WHAT WENT WRONG - Halloween

Episode Date: October 27, 2025

Paint your leaves yellow and orange and scatter them across the yard, because it's springtime in Pasadena and Halloween is coming to town! Chris & Lizzie plumb the depths of the real Michael Myers, how John Carpenter's career was saved by UK audiences, and why you should never show anyone your movie without music. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Oh, and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast, Full Stop, that just so happens to be about movies and how it's nearly impossible to make them, let alone a genre-defining slasher made by a Renaissance man who can be behind the camera and behind the keyboard. As always, I'm your host, Lizzie Vassett, here with my co-host, Chris. And Chris, what do you have for us on this Halloween? I have Halloween. Somehow, the first movie ever called Halloween, which is crazy when you really think about it.

And the filmmakers were as surprised as anybody. The name was available, as we will get to. It is a classic Lizzie, as you mentioned. You know, credited in large part with revitalizing the slasher subgenre of horror. I am assuming you had seen Halloween before. And this is perfect to culminate our spooky months with Halloween, only four days from Halloween. What were your thoughts upon watching it or rewatching it for the podcast?

How has this movie evolved with you? Tell me, walk me through it. I love this movie. I had not seen this movie growing up because my parents were just very averse to the idea of a slasher. And it was just not, that was not the kind of horror that they enjoyed. They were much more psychological and or religious horror. That's what I got exposed to at an early age. So I kind of grew up thinking that this movie,

was probably pretty dumb. And it wasn't until I was in probably my early 20s that I finally watched it. And I began to just really fall in love with John Carpenter. I love him so much. I think this movie is remarkable. Yes, it's a slasher. Yes, you know, there's some things that may read as a little bit hokey today, but honestly, not many. I think this movie holds up incredibly well. The thing that I noticed upon this viewing for the podcast is that I had never appreciated how great the cinematography is in this movie, which, of course, it is Dean Cundee who went on to become, I believe he did Jurassic Park and Apollo 13 and, you know, that's right, everything. Escape from New York. Of course. Of course, one of my favorites. But yeah, this is so great.

And I love, I love that you're kind of seeing John Carpenter beginning to establish the John Carpenter's Cinematic Universe as early as Halloween, you know, you've got the thing appearing on the TV in this movie. And we talked about this a little bit in The Nightmare on Elm Street. And, you know, the question was kind of posed like, you know, why didn't Heather Langenkamp break out since she was the final girl in Nightmare on Elm Street the same way that Jamie Lee Curtis did in Halloween. And upon rewatching it, I think the answer is Jamie Lee Curtis. Like, I do support your theory about the villain in this movie is, so faceless and personalityless on purpose, which I really enjoy about this franchise and this movie

in particular. But Jamie Lee Curtis is so good. Like, she is just clearly a star from the second she shows up on screen. No disrespect to Heather Langenkamp. She doesn't pop off the screen in the same way that Jamie Lee Curtis does. So all to say, I loved this movie. I loved rewatching it. What about you, Chris? Well, I'm excited because we have slightly different opinions here. I think Halloween is fine. Whoa. Wrong. Bad and wrong. I, I, I, I'm sure most people will agree with you. I did grow up watching this movie. Again, as I have mentioned, I have a bias because when I saw scream, it exploded my brain. And once I had seen a slasher deconstructed, I had a hard time. watching what had preceded it.

I do agree with a lot of your praise. I think it's very elegantly set up. It's very naturalistically shot, as you say, Dean Cundee's cinematography is really beautiful, especially the daytime scenes, the pepper the first act of the film. I agree, Jamie Lee Curtis has a very easy and believable screen presence. She does not feel, she never feels forced.

She feels extremely natural, and this was her first theatrical feature film. I think the movie has really interesting use of POV throughout it. I think Hereditary later pays homage to a trope that's somewhat set up in the film, which is the classroom exploration of the theme of the film that's being ignored by the protagonist. So they're talking about fates and... And Twilight, New Moon, obviously. Twilight, even Nightmare on Elm Street does something not dissimilar when they discuss Hamlet and Heather Langancamp falls asleep.

But all of that to be said, again, the movie just feels a little lumbering to me in the same way that Michael is lumbering to me. And as I'm a huge John Carpenter fan, but I tend to like his zanier films. I actually kind of prefer Assault on Precinct 13, which was his movie before this. I love the thing. I mean, can we agree that the thing is his best? Probably, yeah. Without giving it much thought, I would probably say that as his best film. Big Trouble in Little China's a...

You know, one I'm a big fan of. Love it. I like The Fog. Prince of Darkness, a lot of people are not fans of. I do really like it. I understand the importance of this film, and there are flourishes that I really do like. Little Grace Notes, like Michael's mask coming off and the kind of desperate child-like pulling down to, you know, hide his face at the end. Donald Pleasance, I think, gives a really good fun performance and lends some gravitas to the movie.

Donald Pleasants, who plays Dr. Lump. Michael's six-shooter-toting psychiatrist. I know. So all to say... This evil has left. Yeah. While I appreciate a lot about this movie and the place that it holds in cinematic history,

it's not one that I go back to to rewatch very often. That being said, I really love the story behind how it was made, the research that my sister put together for us to talk about today. And I do have one funny, Halloween story. Kind of. My brother-in-law, back in high school, watched Halloween with his friends, and they loved it. They loved it because they thought it was so cool that Dr. Loomis was strapped.

They thought that was awesome. So they started a fake gang called the Loomis crew, and they would blast the Halloween theme song from their cars while they went like this. and made fingerguns, and it got so out of hand that the Fairfield Police Department added the Loomis crew to their list of official gangs,

not knowing that it was a bunch of dumb high school boys referencing Halloween. That's incredible. So that's my one Halloween story. Well, there's a couple other things. I think we would be remiss in not mentioning right at the top, which is that, Chris, are you aware of the real housewife who has a role in this movie?

Yes. Kyle Richards. That's right. Kyle Richards, yes, who plays Lindsay and did again. It re-returned in the most recent franchise entry. Yeah. Sorry. Which I watched mostly because of the Real Housewives.

I watched all three of them. Kyle Richards was good. She was good. She's a good actor. That is something that I always forget. She's a good little actor. She does a great job in this. She's very cute.

Eight years old. So have to mention the Bravo connection for anybody who's not familiar. And the only other thing I'll say is that this movie really takes its time with the killing spree, which I appreciate. Obviously, you get a kill right up top. You get some booms, you get a kill right up top. What more do you need? And then you have to wait like 50 minutes.

Yeah, it's not until the third act that the killing starts again, really. Yeah, and I think that's really successful. And I think that, you know, he's a slow killer, which is also... Yes. I really like. He's so slow. He's very slow. Like a nice skater.

He's strong. Yeah. But he's slow. It's a slow burn. I appreciate that as well. You know, just maybe pick it up a hair. Maybe we go 10% faster on the next one. All right.

I do want to start us thematically in a place that I feel one of the reasons this film was so successful is because of babysitters. And I think babysitters hold a unique place in a unique place. American society, especially I think for folks that grew up in the 70s, 80s, 90s, the use of the high school babysitter really became a mainstay. And I think has petered out a little bit, but when we were growing up, at least I remember a couple of high school babysitters quite fondly. And I'm curious, Lizzie, if you had babysitters or babysat when you were in high school. Yes, definitely. I think frequently my cousin babysat me, and she was quite a bit older. So that was a more responsible choice.

But I babysat some children when I was like 13, 14 years old, and these were like, you know, two-year-olds. And I don't think that's a good idea. No. In retrospect, also I have to call out, Annie, world's worst babysitter. Literally the worst one you could hire and also a terrible friend. And then the best babysitter is Lori. Who needs Michael when you got friends like these? They're terrible. They're terrible.

They're not good. Lori is a great babysitter, and we did bring up the final girl in the Nightmare on Elm Street episode. And, you know, this movie kind of crystallizes the idea that the final girl is the one who is sort of is pure and is the one who's good. Right. And all the other sickos die. I do think Carpenter and Hill have said it was not their intention to make any sort of commentary on sexuality. And I think what they're doing is they're trying to. to create a shorthand for responsibility,

which is Jamie Lee Curtis is the responsible one. Is that true, though, because Michael's first kill is directly related to his sister being sexual. So I don't know that I buy that. That's just what they've said. They've said that Laurie not having sex was not meant to be a differentiating factor on the basis of sex, but rather, I think what they're getting at is she's being responsible.

She's with the kids. Right. Right. She's skeptical. She does not just let people to her home unless it's other children. Unless it's Kyle Richards, which is understandable. Right.

Yes. Exactly. And that's where I do think this movie does something interesting, which is these babysitters are both, we see them as vulnerable, but I think as children, we see them as these almost mythical protectors, you know what I mean, of us.

And so it does something, I think, interesting, in pitting Laurie Strode against this automaton, right, who's going to bust down the door and there's no adults to help. and Dr. Loomis is about as effective as Bob in one battle after another. He shows up at the very end. He's just walking up and down the street. Yeah, exactly.

Actually, it's not true. He's mostly just standing outside of Michael's house for the majority of this movie. And just saying like, hey, get out of here, you kids. He's just waiting. Or calling the cop and going, he's not here yet. Yeah. Well, this was not a chic production. As we'll learn.

Great. But before we get there, the details. Halloween is a 1978 horror film directed and co-written by John Carpenter, co-written by his then-girlfriend and longtime collaborator, Deborah Hill, with music composed, as you mentioned, Lizzie, by John Carpenter at his cord keyboard, or the Moog or whatever he's at. It was produced by, of course, John Carpenter, who was uncredited, and Deborah Hill, along with Irwin Yablons, who was an executive producer, and Mustafa Akad, who was an uncredited

executive producer. It stars Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, great name, I will say, fantastic protagonist's name in her feature debut. Nick Castle and Tony Moran and maybe some other people as Michael Myers. Hmm. A really, really clutch Donald Pleasance is Dr. Loomis. He's great. PJ Souls is world's second worst friend, Linda, and Nancy Keyes, then Nancy Loomis, as world's worst friend, Annie. I noticed the last name. Was that just a total coincidence?

It is. We'll get to it. Yeah, it is. It's an interesting coincidence. And obviously, Billy Loomis later would be named after Dr. Lumis. But Dr. Loomis' name comes from a different character from a different movie that we will get to. Charles Seifers as Sheriff Brackett and, as you mentioned, future real housewife, Kyle Richards, as Lindsay Wallace. It was released by Compass International Pictures and Aquarius. releasing on October 25th, 1978, and as always, the IMDB logline reads. 15 years after murdering his sister on Halloween night, 1963, Michael Myers escapes from a mental hospital and returns to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, to kill again. Yeah, it's pretty much it.

AKA South Pasadena. This did make me very homesick, because it is very clearly Pasadena. It is Pasadena. And I love it. All right. Sources for today's episode include but are not limited to Halloween, a cut above the rest, the documentary, Halloween enmast the documentary, The Films of John Carpenter by John Kenneth Mear, the book, John Carpenter, The Prince of Darkness by Jules Boulanger, and many more articles, retrospectives, and interviews of those involved in the film.

Now, how did Lizzie, a low-budget horror film, very low-budget horror film, with, whether you like it or not, a pretty thin plot, and one of the slowest moving villains since the introduction of the mummy in early Hollywood, become the seminal slasher that came to define the subgenre, and what went wrong? Well, we got to go back, Lizzie. We got to start with a man who's as synonymous with horror as basically anybody, I would argue anybody except West Craven. And that is John Carpenter, Right? If you think of who are the two horror masters of, let's say, 1975 to 2000 or so, I feel like it's those two guys are top of the pantheon. For sure.

But John Carpenter did not grow up in a house of horrors. He didn't even grow up in a strict fundamentalist house like West Craven. He grew up in a wonderful house of music. I'm not surprised. He was born in New York. He moved to a house. Bowling Green, Kentucky when he was five, he was an only child, and he and his family lived out in a log cabin in the woods on the grounds of the University of Western Kentucky. His dad taught music history

and theory. He was an accomplished violinist. He was in the university orchestra. He accompanied for local plays and even performed in studio sessions with the likes of Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Brenda Lee, and young Johnny Carpenter would go and listen to them play. And he grew up in this really supportive environment. His parents would tell him, try your hand. And his father once gave him this blank sheet of music paper. He sat down, filled it out with little notes, and then he played it for him on the piano. And it sounded terrible, but they were always really encouraging of young John. He described music as being second nature, but he wasn't a natural, I think, like his dad. He tried the violin, but he did not have a talent for it. He was unable to play.

As he later said, it was a very sad, sad situation. But operating a camera, a lot easier than the violin. And by the time he was eight, John Carpenter thought, maybe I want to be a director. But Lizzie, he was not inspired by the films you might expect. The first movie he ever saw starred Catherine Hepburn and Humphrey Bogart. Oh, the African Queen. The African Queen, which we just covered. He was four years old when he saw it.

The image of Bogart with all those leeches on him, just stuck with him. And a year later, I mean, of all the imagery, that's the one. That would be what John Carpenter remembers. A year later, he watches 1953s. It came from outer space in 3D, and he was hooked. He daydreams about the movies he wants to make, and then he sees Forbidden Planet in 1956,

and it seals the deal, partly because it has an all-electronic score, which totally blows his mind. So he starts making 8-millimeter films with his friends, and by 14, he's making 40-minute genre movies. Revenge of the colossal beasts, terror from space, Gorgon v. Godzilla, Gorgon the space monster, la G monsters in this universe.

But Hollywood was a long way away from Kentucky. He falls in love with the Beatles. He grows at his hair, which he would keep long. It's still long. He's missing most of it, but what he has is long. I know. I've seen John Carpenter live in concert, and he sure does have some long-stringy hair

in a ponytail. He does. He studied English in history at Western Kentucky University. He plays bass, sings with a band called kaleidoscope, but deep down, he's restless. He wants to make movies. So two years in, he transfers to USC Film School, flies across the country, lands in Los Angeles, and as Miley Cyrus once said, I hopped off the plane at LAX with a daydream and my cardigan. Welcome to the land of fame excess, am I going to fit in? Well, John Carpenter didn't have a cardigan, Lori Strode would in Halloween, but Lizzie, he had a map, and he got off the plane and thought, USC doesn't look that far, so he decided to walk from LAX to USC.

It's very far. How far do you think? How long do you think it would take to walk from LAX to USC? Oh, that's probably six miles. Is that right? Nine and a half miles. Okay. Three and a half hours walking at a good clip.

It's actually 14 and a half driving miles because of, you know, turns and whatnot. He finally makes it to USC and he feels out of place. Because USC wants their students to make meaningful personal films. They're in art school. And John Carpenter says, I want to make money. I want to make big movies. I want to make commercial movies, much like Zemeckis, right, with Lange's. right, with later experience.

Or even I've heard Paul Thomas Anderson when he showed up at, I don't know if it was Columbia or NYU, and they were like, Terminator 2 is not a real movie. And he's like, Terminator 2 is one of the best movies ever get the fuck out of here. It's true. So the school did host some retrospectives with commercially successful directors, including John Ford and Howard Hawks. Did you see Howard Hawks' name on the television screen? I did. Yes, for the thing. That's right. He produced The Thing from Another World, the 1951, black and white film, which John Carpenter would later remake as the thing, arguably his best movie.

Now, Carpenter loved Howard Hawks. He was an Oscar-nominated, genre agnostic, writer, producer, and director. Some of his credits that you guys might know. His Girl Friday, the original Scarface, he is prolific. This is what Carpenter wants. Complete control. Commercial budgets. Every genre. comedies, westerns, noir. He actually doesn't mention horror, which is interesting. But the seeds were there, because his first credit is a seven-minute black-and-white film he made at USC called Captain Voyeur,

which you can see online. It has almost no dialogue. It's about a peeping Tom wearing a cape and balaclava who lurks around the neighborhood at night and then gets shot by a woman who spots him in her window. There are several point-of-view shots. where you can hear him breathing heavily sound familiar? Mm-hmm.

Most of Halloween, yes. Mm-hmm. And just John Carpenter experiencing his fantasy as he's filming. Yeah, you would actually breathe heavier than that. Just trust me. Now, his most famous film school credit is a 20-minute short film called The Resurrection of Bronco Billy. Carpenter did not direct this,

but he did co-write the story, which is about a young man who lives in the city and dreams of becoming a cowboy. He also scored and edited the film. So as you mentioned, Lizzie, he's a Renaissance man from the get-go. Now, the Resurrection of Bronco Billy won the 1971 Academy Award for Best Short Film. And the producer of the film mentions Carpenter by name when accepting the Oscar. And so we really have the sense that Carpenter is this Vundekind, right?

He comes from this musical household, his parents tell him he can accomplish anything. He shows up in Los Angeles, walks to USC, gets an Oscar. he is on his way, and then everything grinds to a halt. So he decides it's time to make a feature film. Well, it starts as kind of a long, short film, but this will eventually become a feature film. Lizzie, have you ever heard of the movie Darkstar? No.

Okay, so Dan O'Bannon, who would go on to write Alien, perhaps most famously, and John Carpenter decide to make this sci-furtain. comedy called Darkstar, described as waiting for Godot in space, and they are filming it piecemeal, literally. So they get, I've read $1,000, maybe $6,000 from USC, and decide to shoot 45 minutes or so, and this is going to be Carpenter's directorial calling card.

They'd make like 10 minutes of it, screen it for family and friends, potential investors, raise more money, shoot 10 more minutes. And by the way, this movie is actually pretty fun. It's very low budget, but you can see it owes, a lot to Stanley Kubrick. There is so much Dr. Strange love to this movie.

There is so much 2001 Space Odyssey. There's like a self-aware bomb in this movie that the main character is having a conversation with at the end, trying to get it not to detonate, and the bomb realizes that it can only be certain of its own existence, and so therefore it has to detonate itself. It's very absurd. It's very fun.

It's definitely low budget, but you can kind of see its influences, and, you know, it wears all of these influences on its sleeve. This process of raising money and shooting 10 minutes at a time goes on for four years. Oh, my God. It is like walking from LAX to USC. During this time, Carpenter drops out of USC.

At one point, he thinks they're done, but then the movie's too short, but it's too long to be as short. Carpenter's composing the score, but the investor who funded post-production wants reshoots. It's a complicated, complicated story that we will get into when we cover the film. Long story short, they finish it.

It releases in L.A. in 1975, and it makes basically no money. And Carpenter's crushed, because I think he really thought this was going to be it. Like, he had gotten here, everything's going well, he's going to make his first feature, and the studios are going to come calling. He's going to be the next Howard Hawks. But making it in Hollywood is hard. It's like learning the violin. It's really hard.

So he lands an agent. The agent sends him out on these generals. at the fringes of Hollywood, people with sketchy money and weird projects that they want made. And Carpenter's terrible at selling himself, so none of these are going anywhere. And the studios aren't calling,

and he's taking checks from his dad to stay afloat, so he shifts to writing. And over the next few years, he puts directing on pause, and he writes a bunch of scripts. And it turns out he's good at it. And a number of them get made. And I just want to talk about a couple

that are relevant to our story. So, Eyes of Laura Mars, Have you heard of Eyes of Laura Mars? Have you ever seen it? No. Eyes of Laura Mars was released in 1978, so same year as Halloween. It was directed by Urban Kirshner, stars Tommy Lee Jones and Fay Dunaway. And it's the story of a woman who can see through the eyes of a killer. It's like a reverse peeping Tom.

I have heard about this. I've never seen it. Do you know what's funny? You think of a package, Kirshner, Tommy Lee Jones, Fay Dunaway, and it's a good logline. And the movie just, for me, it didn't really come together. I still think it would be an interesting movie to remake. And then he directs this TV movie called Someone's Watching Me, which was actually also released in 1978 and is about a woman tormented by a mysterious stalker.

I think we're picking up on a theme, maybe a secret interest of Mr. Carpenter's here, unclear. John, what are you doing between the hours of 9 and 11 p.m. at night in your neighborhood? Breathing heavily. Now, the most important script that he would write during this period of about six years was actually written in eight days. It was a modern-day Western about a group of cops and prisoners trapped in a police station that was being shut down, defending themselves against a local gang.

It was inspired by George Romero's Night of the Living Dead and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. Carpenter called it the Anderson Alamo, because it takes place in a little town called Anderson, And then he called it the siege, which makes sense because they talk about it being a siege in the movie. And finally, the suggestion of his distributor, the name changed to Assault on Precinct 13. Have you ever seen Assault on Precinct 13? I have not, but I know I need to. It's good. It's really fun.

It's kind of like a nasty little, it's not quite an exploitation film, but it's more in the vein of like an escape from New York, for example. One of my faves. Yeah, and I think you can kind of see where Carpenter has a real strength, in my opinion, and that's in ensemble films. And I think he does a good job managing a lot of the characters. Importantly, it does feature Nancy Loomis, who would go on to join the cast of Halloween as a young woman who's working at the telephone. And sorry, he wrote this but did not direct it. He wrote it and directed it.

And directed it. Okay. That's right. And Charles Seifers, who would go on to play Sheriff Brackett in Halloween. And of course, art director Tommy Wallace, who would go on to do production design in Halloween. and, perhaps most importantly, his assistant editor and script supervisor was a woman named Deborah Hill. Now, romance blooms between Hill and Carpenter, production raps, they start dating, an assault on Precinct 13 was released in November of 1976, and it flopped.

Got mixed reviews, Strike 2. Carpenter is devastated. I'll read you the quote. It was the second time I'd had a film make no money. I tried not to get too upset or take it too personally, but no one wanted me as a director. I went back to writing. Writing was opening a door to another door to another door. It was keeping me alive and paying the bills.

But I was programmed for failure. Assault didn't do a thing. It's since become a classic, though, right? It's been remade. It has become a classic, and it was remade with Lawrence Fishburn and Ethan Hawke. I didn't love the remake, but it's fun. I think I actually have seen the remake. Anyway, continue.

Carpenter may have regretted Precinct 13 in the moment, but he would not regret it long term, because without it, Halloween probably never would have happened. So a year after Precinct comes out, Carpenter's rapping production on that TV movie, Someone's watching me. He's hanging out in the commissary at Warner Brothers, and a stranger walks up to him and they say,

Hey, Assault on Precincts, 13 is breaking attendance records in the UK. Oh. Carpenter goes, how is that possible? And it's possible because of a man named Irwin Yablons. He was the pushy distributor who insisted on the name change to assault on precinct 13. Now, he ran an upstart indie distribution company called Compass International Pictures, but he was actually an experienced Hollywood operator.

He had worked in sales and distribution at Warner Brothers, and he had even worked on distributing Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo. He hopped from Warner Brothers to Paramount and became known as the president's brother when his younger brother, Frank Yablons, was promoted to the president of the studio in 1971. I was going to say, yeah. So they are actually related. They are brothers. Okay. Nepotism did not work in his favor.

In 1975, Frank was canned, and two weeks later, Irwin went too. It was a huge blow. They just started producing, so Irwin decides he's going to form a distribution company. To be clear, Frank is not involved in this. This is just Irwin. They had fewer than 10 employees.

By 1976, they had distributed exactly one movie, but they knew how to market themselves. They'd put announcements in the trades. Compass International, making big moves. Hollywood Reporter says, who knows if it's true. And that's when he got a call from John Carpenter's agent about Precinct 13, which was looking for distribution. And unlike the studios, Irwin thought Carpenter had the goods.

Here's his quote. I was excited. This was a movie that I could sell. Carpenter was obviously a very talented guy, and I wondered how the major studios had not seen what I had. Quick question, just for clarification. Sorry. So you said he insisted on the name. Was the name different in the UK?

No. So Carpenter's agent connects with Irwin after production has wrapped. Precinct 13, I believe, cost around $100,000 to make, which is incredible. That is one-third the budget of Halloween, and it's an action movie. Yeah, it's nothing. The movie needs distribution. Erwin gets on board before it distributes in the United States and insists on the name change. I believe it was actually going by the name The Siege when Irwin comes on. Got it. The movie flops in the United States, and that's when Irwin gets creative. He finds all these revenue streams that he'd never been aware of when he was at a big studio, because big studios would never need these revenue streams, non-theatrical rights, school screenings, cruise lines, prisons, the new line cinema model of distribution. So basically, cobbling all this together, he's able to meet payroll,

and then he takes the movie to, it's a film festival in Milan. I will do my best to pronounce this name. Mercato Internacionales del film, del TV, film, del documentario. It is an international cinema and television market held annually in Milan. And he's got something that could sell.

It has sex, action, little dialogue. There is interest. And by sex, I mean, there's some women in the film. There's not actually really any sex in this movie. But he realizes, hey, maybe we don't have to just distribute movies like this. Maybe we could make movies like this. I could raise $100,000. And that's when he's approached by a tall man in his 50s named Michael Myers.

Oh, no. How slow is he? And he kills him. Okay, well, what did this actual Michael Myers man do in order to deserve being the namesake of one of the most infamous slow-moving serial killers. He killed a lot of people. Oh, okay. He's just kidding.

No, he didn't know. He actually asked John Carpenter, John, was there something about me that inspired you to create this mindless, lumbering automaton murderer? And Sean said, no, of course not. I just wanted to pay homage to you because without you,

assault on Breesing 13 never would have been successful and Halloween never would have happened. And, I mean, I guess, guess it's a compliment, but it feels like a little bit of a weird one. But maybe to John, he's like, what an honor. You are now synonymous with one of the greatest villains in cinema history. Sure. So I guess I can see that. Myers works for a distributor called Miracle Pictures, and he wants to talk about Precinct 13. They agree to meet at the end of the week. It's the day of the meeting. Irwin's sick. He wants to go home. He thinks about canceling, but then the phone rings. Myers is already in the lobby.

classic slasher material there. He can't bail. So he goes downstairs, Meyer says, look, I want to take Assault on Precinct 13 to the London Film Festival and then do a UK release. So in November of 1977, Assault on Precinct 13 becomes the surprise hit of the London Film Festival. And it's in this moment that Irwin knows something that nobody else does. He knows something that John Carpenter doesn't even really know. He knows that John Carpenter is a good director. That's right. And he decides, I got to get him to make a movie with me before he figures it out because then I won't be able to afford him. So Irwin has an idea for a movie. It comes to him on a long flight. He knows he wants to do horror because comedy's too divisive. The quote he has is, you know,

you tell a joke at a dinner party, a third of the people think it's funny, a third of the people don't laugh and a third of the people think it's offensive. But if you run in with a knife at a dinner party, everybody gets scared. His justification. Horror is unifying humorous divisive. Great. He decides the movie should be about a killer who stalks vulnerable teenage girls as they babysit even more vulnerable little kids.

Basically the whole film. And the flourish, it takes place on one night, Halloween. And he decides, I want to call this movie Halloween. But then he says, Irwin, don't be an idiot. There has to already be a movie called, Halloween, so he calls John Carpenter and he pitches him, the babysitter murders. That's going to be the title. Irwin, go back.

Yeah. So Carpenter says, okay, fine, I'll do it because he's unemployed and has nothing else to do. They meet at the local hamburger hamlet. They talk over details, not over hamburgers, but apparently tuna fish sandwiches. Ew, guys. Maybe they're great there. I don't get it, but they're into it. Carpenter's pretty blazé, until Irwin reveals,

actually, we can call it Halloween, because I did some research and nobody's ever called a movie Halloween before. And I did some research, and I think the only horror movie that used a holiday in its title was Lizzie, Black Christmas. Wow, that's amazing. Until that point in time. There are about 100 movies named Christmas Something made, you know, until this point, none named Halloween.

That's crazy. It's also a very smart device, the way that he uses it at the end of the film, where, you know, she's banging on the neighbor's doors and they're not answering theoretically because it's Halloween and kids are acting up and doing crazy shit and they think it's a prank. Exactly.

Very well done. Carpenter also thinks this is a cool idea. He says, I can do it. I need four weeks and $300,000. Which is a really low ask, but it's a lot more than what you'd done Precinct 13 for. He'll write, he'll direct, he'll compose, and produce the music,

all he wants, a $10,000 fee, and 10% of the profits. Great. Along with complete creative control. That's a pretty good deal. Yeah, Erwin says, for $300,000, you can have whatever you want, John,

because that's a steal. Now, where that $300,000 actually came from is a bit difficult to pin down. So Irwin and Carpenter take the movie to another USC grad, director and producer Mustafa Akad. He was actually a mentee of Sam Peckinpah and an immigrant from Syria, and he'd long been interested in bringing stories of Islam to the United States. He faced a lot of resistance in Hollywood, so for his big desert epic, Lion of the Desert, he got some unique financing. Specifically, Muammar Gaddafi's government in Libya gave him 30,000. $25 million to make this movie about the second Italio Sanusi War starring Anthony Quinn and Oliver Reed.

Okay. Now, that movie flopped hard. I think it made a million dollars against its budget. But one source did suggest that Halloween was financed by leftover funds from Line of the Desert, which would mean that Halloween was technically financed by Gaddafi. Boomer Gaddafi was the autocratic leader of Libya. for 40 years until the Arab Spring. Okay, so it's safe to say not a cool guy.

Probably not. Had access to a lot of money, sovereign wealth. I don't think this is true. This is just what it said on one Halloween resource website because Lion in the Desert wasn't shot until 1979. That timeline doesn't actually make sense. I would like to debunk that. I do not think that this was financed by leftover funds from that movie

because that movie was made after Halloween. A Volta retrospective says that Irwin and Akkad split the budget between their respective companies, Compass International and Falcon International, but the AFI states that Akad advanced the entire budget. I don't know which one to believe, but it was independently financed. There is not a big investment group. They got the money. Whether they got the money from a dictator, you know, potato potato. Potato potato. Hollywood has taken money from worse.

We may not know who paid for it, but we do know who wrote the first draft. And it wasn't John Carpenter. It was Deborah Hill. Now Hill had Hollywood in her blood. Her father, Frank Hill, had worked in art direction, but he left that to become a salesman. And Deborah took the opposite approach.

She got a degree in sociology. She worked as a flight attendant. She moved to Jamaica. She wrote liner notes for albums. And then she came back to California, started working as a PA, climbed the ranks, and this was a quantum leap. She's going from script supervisor and assistant editor

to being a credited producer and writer on a feature film. It's a big deal. And Carpenter needed her. He needed her humanity. As she said, the story was a complete 50-50 collaboration. I wrote the first draft laying in the kids, the teenagers, and John came back with a pass for the Sam Loomis character,

all the stuff about evil is really, John, which makes a lot of sense. I do think Carpenter is very good at writing, you know, the dialogue amongst men, for example, in some of his films, but I do think his best movies have, we talked about this with The Thing, which was written by the screenwriter who had done Bad News Bears, and does an exceptional job setting up the characters really economically. And while I think Carpenter's a really good director, I do think when he brings in another screenwriter, his work really shines. Yeah. So Hill sets the story in Haddonfield, Illinois, an homage to her hometown of Haddonfield, New Jersey. She likes the idea of exposing

what's underneath the veneer of the suburbs, and she pulls from her personal experience as a teenage babysitter. And so for Michael Myers, Carpenter decides he wants a villain that's more mythical force than human man. And if Myers seems robotic, Lizzie, that's intentional. Are you familiar with a movie that came out in 1973 that had a big influence on the likes of Jurassic Park and became a very popular HBO series not too long ago, written by Michael Crichton. Wait, Michael, oh, oh, yes, yes, Westworld. That's right. About a theme park gone awry with robotic cowboys. Yes, it's Pirates of the Caribbean, where they actually do start eating the passengers. They do. Now, Carpenter also pulled from personal experience. He had taken a psychology class in college,

and he'd visited a mental institution in Kentucky. And he did say, and this is a slightly insensitive quote, but he did say that Dr. Loomis' line about the six-year-old child with devil eyes was inspired by an encounter that Carpenter had had with a severely mentally ill 12-to-13-year-old kid. Children are not possessed by the devil. I hope that child got the psychological help that they needed. So they cracked the structure, and then they make a list of scares,

and they just start weaving these scares methodically into the story. And Lizzie, you mentioned the name Sam Loomis. It does not come from Nancy Loomis. It comes from Psycho. Oh, that's right. Of course. So Tommy Doyle was named after Lieutenant Thomas Doyle from Rear Window in one Hitchcock reference. And then Dr. Loomis and his nurse Marion at the beginning of the film come from Sam Loomis and...

Marion Crane. Yeah, from Psycho. Yeah. Now, Halloween's biggest psycho can. connection is Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of the original screen queen, Janet Lee. That's right, Janet Lee, who had been nominated for her work on that film for an Oscar, and of course, Jamie Lee's father is Tony Curtis.

Yes. Star of Some Like It Hot. And if anyone is not familiar with Janet Lee, for any reason not seen Psycho, she is famously in sort of what Nightmare on Elm Street is playing on, she is the person you think you're following at the beginning of the movie. She's the one who's stolen the money, and she is the one who is very famously murdered in the shower. That's right. She had a hard time showering after that, famously, as well. I had a hard time showering. I saw Psycho way too young, and I took only baths for a really long time because I was really afraid that someone was going to come stab me in the shower.

I'm not a bath guy. I'm not a fan of baths. Love a bath. Got to be standing. I was scared of pools after seeing Jaws. Like pools, oceans, I was, I was afraid of those after Jaws for sure. There's no sharks in pools, Chris. And there's no psychos in my shower. You can't know that for sure. That's true. You just can't. You cannot know that for sure.

All right. Jamie Lee Curtis, Lizzie, was not who John Carpenter had in mind for the role of Laurie Strode. In fact, Jamie Lee Curtis didn't seem to be what anyone had in mind. A few years earlier, she was eyed for the role of Regan in The Exorcist. Oh, that's right. But her mom, Janet, said, no, no, no. No, no, no. Good for mom.

You're too young. Yeah. You're not going to be in this schlocker movie. No. Now, Janet Lee, to be clear, was not against Jamie Lee doing genre work. She would later be very supportive of her work in Halloween and she would even make some cameos in the series. I think she felt you're too young. This movie is extremely adult.

No. I mean, to be fair, it requires far more adult content of Reagan than this movie does of Lorry Strode. And Laurie Strode's older than Reagan. Yes, she would have been, I believe, like 13 at the time. And she's, what, 19 in this? Yes, she is. All right, so Carpenter and Hill start casting. As Jamie Lee is fired from her first big role,

Lieutenant Barbara Duran in the comedy series Operation Peticoat. She was distraught, but she was also available. Now, Carpenter wanted a different Nepo baby, Lizzie, 24-year-old Anne Lockhart, daughter of June Lockhart, granddaughter of Jean and Kathleen Lockhart. But Lockhart turned him down and moved on to Battlestar Galactica, the 1978 version. So, Deborah Hill says, John, I got just the actress for you, and she brings in a 19-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis. And Carpenter falls in love. For three reasons.

One, she had innocence. Two, she had strength. Three, the girl he really wanted turned him down. So we're going with you, Jamie. Well, it ends up being a really fun commentary to use her because her mother is sort of the OG scream queen. Well, Lizzie, I'm glad you mentioned that because no one was more excited than producer Erwin Yablons,

who immediately finds a photo of Janet Lee doing the famous scream in the shower from Psycho, puts it next to a photo of Jamie doing. a scream, and they send it out to every newspaper in the country. Yes, absolutely. Brilliant marketing. All right, let's talk about the rest of the cast briefly. So PJ Souls lands the role of Linda, world's second worst friend. She's fresh off playing Norma, one of Sissy Spacex tormentors and Carrie.

I knew I recognized her and her big 70s hair. Another question for you, why does everyone's hair in the 70s look so good and full? What were they eating that we're not eating now? Lead? Microplastics were not a thing. I don't know, probably lead. Led. Led. We all look like shit now.

They looked great. Great hair, violent tendencies. Yeah, exactly. Great hair. And Nancy Loomis, who had been in Assault on Precinct 13, along with Charles Seifers, joins Charles Seifers plays Sheriff Brackett in this film. And Nancy Loomis, by the way, is great. She's very fun. She's really good.

And she's good in Assault on Precinct 13, too. I do think that she and PJ's, like, it's weird. Curtis looks older than she is, I think, a little bit, but she, I don't know. They all feel a little old. Nancy Loomis looks older, but it's okay. Nancy Loomis looks older. Yeah, exactly. The way they treat her as if she's younger, I think, makes it work fine.

I'm actually glad that they all look a bit older because this movie is so sexual in the way that it handles the teenagers, that it's a bit easier to stomach that you're not looking at someone who looks like Heather Langenkamp, for example. They look like they're in their 20s. Yeah, I agree. And like you mentioned, there's so much annuity asked of these actresses that it starts, you know, I have a hard time watching euphoria, for example, at times because you remind yourself, this is supposed to be a 17-year-old, and we're getting a lot of shots of your boobs right now. And it's a little weird as a 36-year-old man. All right. As everybody tells me, shut up, Chris. Shut up.

It makes sense for the story. Sam Levinson does not agree. Yeah. Future, a housewife of bed. Beverly Hills, Kyle Richards. Yes. Lens the role of Lindsay. She's only eight years old.

And like Nightmare on Elm Street, Lizzie, the young actors all worked for scale. So the only way we're going to get this movie in under budget is if everybody's doing it for scale. With one exception, if there's one role in this movie, Lizzie, that you're going to break the bank for, who is it? Dr. Loomis. Dr. Loomis. And the first choice was not Donald Pleasance. But instead, Peter Cushing, who's probably best known now, as Grand Moth Tarkin in Star Wars.

Okay. Darth Vader's number two. Yeah. In Star Wars, the original trilogy. He was a veteran of the British Hammer Horror films alongside Christopher Lee. That's right. Of course, played Dr. Van Helsing. Mm-hmm.

And Baron Frankenstein. And Carpenter was a huge fan of Cushing, and he thought, this guy's accomplished. I believe at this point Star Wars had been released. That was 1977. He's just been in this huge movie, but he's an experienced genre actor. So he calls his agent and he's, oh, man, we want Peter.

And his agent's like, yeah, Peter's above this, to be honest. So it's a pass. And Cushing never got asked. He never got past his agent. So Carpenter goes to Cushing's former co-star Christopher Lee, who would, of course, later be part of Star Wars playing Count Duku in the prequels and Saruman and Lord of the Rings. And Christopher Lee turns down Halloween. Now, Deborah Hill says that she and Carpenter later ran in the series.

him at a party and he said, meaning Lee said, it was the biggest mistake of his career. Take that with a grand of salt. Yeah. Well, think about it, though. He'd done at that point, like seven of the Hammer Dracula films, I think. I think seven or eight. Yeah. Yeah.

Probably tired. Probably tired. But Halloween became such a franchise and Pleasance did return, you know what I mean, to a few of them. So, like, he could have, that's a lot of work is the point, you know, that he passed up on. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, Irwin was happy that it didn't work out because he didn't want this to feel like another Hammer Horror film. And he had a different actor in mind. Back when he was at Paramount, he distributed a Western called Will Penny, which starred Charlton Heston. Charlton Heston

actually calls this his favorite movie that he's ever worked on. And he got great reviews in it. It was directed by Tom Grease, who's John Grease's dad, who you guys would remember as Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamit. Or the guy in the closet from Real Genius. Or The White Lotus, most recently, Tanya's dastardly ex-husband. It co-starred Slim Pickens, Lizzie, fan favorite, and Donald Pleasance played one of the film's villains. So as Irwin later said, that character had stayed with me for years, and I suggested Pleasance for the part of the obsessed doctor.

My feeling was that he would give the character a quirky originality and a sense of dignity. That's exactly right. That's exactly what he does. I agree also, though this character is, so funny because he's like, A, he says, you know, he's like, you can't understand the evil that Michael has. You don't know what he's capable of. And it's like, you don't either, sir. You just said he hasn't spoken a word in 15 years. So how do you know what he's going to do? Has he been coloring his plans for you? One wonders, if had Michael had a better, more compassionate therapist,

would we be in this place? Most of the movie is Dr. Loomis, like, kicking rocks and wandering around going, I hope that Michael shows up at some point. His whole plan is literally just, we're at his house, let's just wait at his house. And then he just walks down the street looking for something amiss. Eventually, he'll get bored of killing these babysitters and come home to take a nap. Like, I'll kill him then. I do love when he's talking to the sheriff and Michael just drives behind him at the corner. So Donald Pleasance, he was 58 at the time that the film was getting made, agrees to take

on the roll, much to Carpenter's surprise, but he wants $25,000, so Yablons increases the budget to $325,000. So they'd get Michael Myers at a great price. Carpenter hires Nick Castle, an old USC friend who had helped write The Resurrection of Billy Bronco and who had played an uncredited alien in Darkstar, but Castle remembers his hiring a bit differently. Here's the quote. When I found out that John was going to be shooting Halloween pretty close to my house, I went down there and asked if I could stick around the set, because at that time, I was trying to get my own pictures off the ground as a director. He said, okay, fine, but as long as you're going to be here, why don't you do something? And he said, here, put this on. You'll be the guy running around, the killer. And I said,

fine, do I get any money? And he said, yes, $25 a day. Oh, it's so low. It's so low. And Kessel probably said, deal, pha. Like, I'm I'm thrilled. I'm getting paid. What are you guys making? Nobody tells him. Oh, no. He was available. He was cheap. And Lizzie, he also had a family lineage working in his favor. His dad was a choreographer for Fred Astaire. What, damn. Again, there's 12 people in Hollywood in the 70s, and they all had kids, and they're all in Halloween. Now, Carpenter liked the way that Nick Castle walked, but he didn't like his face, so he cast a different actor for the brief moment when Myers removes his mask. Tony Moran, who, and I agree with this, he has a more, quote, angelic look. He looks like a giant child in that moment, which I think is effective.

Is there a makeup effect on his eye? There is from when, because Lori pokes him through the mask with the clothes hanger before that. Also, the child version of Michael, very cherubic, very angelic. Very effective. I think that sequence is great. Although, who has a knife of that size in their kitchen? It is like a four-foot machete that he's just put. pulled out. It's a sword. Yeah. It's one of those classic turkey carving swords. Yeah, exactly.

Well, let's talk about the mask a little bit, because it was described two slightly different ways in the script. Here's the first description. A large, full-head, playtex rubber mask, not a monster or ghoul, but the pale, neutral features of a man weirdly distorted by the rubber. Okay, nailed it. Here's the second description. A Halloween mask made of rubber with the grotesque features of a man. Me, pretty close. Yeah. Lizzie, have you ever seen the movie Eyes Without a Face?

No. Oh, you'd like it. Really good French film, 1960s. This one becomes disfigured. She wears this blank, full face mask. I'm sure you have seen the image of her. It's got the eye holes are too big. Her whole rest of her face is covered.

Her mouth is closed. It's very much referenced in Goodnight Mommy. Have you seen that film? Oh, yeah, with the bandages. Mm-hmm. Also, that Elmodovar movie, The Skin I Live in. Very much referenced in that. Okay, I have to watch this because I love Good Night Mommy,

not so much the American remake, and, you know, I had no idea. Check out Eyes Without a Face. Good movie. Now, Myers almost wore a clown mask. Well, that makes sense because he does as a child. That's right. Production designer Tommy Wallace goes shopping at a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard, and he finds two options. The first is that classic Emmett Kelly's sad clown mask

with the big downturned mouth. And the second is a blank mask. He's trying to find a blank mask. So he goes to look at the masks of people and tries to see which one has the least amount of features. Richard Nixon looks too much like Nixon. Spock looks too much like Spock. And then he finds Lizzie.

I'm sure you know this. I do know it. William Shatner. William Shatner. And it just looks kind of blank. And so he takes it off the shelf, takes it home, cuts the eye holes bigger, takes off the sideburns, darkens the hair, paints it white.

They bring both masks to the office. They try the clown mask first, and it works. Like, it looks, it'll be scary. And then they put the blank mask on, and it is apparently terrifying. It is terrifying. Wallace said, that's when he knew that Halloween was going to be a very scary movie. But there's one person who disagreed. Irwin Yoblins, he said, I think it's dumb.

I think it's phony. I don't think this works at all. He's admitted he was wrong, and that was his one. wrong instinct with this franchise. But there were other people with Doubtzzy. Donald Pleasance was feeling a little doubtful about this movie he'd signed up

for. So he sits down with John Carpenter before filming starts, and he lays it out. I don't understand the script. I don't like this script. I don't know who my character is. The only reason I'm doing this is because my daughter thought your movie was cool. So tell me why I'm doing this. And Johnny

Carpenter's like, uh, uh, uh, uh, His most expensive actor Just told him he hates the script Doesn't understand his character He must have come up with something Pleasant sticks around And Carpenter later realizes

When we became friends He wants to find out how much you want to do the movie He wants to find out how passionate you are So that's his little trick Pleasence didn't actually mean any of it He just wanted to make sure that Carpenter could stick by his guns If he was going to work with him

Which is like on the one hand I get it But yeah terrifying Yeah traumatic So traumatic Why do you want to make this movie? It sucks. Go. Probably how he

therapistized Michael. Yeah, and then he went back to his keyboard. Yeah, played by himself. So, they only have three weeks of pre-production, which is crazy. Production starts in March of

1978. As you mentioned, Lizzie, much of it is shot in Pasadena and South Pasadena, along with West Hollywood, and the schedule is tight. 22 shooting days, of which Donald Pleasance

is only available for five. Okay. So they've got their biggest name for five days. And after day one, Jamie Lee Curtis is convinced she's going to get fired. She knows she sucks. She goes home. The phone rings. Her roommate answers.

Jamie, it's John Carpenter. Oh, my God. It's Operation Pettycoat all over again. John's going to let me go. She picks up the phone. And Carpenter goes, hey, darling, it's John. I just want to tell you how happy I am. and how fantastic you were today.

And I just know it's going to be amazing, end quote. It's very nice. And she said that no director does that, but John did that. So, kudos to John. Now, Carpenter wasn't always that hands-on or verbose with all of his actors. They didn't all get the Jamie Lee Curtis treatment. Nick Castle kept asking for Michael Myers' motivation. John, where's this guy coming from?

And Carpenter said, Nick, don't act. Just walk. I mean, he doesn't have a motivation, basically. No. Yeah, he's just a monster. That's what Carpenter wanted, right? He says, Meyer should be blank so the audience can project their fears onto him. That's the goal.

Right. He's the shape. Now, Castle does appear maskless very briefly, Lizzie, during the mental institution escape. You can see his face for a brief second. And shooting that scene was brutal. It's 3 a.m. He's barely dressed. He's getting repeatedly hosed down with cold water because it's supposed to be raining.

I also want to mention that's one of my favorite moments. directorially is when they pull forward and you see the other patients wandering. I love that. Do they let them out at night? It's very eerie, really well done. The nurse is like, since when do they let them wander around? Yeah, it's great. It's very, very well done.

The sort of realization that the gate has been broken down and that, you know, Michael has escaped happens very slowly. It does. It's a very, I think, smart way to get all the exposition out. Not that you need much for Michael. And they avoid showing the institution. Right. which is also very smart.

Yeah, it's just a fence. It is. Now, the $325,000 budget is barely enough. Everybody's wearing multiple hats. Deborah Hill, that is her hand grabbing the knife in the POV opening when Michael Myers stalks and kills his sister. Oh, wow. Okay. Yeah, it's little Deborah Sands, not a child stance.

A little boy's hand. Now, Michael Myers was played by multiple crew members, including the dog trainer, stuntman. I'm glad it was a dog trainer because the way that that dog went limp really upset me, and I was, I hope the dog was fine. I'm pretty sure that's because it's the dog trainer holding the dog, yeah, in that instance. As he said, sleep. The dog goes limp very convincingly in that scene. I know. It's an amazing actor dog.

That's why I was a little nervous. Maybe a sedative was used. I didn't find anything about that. Also, production designer Tommy Wallace did also play Michael Myers. And there were a lot of struggles. Like making springtime in Los Angeles look like fall in Illinois. Yeah. I'm sure you noticed how verdantly green everything looks in this movie.

There's also at least one shot where she turns one corner. It's very dry and sunny and then she turns another corner and it's soaking wet. Yeah. That being said, great pains were taken to avoid palm trees. There are a cobble visible at the beginning of the film, but I think they overall do a very good job, especially compared to a nightmare on Elm Street where they just say, They don't even try.

Here's the Venice canals of Springfield. Yeah. Well, also, you know, South Pasadena famously has stood in for the East Coast and particularly New England many, many times, you know, Mad Men, Don Draper's house in Austin, New York. You can drive right past that. That's in South Pasadena. Father of the Bride is there. So if you want to shoot for East Coast fall, that's kind of your only option in the L.A. area. It is.

And you could go to like Sierra Madre, for example. Yeah, which they do, I think, in this. Yeah. One of the big things that they were trying to do was get some sort of brown into the frame. So they had a team of six to eight people on leaf duty. They actually painted a lot of paper leaves, autumn colors. They put them in front of a fan, scatter them across the yard,

rake them up, bag them for the next scene. And that's why in every single shot in scene, you see like the equivalent of a bunch of freeway trash of paper leaves on people's perfectly green yards. and they couldn't find any pumpkins. The Jacko lanterns in the movie are squashes that are painted orange. Because, again, we're not in season.

But the mood on set was light and happy. Unlike nightmare on Elm Street, there wasn't a lot of top-down pressure. Jamie Lee Curtis said there were basically 15 to 20 people on set at any given time because everybody's doing multiple jobs. Almost everybody's under 30 years old. The cast shares one Winnebago. And Curtis said it was magic.

A friend of somebody cooked the food each day and we all ate on the ground together. And so it sounds like the actual production itself was a pretty pleasant experience. And then we got to post-production. And things got a little nerve-wracking. First, John Carpenter doesn't know how to end the movie. So Carpenter actually shot two versions of Loomis' reaction

to Michael Myers disappearing. And this was actually because Donald Pleasins asked him, how do you want me to play this? So in the first version, Pleasins goes, Oh my God, he's gone! Like a great Scott. And in the second version, he goes, oh my God, I knew this would happen. And Carpenter really liked the second version.

You knew that's the version we got to go with. And then the montage that ends the film was not in the script. They found it in the editing room to show all the places that Myers had been or could be evil is everywhere, which also left the door open for a sequel. You got to. Which was not intentional, according to Hill and Carpenter. They just wanted to give the movie a creepy. ending. Now, according to production designer Tommy Wallace, they use nearly every foot of film that they

shot. So the shooting ratio of a film, right, the number of feet that you shoot versus the actual length of the finish film. Makes sense. They didn't shoot for very long. No. And so, you know, we've talked about films with a shooting ratio of 50 to 1, meaning for every one minute of finished footage, you've shot 50. I would guess this is something a lot closer to, you know, two, three, four, five to one, single digit ratio. Great. Very economical. The honeymoon phase. ended as John Carpenter started to show the movie to people. He showed it to an executive and the executive said, this doesn't work. It's not scary at all. Nancy Loomis sought and she thought, holy shit, this movie's completely forgettable. And you know what the problem was, Lizzie? Music? It didn't have any music.

There you go. You need John Carpenter going, beady, beady, d'ee, peedee. This is conjecture. Carpenter must have done so much blow because is he wrote this score in three days. I mean, it kind of sounds like it. It does. Like a great way. I love it. But yeah. He didn't even score to picture.

He just wrote the themes blind in a room and then flew them into the editing suite. And he's like, this goes here. This one kind of goes here. It generally worked really well. Yeah. Now, you mentioned the main title theme. It's iconic. It's arguably the most iconic theme in 5-4 outside of Mission Impossible.

The dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb. It's a piano riff based on his dad teaching him five, four time on the bongos when he was 13. He sat down on the piano, he played it, and then he then called his dad and played it for him. And it, of course, became one of the most iconic pieces of music in Hollywood history, arguably. You only need three days and four pounds of cocaine. Well, Irwin might have been doing some stress relief cocaine as well, because he has done. desperately trying to get a major studio to distribute this movie. He sets up a screening and he invites Paramount, Warner Brothers, Columbia.

Nobody shows up. They didn't even show up. It's not like Paramount turning down nightmare where they watched it. It's just Irwin sitting there waiting for them to come. Nobody comes. So then they screen the movie at some local colleges. At UCLA, a third of the audience apparently walked out. At USC, one of these douchebag film students asks why they'd waste the chance to make a movie

on a disgusting horror story, to which accomplished cinematographer Dean Kundi politely says, we're trying to do something fresh with a genre that's a little stale. And Debra Hill says, yeah, we kind of hope it'll become a classic. And the student says,

that's pretentious and ridiculous. Wow. And that student was Bradley Cooper. Sorry, that's a reference to Bradley Cooper appearing in the audience of Inside the Actor's Studio. That is. Bradley Cooper, I think at this time, would have been two years old.

But he still might have said that. He was precocious. Honestly, I could see it. Now, it seems like that student was right at first. They had no distribution. They were lost at sea. But sometimes, Lizzie, you got to walk from L-A-X to USC. You got to.

Because it's the only way. So Irwin sells the movie one city at a time. And he starts in Kansas City on October 25, 1978. Oh, great barbecue. The first night goes okay. Opening grosses are about $200 per theater, according to the AFI. And then the ticket sales just kept going up. Within a week, daily grosses were between $1,600,000 and $2,000 a day.

Audiences were returning to see it again and again. They were talking back at the screen, like in the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yes. They rushed the movie to New York and Los Angeles for Halloween. It plays the San Diego Film Festival, and Deborah Hill and Jamie Lee Curtis led a screening at the La Jollae Museum of Contemporary Arts. Wow. On November 10th, 1978, the Hollywood Reporter claims

that Halloween had made $2 million in the United States and another $1 million in advanced sales from foreign markets after a single screening at the Mercado International de film, del TV film, del documentary in Milan. He's back. Where Yoblins had first met Michael Myers years earlier. Two weeks in.

Halloween had nearly 10xed its $325,000 budget. And it found an unexpected friend in Roger Ebert, patron saints of low-budget horror films, whose positive review started with a Hitchcock quote, I enjoy playing the audience like a piano, to which Ebert says, so does John Carpenter. Halloween is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to Psycho. Nice.

An apt comparison. Now, it wasn't all positive. Lizzie, could you imagine any criticism that Halloween might receive, perhaps from female critics? Sure. I mean, there's some unnecessary, one could argue potentially unnecessary toplessness. And the majority of the movie is just Michael Myers stabbing young teenage girls. Well, not the majority. The majority of the kills are Michael Myers stabbing young teenage girls, although he does kill a boy as well.

That's true. And he also chokes one of them to death. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And, well, he staps her, too. They're sort of, they are treated. That's what he does. He does a chok chokes, stab. Yeah, I mean, look, I find it very hard to believe that there is no commentary on, you know, teenage girl sexuality and boy sexuality, to be honest, in this movie.

Because they're murdered for doing the sexes. You can't tell me otherwise. I've seen it. I watched it. That's what it is. Well, that was a major criticism of the film. The one female character who did not die was the one who was not sex. sexually active. And again, for years, Carpenter and Hill have denied that this was intentional.

Which I guess fair, because he does try to kill her. He's just really bad at it if you haven't had sex. If you have had sex, he's very good at it. Or maybe you are just very slow to react. It's once you have sex, you are bad at defending yourself. That's what I mean. Yes. Right. Got it. So in late November, the Ravoli Theater in New York had to pull Halloween to make room for Universal's big Christmas release, Stephen Spielberg. 1941. Whoops. Which flopped so hard, they said,

you're out of here. Halloween's back. Two weeks later, they put Halloween back. Which is great. Halloween grossed roughly $50 million in the United States and nearly $70 million worldwide. I presume, given his 10% profit participation,

John Carpenter became a millionaire after this film. It was the most lucre independently produced film of all time for 12 years. Do you know what surpassed it, Lizzie? It didn't have as low a budget, but it was just independently produced. 1978 would have been 1990? You're never going to guess it. It would have been 1990, yeah. I'm not going to get it?

No. Okay, what is it? What is it? Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. There's literally no way I would have ever gotten that. Even if Michael Myers was chasing you and your life depended on it. And he's so slow. Yeah, still would. He is slow. He'd catch me eventually. All right. Alongside Toby Hooper's The Texas Chainsaw Masker, Halloween is, as we discussed, credited with revitalizing the slasher genre. Now, even though Debra Hill and John Carpenter claimed they never planned a sequel,

Halloween spawned a hell of a franchise. There were a dozen more movies, two reboots, and the Laurie Strode saga seemingly came to an end with the somewhat miserable, in my opinion, Halloween ends, released in 2022. Pretty not good. I mean, I'm thrilled. Jamie Lee Curtis, get the bag. Jamie Lee Curtis is great in those movies.

All the actors are great. Yes. I did not enjoy those films. You know what? I was fine watching it, but again, I was watching it mostly for the novelty of a Beverly Hills housewife being in it. Kyle Richards is good in it.

Jamie Lee Curtis did appear in most of these films, but I would argue, for the most part, transcended the franchise. She became a star and a sex symbol in her own right, independent of Halloween. The movie did mark the end of Carpenter and Deborah Hill's romantic relationship, but it solidified their professional partnership. They went on to make several more movies together,

including a couple of Halloween sequels, but also a few favorites of mine, The Fog, which I really like, Escape from New York, which is great, and Escape from L.A., which is one of the best, so bad it's good movies of all time. It's fantastic. Oh, and it's just, to this day,

contains my biggest, like, funniest map blunder. so when they show the map of Los Angeles and it says La Cagnada up to the north, I thought they were making a joke that Canada had been taken over by Mexico and it was La Canada when I was a kid because that's how dumb I was. Little did you know.

Little did I know. La Cenaia, real place that I can't afford to live. That's right. Moving on. Carpenter achieved for the most part the directorial status that he'd sought, but he never enjoyed the genre malleability that Howard Hawks once did.

squarely worked inside the horror and action genre, I would say, although he did try to make a Western for a long time. Hill also went on to create one of the first big female producing partnerships when she joined forces with Linda Ops and some of their movies include the wonderful the Fisher King, Clue, which we just discussed on Spooled, and Adventures in Babysitting. Oh, great. What a fun tieback. Which was Chris Columbus's directorial debut. Debra Hill passed away from cancer in 2005. She was only 54 years old. Financier Mustafa Akad died that same year

in the 2005 Amman bombings in Jordan. He was 75 years old. And in 2006, Halloween was added to the National Film Registry. Like Michael himself, the Halloween franchise collapses occasionally, but never stays down. The brand has threatened to swallow up the original work, yet Halloween, the film retains a stature apart from Halloween, the franchise, and the Empire, and its presence in the National Film Registry is a testament

to its singular and continuing power. And I'm sure we'll get another reboot any day now. Oh yeah. Of course. Of course, because Michael's never done. He's never done. But I have to ask you, in his origin story, what went right? I think a lot went right. As we discussed, I really enjoy this movie. I am going to stick with it, though, and give it to Dean Cundee. for the cinematography on this. I think it could have looked so hokey, particularly the way that they were shooting this, whether it's the shot from when he,

at the very beginning, when he puts the mask on, all the POV shots. I think the way that he just establishes space and quiet in the frame and in this movie is really fantastic. And I just don't think it would be as scary or as successful without him behind the camera. I really, it's worth looking at it to see, you know, what he blooms into in terms of Jurassic Park and later things,

I think you can see a lot of it starting here. Absolutely. He is a generational talent behind the camera. And that was one of, I completely agree with you. One of the first things I felt, actually, it's in the slow dolly in on Jamie Lee in the corner of the classroom. It's such a beautiful shot. And like, she looks so beautiful.

A lot of them are beautiful. Like when she's standing outside and you sort of, these. shots, also the way that they capture him appearing and disappearing and him just like just exiting frame. Yeah, it's very simple. Yeah, when he's in the clotheslines outside in her backyard, it's a great shot. Yeah, it's a really, really wonderfully shot movie. And especially when you know the budget they had and how quickly they must have been moving and how little time he probably had to light, it just reinforces the creativity. Because it's an economically shot movie, too. Yeah, very.

you get the sense of with a lot of his early work, including assault on precinct 13. I would like to cheat and give a tie. Okay. So, Deborah Hill, because I think I would imagine if Carpenter had tried to write the teenage girls in this movie, it might have felt very different. Yeah. And I think the kids are really well written, and they don't try to act older than their age. They're just little kids. I think, you know, the girls are well written.

And that most of the movie is you're just hanging out with these babysitters. Yeah. Like dreading what's going to come next. So in a lot of ways, she wrote a lot of the meat of the movie. And then I want to, on the flip side, give it to Donald Pleasance, who has some of the most insane dialogue. He sure does. You are ever apt to hear, and yet totally grounds all of it.

And it's believable. And I kind of buy his character. And when he says, like, you have the wrong feeling. Like, he just says so many weird death has come to your little town, Sheriff. I met him 15 years ago. I was told there was nothing left, no reason, no conscious, no understanding. And even the most rudimentary sense of life or death of good or evil, right or wrong, I met this six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face and the blackest eyes.

The devil's eyes. It's so over the top. But the way he delivers it is so earnest and yet also he kind of throws it a little bit too, because he's almost too busy to be talking to the sheriff. And it totally works. And he's wonderful. And I think without him opposite Jamie Lee, I don't know. I just don't think the movie would work.

And so I would like to give it to him too. Great. And obviously we love Jamie Lee. We do. But she has enough. She doesn't need her own what went right yet. No. We'll give it to her with any number of films that follow this one.

All right, Lizzie. That concludes our coverage of Halloween. Would you like to tell the folks at home what we have coming their way next? Sure. A natural follow-up. I would say. This is what I throw on after Halloween every time I watch it. Yeah, you know what?

I'm very excited because we are actually entering into our first directorial double feature. And it's double man. It's man on man, meaning Michael Mann. And we are starting next week with The Last of the Mohicans. I'm very excited about this one. It's a really interesting story. I also love that movie. It is like in a dark sense.

maybe kind of a Thanksgiving movie? Uh, that was not the intention. I'm just saying you slotted it into November, Lizzie. Unfortunately, it is in November. That's not what we were intending. But yes, it does star, hey, it does star a lot of Native Americans. And we are going to discuss over the course of that episode

how its portrayal of Native Americans on camera and then also treatment of them off camera was a big point of discussion in Hollywood at the time and how it differed from dances with wolves. Spoiler alert. So that will be next and then the week after that,

we will be covering Chris. When you feel that heat around the corner, it's got that ass! That's the quote that we should use. Great. Every film bro's favorite movie, heat, yes. It's a great movie. It is great.

It is great. We will first discuss the theft of America by the colonizing puritans. And then the theft from the banks by Robert De Niro, Tom Seismore, Val Kilmer, Wangro. I am excited. It's going to be heat. Michael Mann's Heat.

One of the greatest love stories put to the screen, in my opinion. Man on Man. Yeah. It really is. Two men addicted to each other who ultimately can't live without each other. Amazing. And I think it's a beautiful movie. So I'm excited to talk about it.

And I meant our double feature will be man on men. Mano a man. That's right. Man on man on man. That's right. Man on man. We should do that. That's good. That's the musical we're going to write. All right, guys. If you're still enjoying this podcast somehow, after that, there are a few easy ways to support us. Number one, you can leave a rating and review on whatever podcasts you're listening on, five stars, five stars. Number two, you can tell a family member, tell a friend, hey guys, check this podcast out. It's pretty good. Number three, you can subscribe for bonus content on Apple Podcasts. That's right, if you go to our page on Apple Podcasts for $4.99 a month, you can get at least one bonus episode a month. We just did a review on one battle after another. And we have a review coming up very soon of Guillermo del Toro's Frankenstein, starring very beautiful giant man, Jacob Allorty. If you are interested in even more content, you can join our Patreon. Head to www. patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast.

You can join for free. For $5, you get bonus content and an ad-free RSS feed. And for $50, you can have your name shattered out by Dr. Loomis himself like this. Hey, Lonnie, get your ass away from there. I told everybody, Adam Morfatt, Adrian Pang Correa, Angeline Renee Cook, Ben Shindleman, Blaze Ambrose, Brian Donahue, Brittany Morris, Brooke, Cameron Smith, C. Grace B. He was doing very well last night. Chris Leal, Chris Zucker, D.B. Smith, David Friskillante, Darren and Dale Conkling, Don Schiaebel, Ellen Singleton, M. Exodia.

Evan Downey, Felicia G. He's gone. He's gone from here. The evil is gone. Film it yourself. Galen and Miguel, the broken glass kid. Grace Potter, Half Greyhound, Jake Killen, James McAvoy, Jason Frankl, Jen Mastro Marino, JJ Rapido, Jory Hilpiper. Okay, now from the sequels. I shot him six times. I shot him in the heart. Jose Salto, K. Canaba, Kate Elrington,

Kathleen Olson, Amy Ogishlogger McCoy, Frankenstein, Lon Relad, Lena, L.J. Lydia Howes. Matthew Jacobs and Michael McGrath. I am talking about the real possibility that he is still out there. Nathan Knife. Nathan Centeno. Rosemary Southward. Rural juror.

Sadie. Just Sadie. Scott O'Sheedah. Soman Chinani. Steve Winterbauer. Suzanne Johnson and the Provost family where the O's sound like Oves. And just when you think he's dead. No, he's not. He's still breathing. Look at him.

All right, guys. Thank you so much for tuning in. and we will see you next week for the last of the Moheekans. Run away fast. Stay celibate. It's the only way you're surviving. Okay. Bye.

Go to patreon.com slash what went wrong podcast to support What Went Wrong. And check out our website at what went wrong. What Went Wrong is a sad boom podcast presented by Lizzie Bassett and Chris Winterbauer. Editing and music by David Bowman. Research for this episode provided by Jesse Winterbauer with additional editing from Karen Krupsaw. B.