and the fun that we had making the movie.

Hopefully that comes across in the film as well.

We really did enjoy each other.

What do you think?

Yeah, orders, orders.

I look like a life-threatening situation to you.

I didn't see any semblance of comedy.

And the role that me and Dave were, they were like these two clown cops.

I thought, this is a little bit of an odd choice.

It's unusual for this type of series, but hey, jobs a job, you know, make it work.

Those guys did a great job with it.

And we all sort of saw it as a way to kind of open it up a little bit.

Definitely not funny.

Comedy is actually tough, because how do you do it without being cliche,

or trite, or corny?

And I took a little pass out.

I made some goofy, barre, barre, kind of cartoon music that went with it.

All clear.

Nothing more.

Nothing more.

Nothing more.

I wasn't expecting that at all.

You know, I realized that we were the comedy relief, but I didn't realize that

Dominique was going to go over, you know, take that extra leap and

actually add in the sound effects that were these goofy sound effects.

Fortunately, well, as you can't.

Sorry.

Boop, boop, honka, honka, honka.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

You know, you got a Halloween scary groove and all

of a sudden this thing was just like a cartoon cue.

So that was an odd piece.

And they kept it, so I guess it worked.

The performers played enough of the humor without this music that sort of adds this

silliness that I don't think is necessarily there, or even really appropriate.

When I came out of the house for the first time when Ellie called the police,

a pretty woman, I thought, wow, be great.

If this cop is attracted to her, it would make the

scene a little more fun if I'm trying to impress her.

Especially since I'm being cut off a great deal by my

partner Dave, which is going to make it an irritant to me.

It's what we're here for.

Rescue Cats.

Find dogs.

That's a job.

And we love it.

Following by felt like a different movie altogether, it didn't have the same vibe.

Dominique was very eccentric and just the way he talked about things.

He definitely had a way of making you feel more connected to material that,

frankly, some people might have thought or dismissed as trite.

At first, a lot of things he said, he was kind of off the wall, you know,

like, wood through water.

But when he gave you different things, you could kind of picture it, and you

would think about it, and then it would take on as a life of itself.

Every time me and Dave, my partner walked away from camera, he would always say,

when you walk away from camera, I want you to walk like penguins.

Penguins, you get me?

He wanted to add a goofiness to these characters.

So he thought if we waddled away, it would add that element of clownishness.

So oftentimes, we were walking away from camera,

and I would hear, just as we turned, penguins!

Well, you know, he's French.

So that guy says it all right there.

Everything he would say to me was, it's about sex.

Sexy.

And I was like, okay, I'm walking my dog.

You know, he was all like, sexy, sexy.

We want sexy.

Rachel wasn't big in the sexy department, and

that's kind of what made her the girl next door.

And I think that's why the characters liked her.

We had the sexy girls, but my character wasn't one of them.

And there was no more sort of telling, dominiqueism in the film than when he

asked Ms. Glenn and I to come and rehearse the love

scene in his hotel room the night before we shot it.

I think we were both like, you want us to do what?

I will walk you through the way I see it, the lighting has to be perfect in your

face and the hands and the others want to walk you through the choreography.

And we got there and we just kind of worked out the beats and it couldn't have

been sort of more technical and really was no passion involved.

It was put your hand there, moved there so she can do this.

She's looking into the key light.

And so I appreciated that about him.

His sort of technical approach to the filmmaking aspect.

But then his ability to kind of draw you into his

world and make it seem like a fun place to be.

I was really close with dominique.

I remember going to his house in LA and we ate dinner sitting on pillows.

And I just thought that was the coolest thing.

You know, he was just very French.

So I never met anybody before.

That was European.

Well, Dominique's fun.

A lot of fun.

Good Frenchman.

I love that he brought something different probably to the movie which some people

really responded to and some people didn't.

I remember a lot of things changing at the last minute.

For example, for all the rehearsal process and for the first day of shooting,

Billie was supposed to be a BMX bike racer.

There was a bunch of stuff between Billie and

Jamie where Billie was supposed to save her life.

And we were writing bicycles.

It was all this shit.

We would sit around and say, that sounds good.

We could do that.

We filmed them.

They didn't all make it into the film.

But we shot them.

So it was a lot of stuff like that of things being

changed very drastically without rhyme or reason.

What was on the script wasn't necessarily what you shot that day.

I know Mustafa and Dominique kind of had a butting their heads towards the end.

That's why they changed this and that.

And I don't know if Dominique was trying to take over

or I mean, I didn't get involved in the politics.

But I remember the biggest drama being about Samantha and Tina.

Something happened with Wardrobe and Wendy's character Tina.

And then she was supposed to play the devil.

I was going to play something else.

And then all of a sudden she's playing the French maid and then I'm Devil Girl.

They didn't want the heroine of the movie to be the devil

because they felt you wouldn't really feel for her as much.

So instead they made the girl that has sex the devil.

I loved my costume.

I was so happy to have that costume though.

It was really fun.

We have room service.

Spit stresses up like Michael Myers at the

Tower Farm Party to play a prank on the cops.

But how does he even know who much of Myers is or

what he looks like and where does he get that mask?

Like you start poking holes in this film and you're

going to end up with some Swiss cheese, mister.

My experience is that when you are working

on a film there's a lot of changes midstream.

It's almost never a good thing.

There's something about the foundation that begins to get really flimsy.

There were some scenes that I did that we

re-shot that I wish were put back into the film.

There was a very bizarre character who was called Doctor Death, I believe.

And it was this skinny kind of funny character actor who had a parakeet.

And Michael Myers wanders into his house.

I guess they were trying to reference Frankenstein.

I'm in the blind man.

Michael Myers walks in his house and falls on the bed.

And he puts the tattoo on me and there was a whole bunch of witchcrafts, things,

spells and whatnot.

And on Halloween I come back to life, put the mask

on, and over this altar there was this sharpened rock.

So I get up, grab him, take him up over my head, I break his back, throw him on the

altar, and I put the rock through his chest.

I thought that was kind of a nice scene.

Everything was put into that opening scene and it didn't work.

And most of us saw it and he hated it.

They decided that they would re-shoot it.

They would re-shoot the opening and they did.

We just had a distress call from the clinic.

They haven't been able to reach them again.

There were four men up there.

And there was a whole sequence where I killed

the SWAT team, which never made it to the screen.

It was just bloody, bloody, bloody, trying to shoot down Michael Myers in

front of that hospital with police cars and actors and stuntmen.

And that became a real bone of contention

for the director and the executive producer.

The man in black was never in the script.

The man in black showed up midway.

That was kind of interesting.

I mean, I wasn't really told who it was, but I played him some of the times.

There were people that would always come to

set and watch, people in the neighborhood.

And there was a guy that would always come wearing these slickers and hat.

And I think that they, I don't know if it was Dominic or somebody else come up with

an idea that they wanted to add an extra element to it, another character.

Who is he?

What's the symbolism?

And I have no clue except that the movie was not going as planned and it was

lacking something and they decided to add in this guy midway through to make up for

things that just were falling short, I guess.

This man in black, this would fix all the problems.

The problems it fixed and the problems it created were fairly well balanced.

And the hope was, in part six, it would be resolved.

I remember Don taking me to the side and

saying, Rick, what the... are they doing here?

This doesn't make any sense.

They shot other scenes.

It's like, well, why are we filming these?

And he goes, well, this would go into the part six.

Don't worry, Don.

It'll all make sense when it comes out of the wash.

You'll see.

I mean, what was I going to do?

The only thing I vaguely remember was that they said there was going to be some

connection between him and Michael via they had the same tattoo.

They said that, you know, it was sort of like, in my mind, I think this,

but like raising Kane, that either it was going to be like a twin, an alter ego,

or during the year that they did this incantation and then it became another being.

I do know, though, for a fact that at the end of five,

no one had any clear vision what the man in black was.

Maybe Don had an idea, Dominique, you know, Dan

Perrin's, watching it in the theater somewhere.

Everyone had their idea, but there was no one

clear direction of what was going to happen.

We were filming in the summer, pumpkins don't come out until Halloween.

So we tried gourds, we tried squash, we tried, and what ultimately worked well.

We were watermelon.

Rob Draper, who is the director of photography, is a very capable guy.

And provided really good opportunities for reveals, for angles on things,

for drama within the shot itself.

There's a shot in the movie of me just almost making love to that Camaro that I

drove and how I touched it and I wiped it clean and people

really like seemed to like that one particular shot.

And also when I got, you know, a pitchfork to the head.

Three, two, one, action.

For many, many, many years I had one of the stunt

heads until my wife just couldn't take it anymore.

She's like, you have to get rid of that.

That's really creepy.

The Camaro, when I was driving it, there was something strange about the car.

I couldn't put my finger on it, but it's like,

you know, there's something weird about this car.

In retrospect, I feel like I was in the car I was always creeped out.

And it wasn't until about two years ago the transportation captain, the guy who

found the car, told me that they got it from a family

that the girl had committed suicide in the car.

I don't know if that vibe was there, but there

was always something strange about that car.

If you remember when Michael Myers takes Tina, he gets

her in the car and they stop at a convenience store.

When we shot the convenience store scene, they didn't have a lot of extras available

because it was two or three in the morning.

So I was there waiting for another scene to be shot, and they asked if I would put

on a costume and play an extra in front of the convenience store.

So if you see that scene, I'm dressed in a cat suit

with a mask and a dark wig, and I look pretty hot.

The crow magnum, the brute mask, that was sort of thrown in.

And yes, at one time they wanted me to wear a Ronald

Reagan because he thought that would be funny.

But I don't think they could get approval for that one.

When I was in the car with John, he did creep me out.

I mean, it's amazing what one can do behind a mask.

And he did all these little subtle things with his eyes and his movements.

When I was talking to the Dominique, he goes,

what can you give me as far as reaction?

I go, well, stay on my hands.

So if you watch, I'm gripping the wheel.

And when she comes over and she kisses me, and then she has that reaction.

And Dominique's like, oh, yes, yes, that's it.

That's where the European phone maker, you know,

truly, you know, you got to see it on screen.

It was lit just brilliantly.

So beautiful.

I got to get a pitchfork in the back while having sex in a barn.

Did I get to finish that?

Only I know for sure.

One part in the barn that did get difficult, the application that Greg

Nicotero and Mark Matry had on Matthew Walker, who played Spitz.

I had to be laying on an ironing board with half my torso kind of hanging off the

ironing board, propping myself up over her with the

fake chest kind of coming down at an angle there.

Everything had to be sort of just right and they've

made up my neck and made everything up to look like it.

And I'm trying to be as natural as thick as possible.

And we can only do it once, we think.

So we call action and the prongs come through.

And because the foam was of such high quality,

it formed around the prongs very quickly.

So the blood couldn't penetrate through the holes that were made.

The blood just hit the back of the appliance and ran down.

And we tried to do it again and set up for a second shot.

But again, the same thing happened.

The prongs came through and the blood just kind of fell behind.

So they said, we got what we needed, we're moving on.

And nobody was happier than me because I could get off the ironing board.

I grew up on a farm.

And if you notice, there's a lot of farm implements.

So, you know, I was showing Dominique, okay, we can do this, we can do that.

And when I used the mowing side, I said, oh, the

Grim Reaper, that's wonderful, that's wonderful.

I was not supposed to get killed the way I did in the film.

And I went to Dominique.

And I suggested, I said, you only see some balls on

Sammy, you know, one time she's going to fight back here.

She's going to try and get back at Michael Myers.

So Dominique said, great idea.

And so that's why I pulled the picture.

It's work out of Spitz's back.

And that's why I take off after Michael.

You son of a bitch!

When I go back against the barn wall there, I

hit my arm pretty hard and a nail went in it.

So I had to go and get a tetanus shot.

Michael did an incredible job killing me.

That sounded different.

As far as my death scene goes, it was never a shot how we got killed.

It was the aftermath.

You just saw us all bloodied up in the car, and I guess it's left to your imagination.

I mean, the scene where I'm running through the woods with dawn, you know,

driving the car, I had food poisoning that day.

It's like throwing up in between takes.

And I remember we just went over it two or three times, if here's going to be your

path around that tree and that tree, and then you're going to go over here.

So you're like, okay!

And you start running and they start filling the area with this thick, dense smoke.

And Don's got the lights on in the car and I'm

running in front of him and he can't see me.

I mean, there's times where I watch that movie

and I am so close to the front of that car.

I can't believe that I actually did that.

We didn't use a lot of stunt people.

I mean, very seldom did we use anything.

When I'm running through the field at the end, he, you know, is driving.

I'm right on her.

And the camera's in the back.

We got the lights on her.

Take three.

She turns around so the camera can see her.

And she's wearing a cape and she trips and falls.

And I drove over her.

I mean, I stopped it right on top of her.

I heard her scream.

Luckily, he's a stunt driver and so nothing happened.

It was close.

When we did the scene where he drives into the tree,

they invited everyone to watch that big explosion.

And everyone was so excited that it went so well that they never yelled cut.

So Donald was inside the burning car for longer than I think anyone should have been.

I love how I died because I felt like I saved a life.

And I love that I got this opportunity to be a heroine in that one moment.

The premiere when she died, they applauded.

There was a scene where I'm in the laundry chute.

And even that scene, actually, Don was stabbing it with a real knife.

And I was in there.

And I was not harnessed.

And I meant, it was an air conditioning duct.

I would sort of get in and wedge myself in there and put my feet up.

And I just fit enough to where I couldn't move.

But then I would let my legs go and I would hold on and try to grab at it.

And again, there was nothing that was holding me up from completely falling and

eating shit and hitting the bottom of this thing.

We marked out different places inside.

And then I had marks on the outside where I

could put the knife where she would be safe.

Don will come in and, you know, okay, make

sure you keep your legs above here, Danielle.

And I would go, okay, and I would hold my legs up.

And he would just jam, you know, jam a butcher knife through.

So it's fucking crazy to think about it.

But if she slipped or something, you know, I mean, she was a real trooper.

I have to give her that.

There's a moment where my leg falls down and he's

supposed to get me through the leg with the knife.

And then he pulls it out and you see me, like, screaming.

And then the next thing when I come out of the chute and I fall under the floor,

if you notice, I have a huge gash in my leg.

And there's, like, blood all down my tights.

So we didn't reshoot the aftermath, but they completely

mixed me getting stabbed in the shin from the movie.

I had that leg for a while, actually.

And I gave it to a cousin of mine and he lost it.

I think I worked on part five, you know, it was a matter of days.

And then I think they had to bring me all the

way back so I could be the corpse and the attic.

You want to fly back and shoot this scene and then we're going

to have a huge final after party and, like, yeah, why not?

Let me see.

The only time that I thought it was weird was when he took his mask off.

You can see that he doesn't look like what Michael Myers should look like because

he's, you know, an Indian, a Cherokee Indian.

Dominic thought that Danielle and I looked enough that we could be, like,

father and daughter.

I had long hair at the time.

It was dark, you know, and we had similar features.

It was just like me.

And when we shot that scene, I had to cry.

I think because I was so close with Dawn that we have this bond anyway.

I just remember feeling emotional during the

scene and it's a great moment of vulnerability.

I mean, I think you have to sort of show that in those characters for them to be

somewhat likable or at least know where they've come from

and why they've ended up being the way that they are.

They had a prosthetic ready in case they wanted to do a full face, but Dominic

thought it was more effective just to see the one eye.

And that when she reaches up and this goes to the part six too, that they were

shooting, that they were going to show more of it in part six.

That, you know, all of us would, you know, kind of gel together.

I remember being scared that I was going to catch on fire because I had this big

dress on that had all this shit sprayed on it that was like flammable.

And I thought, oh God, I've a gallon of hairspray on my dress and I'm totally

flipping out of this coffin and there's candles

everywhere I'm going to get caught on fire.

So that was, I kind of needed him to be there to make me feel like I was protected.

We're doing the fight scene.

I do the thing with Loomis and they drop the chain, which was heavy as hell.

We had a rubber two by four, but it had a PVC pipe in it.

And if you hit it on the four side, it was padded.

And on the two side, there was less.

And so he was getting a little bit tired, kept doing it.

I mean, he did it, Don Pike did it, Dominic even did it.

You know, hitting me with that two by four.

But at one point, he turned it just a little

bit and caught me on the nose and broke my nose.

Don came over to me and he goes, did he get you?

And I go, yeah, he goes, you want to stop?

I go, nah.

I mean, I've been hit before.

Let's go.

In the film, Don Pussins, this was supposed to be his last film.

And it was written and we shot it that way and he was supposedly dead.

He wasn't going to come back for part six.

He's laying on top of me and I'm supposedly dying.

He's dying.

And the lice are flashing.

And he whispers to me and goes, now I get it.

I abused you as a child.

National Guard will take him to a maximum security facility.

But he'll stay till the day he dies.

That shot, I always go, oh, Michael's just sitting in jail.

I mean, I don't know.

That could have been a better ending.

The ending of five, I think, similarly to four, what they were

probably trying to get was some kind of clip-hanger ending.

You know, that would try and bring the fans back.

Who is this, what is this, what happened?

So I think that was probably the idea of what they were going

for with the man in black, but I think it wasn't successful.

So when it came to do Halloween Five, the director, Dominic, Arthur,

and Gerard, kind of wants to go back to Halloween One, in his mind, at least.

So he says, I really want you to feature the piano.

I know you do a lot of sense stuff, but I

really want this to be a piano-driven score.

Kept it simple.

I remember at the beginning of Five was this whole pumpkin chop thing.

It was a first time that I went kind of wild myself in that opening scene.

So I loaded the Halloween theme into the sampler.

And now, because you've got the whole piece of music on one key, you can go...

So I actually kind of went for the craziness with the chopping of the pumpkin

in that opening scene, and actually added the slicing sounds as a percussionist.

Dominic was a little more involved.

He would come over a lot.

So I'd say we're Dwight visited three or four times.

I saw Dominic probably 10 or 15 times.

He'd like twice a week.

How's it going?

How's it going?

Kind of monitoring.

And giving me a little more guidance for where he wanted to see the accents go.

But nice guy.

Really liked him.

He kept it fun.

And I got all my friends that were underage.

And we all went to the theater to watch it.

And there was probably like 40 or 50 of us.

So we hooted and hollered and cheered and thought

it was the greatest thing since sliced bread.

But I think that if you, as I get older and I see the two

movies back to back and talk to the fans, they still love it.

But they always say that they liked four better.

I think five dissipated the interest level of the really die-hard fans.

That's why it didn't do as well at the box office.

And I know, you know, for some reason 12 minutes into the

film, audiences were seeing like running for the exits.

So I don't know.

There were certain things that just didn't seem to jive.

And certain things that they didn't seem to take care of.

It seemed like in the rush to get it done,

maybe there was a lot of cooks in the kitchen.

But it's definitely a unique film amongst the series.

It's got its own look and style and feel.

The opportunity to do this film with so many creative

people in one place really benefited the film.

If it was a standalone project, I think it would have done very well.

I think it's still some of the best work I've done as an actor.

The movie is a good movie outside of it being a sequel to Halloween 4.

I mean, if you just watched it outside and it wasn't

Michael Myers, I think that it is a good movie.

People are still watching it and still having a great time.

Whether they love it or they hate it, they still watch it.

You know, so it's doing something for people.

I get phone calls and texts and emails every year at Halloween when the film plays.

I saw you in a bar and get a pitchfork in the back, dude.

I'm glad that aficionados of the Halloween series eat it up.

They've seen that they can't get enough.

The fans are always, they're the best.

And it's great to go out and they know it inside and out.

They know everything about the movie.

They know more about it than I do.

I came to this convention and I was like, is anybody going to remember me?

It was kind of an oddity to me.

Like, why would I go, they want my autograph?

Are you kidding?

Take a picture with me?

Why?

It was 25 years, and when I got there, it was really, it was a delight.

People knew who I was.

They wanted to take pictures, sign autographs.

It was a blast.

And again, I was really shocked that it's got this huge following.

The fans are incredible.

The franchise has been so nice to me and we're all family.

I mean, it's something that once you're a part of it, you are a part of it.

And there is a legacy there.

And you will definitely carry that with you for the rest of your life.

I love that.

I love that something I did 25 years ago as an 11 year

old kid still resonates with people all these years later.

And people care so passionately about it.

I really enjoy watching it.

And I really love to see all of us in the movie.

And I think it's really clear that we're all having, like, a great time.

And it's changed my life in the sense of that I

feel kind of honored to be a part of something big.

I moved to L.A.

after Halloween 5, and I think I thought that it was going to happen pretty quickly.

And when it didn't happen, maybe we'd, you know, asked a couple of times.

And I was very close with the accords.

So I would, when I was living in York, I would come and stay with them during the

summers because his daughter, Lana, was my best friend growing up.

So I would come and, like, live in his house.

I still couldn't remember the smell of his library of... I just wrote to Malick the

day that I can still smell your dad's cherry tobacco in his pipe.

Like, I will never forget the smell of that.

And his mom was to his wife's perfume.

But, so I'd spent a lot of time at the house and with the family.

And I think I just thought it was going to happen.

And then it never really did.

And I don't know if I just stopped asking about it at some point.

And then kind of forgot about it.

I didn't think about it at all about them doing a six.

I just thought, okay, maybe it's just not going to happen.

And then I went on to do, you know, did other things.

And then lo and behold, you know, many years later, my agent called me.

And she said, in breakdowns today, breakdowns is like, you know, a news

bulletin that goes out to all the agents that they're casting this movie.

And they're looking for this type of person.

And then agents say, I've got this person.

So they sent out this breakdown for Jamie.

And they wanted someone over 18 to play, you know, 17.

And they had my picture.

My headshot.

But they wanted to look alike.

So my agent called me and said, they're casting Halloween six and they're

trying to get someone over 18 to play your character.

Obviously, when you're over 18, you can work long hours.

You could do other things.

I don't have to go to school.

I was 17 though.

So my agent called up Paul Freeman and Mustafa

and said, you know, Danielle wants to do this.

And what could we do to make it happen?

And they said, we need to hire someone over 18.

So get her emancipated.

So you basically have to go before a court.

And you have to prove to the judge that you're an adult.

And you're essentially like, I'm an adult now.

And you say, I'm going to move out of the house for my mom.

You know, you're like, you're an adult.

And then they can work you like an adult.

So I did that, hired an attorney.

It cost a couple thousand dollars to make it to do it.

Going back to the court two or three times to get approved.

And done.

So I go, finish, sit down, have a meeting with everybody.

And I remember everything starting to change.

Like, the way that everybody was talking about the new script and things that were,

it just wasn't... I remember leaving thinking, oh, these people don't know Halloween.

Like, this isn't, this isn't... I don't get it.

This isn't... Wait, I'm confused.

So I am pregnant with my uncle's baby.

Like, I just didn't understand what had shifted.

Oh my God, this is... this is not what I wanted to do.

I don't want to die like this.

This is... And at that point, I'm a teenager now, so I'm

old enough to know sort of what's cool and what's not cool.

We went back and forth quite a bit.

And it just was like, we were... it just wasn't working from the very beginning.

And then business affairs, which is, you know, people

that are supposed to make the deal with actors.

They don't have any connection to the project.

It's just their job.

And they called and I just remember being on the phone and then being like,

we're going to offer you, you know, whatever scale was,

like, $800 a week or $1,000 a week work for the week.

And I was like, oh my God, I have... but I just have all of this.

I just paid like $3,000 or $4,000 to be able to do the movie.

And wait, what?

And it just became... it just got really fucked up.

And I remember... I remember Paul getting on the phone with me and somebody else.

Maybe it was Dan Ferrens and them sort of saying, please, please, please,

you know, we're going to make this work.

We're going to make this right.

And just feeling like their hands were tied.

And I tried to make it happen and then we got one more phone call.

And I'll never forget the woman on the other line

said to me, your character is a scale character.

You die in the first act.

We're not giving you anymore money.

And I went, I guess I mean nothing to you then.

Okay.

I just wanted to put the money back in my bank that I spent to do the movie,

which you guys are trying to replace me to begin with anyway.

And I fought for it because I didn't want to have someone play Jamie.

And okay, so I'm done.

And that was really what had happened.

And I met JC Brandi who played Jamie years later through mutual friends.

And she was just like the shit that I got for replacing you.

People fucking hated me.

And I've gone on the record by saying, JC's my friend.

I've had her dance class.

She's my friend.

And I don't want anyone to be mean to her because she

didn't kick me to the curb and stomp on me and replace me.

But Dan Farrens and I do talk about it every once in a while about we have this

fantasy of going back and redoing Halloween 6th the

way we both thought that it should have been done.

People automatically assume that I wanted some crazy amount of money.

It's not like I'm demanding of anything.

I just, when you have been asked to do something and then they insult you by

saying, your piece of shit, you die in the first act.

I don't give a fuck that you were into other Halloween movies.

Who cares?

And it was like, whoa, oh my God.

I was just so, I think, I was just in such shock.

And then you've got your team going, you know what?

We're going to pass.

Let them come back.

And this is ridiculous and they put you through

the ringer and it's been a big fucking runaround.

And I walked away and they never came back.

But I feel like in retrospect, looking back on it now, that if I would

have been Jamie in Halloween 6 and I would have died,

maybe I wouldn't have come back for the new Halloween's.

Because there was a part of people that still wanted to have Jamie back.

And I think that maybe Rob Zombie felt the same way.

And that's why I ended up coming back and rebooting it.