Carpenter and Hill wrote the script in about two weeks, the film was shot in 22 days in May of 1978 (the crew had to keep sweeping up and reusing their scant pieces of fall foliage), editors Tommy Lee Wallace and Charles Bornstein cut the film shortly thereafter, and Carpenter composed the score in three days, because, as he told Fangoria a few years later, “I was the fastest and cheapest I could get.” Yablans (sensibly) wanted to get it into the theaters in time for the title holiday, so the entire production was working backwards from that deadline. The rest of the cast was rounded out by mostly-unknowns, though Jamie Lee Curtis (in her film debut as Laurie Strode, the tale’s “final girl”) brought some star power - she was the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, who appeared in two of the film’s biggest influences, Psycho and Touch of Evil.Įverything on Halloween happened fast. Sam Loomis, who spent years trying to reach Michael, and then trying to keep him locked up. British actor Donald Pleasence (whose credits by then included The Great Escape, the James Bond film You Only Live Twice, and the Biblical epic The Greatest Story Ever Told) was as close as to a marquee name as they could afford he was paid $20,000 for five days’ work as Dr. The slender budget meant Carpenter and Hill couldn’t afford stars, which was fine with Yablans, who knew the story was the selling point anyway. They came up with the story of Michael Myers, a six-year-old boy who murders his teenager sister on Halloween night in 1963 and is sent away to a mental institution, only to escape on the same holiday, 15 years later, to return to his hometown and kill again. In exchange for writing and directing it, Carpenter would get creative control, $10,000, and a percentage of the potential profits Carpenter brought on then-girlfriend Debra Hill to co-write the script and produce. Yablans would executive produce the movie, financing it through his company Compass International Pictures, splitting the $300,000 budget (a low one, even for then, even for an independent film) with financier Moustapha Akkad. The director was looking for a commercial hit Yablans was looking for a director for his very commercial movie. Yablans had acquired Carpenter’s 1976 urban western Assault on Precinct 13, a gripping, tightly wound action picture that failed to find an audience anywhere but in Britain (where it was successfully distributed by Miracle Films, headed up by a kindly gent named Michael Myers). When his plane landed, he hurried to a phone and pitched The Babysitter Murders to John Carpenter. And it happened to be Halloween night.” He worked out the idea of a madman stalking and killing babysitters everyone’s either been a babysitter or had a babysitter, he figured, so the story was relatable. I couldn’t afford to buy a book or a play. “I was coming back from a film festival in Milan, and I was looking for an idea that wouldn’t cost money because I didn’t have any money. “I dreamed up Halloween on an airplane,” he told the New York Times in 1981.
#THE SON OF PROJECT HALLOWEEN MOVIE#
Not too shabby for a bunch of hippies making an exploitation movie about a babysitter killer.Īt least, that was the movie Irwin Yablans saw in his head.
I’m not going to tell you when it’s going to come … but here it comes!’ It’s programmed right in, just laying it on.” Nevertheless, Carpenter and his team crafted a film that transcended its meager roots and modest targets to become a game-changer in the horror genre and the independent film scene, begetting countless imitations, a remake series, and nine sequels, the latest of which opens this Friday. You say to the audience, ‘You’re going to see something that’s going to scare you. “It’s an old county-fair haunted-house movie. “That’s a programmed movie,” he told Film Comment’s Todd McCarthy. A low-budget horror thriller aimed primarily at secondary markets and drive-ins even its director harbored no illusions of its being art.
When John Carpenter’s Halloween quietly opened in Kansas City on October 25, 1978, it did not seem like the kind of movie anyone would speak kindly of - or think about at all, really - 40 years later.
0 kommentar(er)
