Call a film Halloween Kills and you’d better deliver. Over 43 years, four separate timelines and 10 blood-soaked rampages, masked maniac Michael Myers has slaughtered over 120 unsuspecting residents of Haddonfield, Illinois on the spookiest night of the year, utilising everything from a trusty chef’s knife to an especially pointy tripod in his single-minded pursuit of Laurie Strode. Myers, then, is no slouch when it comes to butchering the innocent, but his body count is set to skyrocket when Kills hits screens later this year.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366429_loc.JPG]
“It’s intense and brutal. Just brutal,” says Jamie Lee Curtis of the follow-up to Halloween (2018), itself a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s original, trailblazing slasher. “There’s an incredible amount of killing in this movie,” adds Danny McBride, the film’s co-writer. “It’s so bloody. It’s wild. David [Gordon Green] just went for it. This is such a vicious sequel. It’s relentless.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366267974.jpg]
MICHAEL’S 10 MOST HAUNTING KILLS...
DEATH BECOMES HIM
10 OSCAR HALLOWEEN, 2018
Oscar walks Allyson home to ensure her safety. But what about his? Michael plunges his trusty knife before impaling his prey’s head on a spiky gate.
9 JOHN STRODE HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, 1995
Laura’s abusive uncle is stabbed by Michael, and then has his head thrust into a fuse box for good measure. Electrifying.
8 LAURIE STRODE HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, 2002
Terrible film, good death, as Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is stabbed repeatedly and hung from a rooftop. Curtis would resurrect Laurie in Halloween (2018).
7 ANNIE HALLOWEEN, 1978
The first of (adult) Michael’s kills in Carpenter’s original comes 55 minutes in, as Annie, sitting in her car, is strangled from behind, then knifed.
6 PARAMEDIC HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, 1988
Myers, presumed dead, sits up in an ambulance and sticks his thumb deep into a paramedic’s forehead. As you do.
5 JIMMY HOWELL HALLOWEEN H20: TWENTY YEARS LATER, 1998
4 DANIELS HALLOWEEN II, 2009
Can’t match Carpenter’s suspense? Then go for intensity. Rob Zombie has a nurse played by Octavia Spencer (!) stabbed again and again and again. In close-up.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366972284.jpg]
3 OFFICER FRANCIS HALLOWEEN, 2018
Killed off-screen, but made memorable because Michael hollows out the policeman’s decapitated skull like a jack-olantern, and pops a candle inside.
2 KAREN HALLOWEEN II, 1981
This nurse at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital is relaxing in the hydrotherapy pool when Michael turns up the heat to boil her like a lobster.
1 BOB AND LYNDA HALLOWEEN, 1978
Michael impales Bob against a wall then borrows his glasses and a white sheet to approach Lynda as a bespectacled ghost. The trickster strangles her. JG
Teenager Jimmy is stabbed with an ice skate. Inventive, but mostly places high on the list because he’s played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524583.jpg]
Green completed work on Halloween Kills in July 2020, right around the time the decision was made to push the film back by 12 months to avoid a “compromised theatrical experience”. He hasn’t watched it since; both to resist any temptation to tweak things here and there and “cause trouble for everyone”, and also so he has a second opportunity to watch it fresh, with an audience. “That’s why you make horror movies,” says Green who, along with McBride, is currently in production on the second season of HBO series The Righteous Gemstones. “You make them for the crowds. You make it for those reactions. You make it for that community which is just so loving. It’s exhilarating as a filmmaker to be a part of that connection.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524738.jpg]
No moment proved more exhilarating for Team Halloween than the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018, not least because success was far from a sure thing. By that point it had been nine years since Michael Myers last terrorised Haddonfield in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II – a film that has its advocates, but is generally considered a gruelling low point for the series. In the years that followed, long-serving producer Malek Akkad, the son of legendary Halloween producer Moustapha Akkad, had plenty of opportunities to bring The Shape back to screens; there was only one problem.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524785.jpg]
“They were crazy, crazy, bad, bad ideas,” Akkad remarks. “Some of the pitches that I’ve heard, oh my God! I waited it out for seven years. I wasn’t going to make a piece of junk like they wanted me to.” Once Akkad “got out from the previous studio” in 2016 and teamed up with Universal, the stars quickly aligned. Within months John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Blum and David Gordon Green had all signed on to make a new Halloween that would serve as an authentic sequel to Carpenter’s ’78 slasher. The signs were certainly promising but no one, least of all the film’s creative team, knew if audiences would embrace their vision.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524837.jpg]
“When we screened for the very first time at TIFF I was so fucking nervous,” McBride recalls. “I didn’t eat for like a week before that. The franchise means so much to me, and I know how much it means to fans. We really just didn’t want to disappoint people.” As the film played, and each crushed skull, snapped neck and knowing nod to Halloweens past was greeted with gleeful approval by the vocal TIFF audience, nerves turned to excitement. “Going up on that stage after it was done, and seeing how much fun everyone had had – it was overwhelming,” says McBride. “I turned to David and was like, ‘I don’t really see how anything in our careers will be more fulfilling than what we’ve just experienced.’”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524889.jpg]
It was a moment that marked the latest milestone in a 25-year journey for McBride and Green. The pair first met in college and bonded over a shared love of cinema after realising they owned many of the same VHS tapes, Halloween included. Standing on stage in Toronto brought everything full circle. “It was a fulfilment of our childhood dreams, in a lot of ways,” Green says plainly. “[Halloween] is a VHS cassette that I still have in my office as a reminder. It’s one of the films that inspired me. It’s right next to my copy of The Neverending Story – whatever that’s worth! But it’s so fun that, in that moment we could look over at each other, and close our eyes for a second, and be really thankful.”
The reception out of Toronto, and subsequent box office haul of $255m worldwide – far and away a franchise-best – practically guaranteed a sequel (or two). But Green and McBride had been dreaming bigger from the beginning. “When David and I first met, the conversation was that he and Danny had conceived of a trilogy,” Curtis recalls. “They understood that there was much more of this story to tell than just [Halloween] 2018.” Both agreed that their first Halloween needed to feel conclusive in and of itself, and that committing to sequels which may never get made if the first film didn’t resonate would be hubristic at best, foolhardy at worst (as Universal learnt to their cost a year earlier with the ignominious collapse of the Dark Universe), but conversations often turned to the future, and how to avoid the pitfalls of the slasher sequel.
“The sequel is almost always where it shits the bed,” McBride notes, not inaccurately. “Or the monster is over-explained, or something happens that makes it into a joke. We really wanted find a way to sidestep that.” Incorporating “a lot of ideas” developed for Halloween 2018, it was decided that Halloween Kills would pick up moments after the ending of the ending of the first film, with Michael still trapped in Laurie’s purpose-built cell as chez Strode burns around him. 1981’s Halloween II, scripted by Carpenter and Debra Hill, is similarly set on the same night as its predecessor, so Green naturally sought Carpenter’s sage advice. “Sure enough, a lot of the obstacles that I was facing he laughed at, and said that they were talking about the same things in the early ’80s. He thought it was a funny thing to revisit a lot of the problems that they had, and trying to find creative ways out of them.”
The solution that Green and McBride hit upon was to turn a series about the obsessive pursuit of a single woman by a madman in a mask, into an ensemble tale centred around the residents of Haddonfield, all of whom have suffered at Michael’s hands. As Green puts it, Kills is a much bigger story than “a man with a knife, in a house, victim by victim. It’s the plague of fear. As word hits Haddonfield of what’s out there, and some of it’s true and some of it’s not, it’s building the myth of this murderer. It’s the larger, pervasive spread of fear, and how that affects a community.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366971360.jpg]
‘SOME OF THE PITCHES I’VE HEARD, OH MY GOD!’
MALEK AKKAD 3
In 2018, with its themes of generational trauma inflicted on all three Strode women (or ‘Hallowomen’, as Curtis refers to them), Halloween resonated unexpectedly with the still-explosive #MeToo movement. Once again, Green and McBride have found that the themes they’re exploring within the confines of a mainstream horror movie are unexpectedly mirroring events beyond the screen. “Trauma was act one, if you will,” Curtis puts forward. “There was a confluence between the #MeToo movement and the Halloween 2018 movie with Laurie Strode representing 40 years of oppression, and her saying, ‘I am not taking it anymore.’ I think it was a genuine reason why the 2018 movie was so profoundly successful.
“Now, David and Danny did not know that on January 6th, there would be a Capitol riot,” she continues. “David and Danny did not know that George Floyd was going to be killed, and it was going to stimulate large masses of people taking to the street, and taking to acts of violence as a way to say, ‘We are doing this on our own. We do not trust you to do it for us.’ And that’s exactly what Halloween Kills is about – an entire town saying, ‘We are taking this on ourselves.’ It shows that David and Danny have a divining rod. They’re future thinkers. They have some idea of what’s happening in the world, and they’re distilling it through their writing.”
Green and McBride can’t account for their precog powers (“I have no clue!” chuckles McBride), only that Laurie Strode, and her evolution as a character, has driven a lot of the major decisions in their Halloween trilogy. “Laurie is a voice of both insight and reason that is trying to give a volatile community some sense of purpose here. It’s less about vengeance and more about a calculated philosophy of how to process evil,” Green says, pointing out that “she’s not the main character of Halloween Kills, but she is the emotional core of it. I could always turn to her for help in voicing these questions of the themes of this movie.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273047.jpg]
With Laurie set to spend the majority of the film in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital fighting for her life after taking a knife to the gut in the first film, Kills opens up “opportunities when heroes can shine, and others can show their true colours and fall” according to Green. One of the characters who has already ascended to hero status is Laurie’s daughter, Karen, whose ‘gotcha’ moment at the film’s climax blew the roof off that Toronto screening. For Judy Greer, a supporting actor extraordinaire, it was a rare moment in the spotlight she won’t soon forget, and one that feeds directly into Karen’s mindset in Halloween Kills.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273742.jpg]
“Imagine being me, sitting in that audience, seeing that for the first time! That’s a moment I hope I remember for the rest of my life,” says Greer with a burst of energy down the phone, adding that “she’s still in that moment [in Halloween Kills]. The adrenaline is still coursing through her veins. It’s not like Karen has a couple of months to be like, ‘I’m awesome. I’m a badass!’ David Gordon Green said to me, when we were shooting, ‘I want this to be like Mad Max where we’re just going. We’re going, going, going, going.’”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273194.jpg]
While Karen comes to terms with her newfound badassery and mourns the death of her husband, her daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) channels her anger into hunting down Michael. “When we met Allyson in 2018, she was a very relatable, lovely girl-next-door type of character,” Green says. “Allyson here, she is ignited. She is, in some ways, leading the charge, and is one of the more bloodthirsty of the group. Whereas Karen, who has dealt psychologically with her mother more intimately, is trying to resist those temptations.”
In Halloween Kills, Michael Myers’ reign of terror extends to every corner of Haddonfield. As Curtis explains, “The great device that David and Danny came up with is: trauma didn’t just affect Laurie Strode; trauma has concentric circles. Anybody who had a near-miss with Michael Myers is traumatised.” This allowed Green and McBride to explore Haddonfield and its inhabitants to a greater extent than ever before, bringing characters who may have had near misses with Michael Myers in their first film to the forefront, and checking in on some familiar faces from the original Halloween.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273355.jpg]
Q&A
JAMIE LEE CURTIS
HADDONFIELD’S RESIDENT SURVIVOR SPEAKS
Laurie barely makes it out of Halloween 2018 alive, how is she holding up in Kills?
Laurie has been mortally wounded. She’s really hurt. And it’s not like a ‘movie’ hurt. It’s a real ER coding moment. She’s been stabbed in the abdomen. You can’t put a Band-Aid on it and go, “You’ll be fine!” [laughs] She shows up at a hospital, dying. Dy-ing. Bleeding out on the green. So the whole town takes centre stage, and then Laurie has to try to survive, because the only person that’s going to get Michael is Laurie.
Did spending so much time in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital bring back memories of Halloween II?
It’s initially similar to Halloween II in that it’s the same night – the movie picks up with us in the back of the pickup truck. They both take place in a hospital. So of course, the traumatic feelings of 1981 come flooding back. Rick Rosenthal came in to direct Halloween II, and did a terrific job. So I have memories of it, but this is very different.
It seemed like a bit of Dr Loomis had crept into Laurie in the last film…
I think I’ve swallowed him whole! Her understanding of the severity... I think we see it at the end of 2018. You know, she’s not fucking around. There’s one ending here.
There’s only one ending.
Has t...
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366429_loc.JPG]
“It’s intense and brutal. Just brutal,” says Jamie Lee Curtis of the follow-up to Halloween (2018), itself a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s original, trailblazing slasher. “There’s an incredible amount of killing in this movie,” adds Danny McBride, the film’s co-writer. “It’s so bloody. It’s wild. David [Gordon Green] just went for it. This is such a vicious sequel. It’s relentless.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366267974.jpg]
MICHAEL’S 10 MOST HAUNTING KILLS...
DEATH BECOMES HIM
10 OSCAR HALLOWEEN, 2018
Oscar walks Allyson home to ensure her safety. But what about his? Michael plunges his trusty knife before impaling his prey’s head on a spiky gate.
9 JOHN STRODE HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, 1995
Laura’s abusive uncle is stabbed by Michael, and then has his head thrust into a fuse box for good measure. Electrifying.
8 LAURIE STRODE HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION, 2002
Terrible film, good death, as Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) is stabbed repeatedly and hung from a rooftop. Curtis would resurrect Laurie in Halloween (2018).
7 ANNIE HALLOWEEN, 1978
The first of (adult) Michael’s kills in Carpenter’s original comes 55 minutes in, as Annie, sitting in her car, is strangled from behind, then knifed.
6 PARAMEDIC HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS, 1988
Myers, presumed dead, sits up in an ambulance and sticks his thumb deep into a paramedic’s forehead. As you do.
5 JIMMY HOWELL HALLOWEEN H20: TWENTY YEARS LATER, 1998
4 DANIELS HALLOWEEN II, 2009
Can’t match Carpenter’s suspense? Then go for intensity. Rob Zombie has a nurse played by Octavia Spencer (!) stabbed again and again and again. In close-up.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366972284.jpg]
3 OFFICER FRANCIS HALLOWEEN, 2018
Killed off-screen, but made memorable because Michael hollows out the policeman’s decapitated skull like a jack-olantern, and pops a candle inside.
2 KAREN HALLOWEEN II, 1981
This nurse at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital is relaxing in the hydrotherapy pool when Michael turns up the heat to boil her like a lobster.
1 BOB AND LYNDA HALLOWEEN, 1978
Michael impales Bob against a wall then borrows his glasses and a white sheet to approach Lynda as a bespectacled ghost. The trickster strangles her. JG
Teenager Jimmy is stabbed with an ice skate. Inventive, but mostly places high on the list because he’s played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524583.jpg]
Green completed work on Halloween Kills in July 2020, right around the time the decision was made to push the film back by 12 months to avoid a “compromised theatrical experience”. He hasn’t watched it since; both to resist any temptation to tweak things here and there and “cause trouble for everyone”, and also so he has a second opportunity to watch it fresh, with an audience. “That’s why you make horror movies,” says Green who, along with McBride, is currently in production on the second season of HBO series The Righteous Gemstones. “You make them for the crowds. You make it for those reactions. You make it for that community which is just so loving. It’s exhilarating as a filmmaker to be a part of that connection.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524738.jpg]
No moment proved more exhilarating for Team Halloween than the film’s premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2018, not least because success was far from a sure thing. By that point it had been nine years since Michael Myers last terrorised Haddonfield in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II – a film that has its advocates, but is generally considered a gruelling low point for the series. In the years that followed, long-serving producer Malek Akkad, the son of legendary Halloween producer Moustapha Akkad, had plenty of opportunities to bring The Shape back to screens; there was only one problem.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524785.jpg]
“They were crazy, crazy, bad, bad ideas,” Akkad remarks. “Some of the pitches that I’ve heard, oh my God! I waited it out for seven years. I wasn’t going to make a piece of junk like they wanted me to.” Once Akkad “got out from the previous studio” in 2016 and teamed up with Universal, the stars quickly aligned. Within months John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jason Blum and David Gordon Green had all signed on to make a new Halloween that would serve as an authentic sequel to Carpenter’s ’78 slasher. The signs were certainly promising but no one, least of all the film’s creative team, knew if audiences would embrace their vision.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524837.jpg]
“When we screened for the very first time at TIFF I was so fucking nervous,” McBride recalls. “I didn’t eat for like a week before that. The franchise means so much to me, and I know how much it means to fans. We really just didn’t want to disappoint people.” As the film played, and each crushed skull, snapped neck and knowing nod to Halloweens past was greeted with gleeful approval by the vocal TIFF audience, nerves turned to excitement. “Going up on that stage after it was done, and seeing how much fun everyone had had – it was overwhelming,” says McBride. “I turned to David and was like, ‘I don’t really see how anything in our careers will be more fulfilling than what we’ve just experienced.’”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366524889.jpg]
It was a moment that marked the latest milestone in a 25-year journey for McBride and Green. The pair first met in college and bonded over a shared love of cinema after realising they owned many of the same VHS tapes, Halloween included. Standing on stage in Toronto brought everything full circle. “It was a fulfilment of our childhood dreams, in a lot of ways,” Green says plainly. “[Halloween] is a VHS cassette that I still have in my office as a reminder. It’s one of the films that inspired me. It’s right next to my copy of The Neverending Story – whatever that’s worth! But it’s so fun that, in that moment we could look over at each other, and close our eyes for a second, and be really thankful.”
The reception out of Toronto, and subsequent box office haul of $255m worldwide – far and away a franchise-best – practically guaranteed a sequel (or two). But Green and McBride had been dreaming bigger from the beginning. “When David and I first met, the conversation was that he and Danny had conceived of a trilogy,” Curtis recalls. “They understood that there was much more of this story to tell than just [Halloween] 2018.” Both agreed that their first Halloween needed to feel conclusive in and of itself, and that committing to sequels which may never get made if the first film didn’t resonate would be hubristic at best, foolhardy at worst (as Universal learnt to their cost a year earlier with the ignominious collapse of the Dark Universe), but conversations often turned to the future, and how to avoid the pitfalls of the slasher sequel.
“The sequel is almost always where it shits the bed,” McBride notes, not inaccurately. “Or the monster is over-explained, or something happens that makes it into a joke. We really wanted find a way to sidestep that.” Incorporating “a lot of ideas” developed for Halloween 2018, it was decided that Halloween Kills would pick up moments after the ending of the ending of the first film, with Michael still trapped in Laurie’s purpose-built cell as chez Strode burns around him. 1981’s Halloween II, scripted by Carpenter and Debra Hill, is similarly set on the same night as its predecessor, so Green naturally sought Carpenter’s sage advice. “Sure enough, a lot of the obstacles that I was facing he laughed at, and said that they were talking about the same things in the early ’80s. He thought it was a funny thing to revisit a lot of the problems that they had, and trying to find creative ways out of them.”
The solution that Green and McBride hit upon was to turn a series about the obsessive pursuit of a single woman by a madman in a mask, into an ensemble tale centred around the residents of Haddonfield, all of whom have suffered at Michael’s hands. As Green puts it, Kills is a much bigger story than “a man with a knife, in a house, victim by victim. It’s the plague of fear. As word hits Haddonfield of what’s out there, and some of it’s true and some of it’s not, it’s building the myth of this murderer. It’s the larger, pervasive spread of fear, and how that affects a community.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627366971360.jpg]
‘SOME OF THE PITCHES I’VE HEARD, OH MY GOD!’
MALEK AKKAD 3
In 2018, with its themes of generational trauma inflicted on all three Strode women (or ‘Hallowomen’, as Curtis refers to them), Halloween resonated unexpectedly with the still-explosive #MeToo movement. Once again, Green and McBride have found that the themes they’re exploring within the confines of a mainstream horror movie are unexpectedly mirroring events beyond the screen. “Trauma was act one, if you will,” Curtis puts forward. “There was a confluence between the #MeToo movement and the Halloween 2018 movie with Laurie Strode representing 40 years of oppression, and her saying, ‘I am not taking it anymore.’ I think it was a genuine reason why the 2018 movie was so profoundly successful.
“Now, David and Danny did not know that on January 6th, there would be a Capitol riot,” she continues. “David and Danny did not know that George Floyd was going to be killed, and it was going to stimulate large masses of people taking to the street, and taking to acts of violence as a way to say, ‘We are doing this on our own. We do not trust you to do it for us.’ And that’s exactly what Halloween Kills is about – an entire town saying, ‘We are taking this on ourselves.’ It shows that David and Danny have a divining rod. They’re future thinkers. They have some idea of what’s happening in the world, and they’re distilling it through their writing.”
Green and McBride can’t account for their precog powers (“I have no clue!” chuckles McBride), only that Laurie Strode, and her evolution as a character, has driven a lot of the major decisions in their Halloween trilogy. “Laurie is a voice of both insight and reason that is trying to give a volatile community some sense of purpose here. It’s less about vengeance and more about a calculated philosophy of how to process evil,” Green says, pointing out that “she’s not the main character of Halloween Kills, but she is the emotional core of it. I could always turn to her for help in voicing these questions of the themes of this movie.”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273047.jpg]
With Laurie set to spend the majority of the film in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital fighting for her life after taking a knife to the gut in the first film, Kills opens up “opportunities when heroes can shine, and others can show their true colours and fall” according to Green. One of the characters who has already ascended to hero status is Laurie’s daughter, Karen, whose ‘gotcha’ moment at the film’s climax blew the roof off that Toronto screening. For Judy Greer, a supporting actor extraordinaire, it was a rare moment in the spotlight she won’t soon forget, and one that feeds directly into Karen’s mindset in Halloween Kills.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273742.jpg]
“Imagine being me, sitting in that audience, seeing that for the first time! That’s a moment I hope I remember for the rest of my life,” says Greer with a burst of energy down the phone, adding that “she’s still in that moment [in Halloween Kills]. The adrenaline is still coursing through her veins. It’s not like Karen has a couple of months to be like, ‘I’m awesome. I’m a badass!’ David Gordon Green said to me, when we were shooting, ‘I want this to be like Mad Max where we’re just going. We’re going, going, going, going.’”
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273194.jpg]
While Karen comes to terms with her newfound badassery and mourns the death of her husband, her daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) channels her anger into hunting down Michael. “When we met Allyson in 2018, she was a very relatable, lovely girl-next-door type of character,” Green says. “Allyson here, she is ignited. She is, in some ways, leading the charge, and is one of the more bloodthirsty of the group. Whereas Karen, who has dealt psychologically with her mother more intimately, is trying to resist those temptations.”
In Halloween Kills, Michael Myers’ reign of terror extends to every corner of Haddonfield. As Curtis explains, “The great device that David and Danny came up with is: trauma didn’t just affect Laurie Strode; trauma has concentric circles. Anybody who had a near-miss with Michael Myers is traumatised.” This allowed Green and McBride to explore Haddonfield and its inhabitants to a greater extent than ever before, bringing characters who may have had near misses with Michael Myers in their first film to the forefront, and checking in on some familiar faces from the original Halloween.
[https://magarticles.magzter.com/articles/5203/708243/60ffaa157c9cd/1627367273355.jpg]
Q&A
JAMIE LEE CURTIS
HADDONFIELD’S RESIDENT SURVIVOR SPEAKS
Laurie barely makes it out of Halloween 2018 alive, how is she holding up in Kills?
Laurie has been mortally wounded. She’s really hurt. And it’s not like a ‘movie’ hurt. It’s a real ER coding moment. She’s been stabbed in the abdomen. You can’t put a Band-Aid on it and go, “You’ll be fine!” [laughs] She shows up at a hospital, dying. Dy-ing. Bleeding out on the green. So the whole town takes centre stage, and then Laurie has to try to survive, because the only person that’s going to get Michael is Laurie.
Did spending so much time in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital bring back memories of Halloween II?
It’s initially similar to Halloween II in that it’s the same night – the movie picks up with us in the back of the pickup truck. They both take place in a hospital. So of course, the traumatic feelings of 1981 come flooding back. Rick Rosenthal came in to direct Halloween II, and did a terrific job. So I have memories of it, but this is very different.
It seemed like a bit of Dr Loomis had crept into Laurie in the last film…
I think I’ve swallowed him whole! Her understanding of the severity... I think we see it at the end of 2018. You know, she’s not fucking around. There’s one ending here.
There’s only one ending.
Has t...
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Total Film (Digital) - 1 Issue, August 2021