ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - August 5th
"HALLOWEEN H20: TWENTY YEARS LATER"
released in 1998
"I met him fifteen years ago. I was told there was nothing left. No reason, no conscience, no understanding, even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, 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."
Dr. Samuel Loomis, Halloween (1978)
Watch the Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later trailer below!
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Twenty years after the massacre in Haddonfield, Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), Dr. Sam Loomis' former colleague, is killed by Michael Myers (as well as her two teenaged neighbours), after having found the whereabouts of his "dead sister, Laurie (Curtis). Now living under the alias Keri Tate, Laurie is the headmistress of a private boarding school, Hillcrest Academy, where she also raises her son John (Hartnett) and has a relationship with the school's guidance counselor, Will Brennan (Adam Arkin). As October 31st arrives, most of the students leave the school for a weekend long field trip to Yosemite National Park, with only a few students remaining, including Sarah (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe), Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd) and John's girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams). John also sneaks back into school to join them for a Halloween party in the school's basement. Unbeknownst to all of them, Michael has already slipped past the security guard, Ronny (LL Cool J) and is somewhere on the academy grounds stalking his next victims. Discovering Sarah and Charlie's bodies, John and Molly flee, chased through the grounds by Michael, until they are rescued by Laurie. Realizing she can no longer escape her fate, Laurie sends the few survivors to safety and remains behind to confront Michael and end their battle once and for all!
TRIVIA: Jamie Lee Curtis considers the film a thank you note to her fans. Curtis: "Without that early career, I truly don't think I would have been an actor."
Top: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) with her son, John (Josh Hartnett);
Above: A nervous mother has a close encounter with the Shape!
Contrary to popular belief, Kevin Williamson was in fact not the original writer of the film, which was Robert Zappia. Zappia had been approached to the write the screenplay back when Halloween 7 (as it was then known) was originally planned to be released direct-to-dvd after the lackluster performance of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). However, when Jamie Lee Curtis expressed interest in returning to the series, Kevin Williamson - who was coming off of his blockbuster success with Scream (1996) - was asked by Dimension Films to pen a treatment that added Laurie Strode. With a working title of Halloween 7: The Revenge of Laurie Strode, Williamson wrote numerous drafts with star Curtis's input, including a scene where a bitchy student at Keri/Laurie's school giving a class report on the "Haddonfield Murders", and going into great detail about Jamie Lloyd being hunted and eventually killed by her uncle, Michael Myers - as a way of incorporating the canon of Halloween 4 through 6 into the H20. Like much of his scipt, the scene was dropped (as well as a subplot about two detectives chasing Myers for the murder of Marion Chambers and a massive climax sequence involving a helicopter/bus chase that ends with Myers being decapitated by the out of control helicopter rotors) and only Williamson's bare treatment for H20 was used as the basis for Matt Greenberg's screenplay, with a new direction focusing on Laurie and ignoring the continuity of the Halloween films after Halloween 2.
John: It just occured to me today that I've never celebrated Halloween before.
Molly: And why's that?
John: Oh, we've got a psychotic serial killer in the family who loves to butcher people on Halloween, and I just thought it in bad taste to celebrate.
Top: Hillcrest students, Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd), Sarah (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe),
John, and Molly (Michelle Williams);
Above: Michael slips past security guard, Ronny (LL Cool J)
John Carpenter was originally in the running to be the director for this particular follow-up since Curtis wanted to reunite the cast and crew of the original to have active involvement in it. Carpenter agreed to direct the movie, but his starting fee as director was $10 million, rationalizing that the hefty fee was compensation for revenue he never received from the original Halloween. Producer Moustapha Akkad balked at the fee and Carpenter walked away from the project. Also starring in the film with Curtis was Michelle Williams (who signed on to the film without even seeing Williamson's script), LL Cool J (who was a huge fan of the original Halloween) and Josh Hartnett, in his feature film debut. Joseph Gordon-Levitt also appears in a cameo at the beginning of H20 as Marion Chamber's doomed teen neighbor, Jimmy. Curtis's real life mother, Janet Leigh, also has a memorable cameo as Keri Tate's secretary, Norma Watson (one of the coolest scenes in the movie). This would be Leigh's first role in a feature film for 18 years, her previous theatrical film was The Fog (1980) which also starred her daughter, Jamie Lee Curtis. P.J. Soles was asked to play the role of Norma Watson (incidentally the same name as her character in Stephen King's Carrie (1976)), but was skeptical about returning to the series as someone completely different than her character Lynda, originally killed off in Halloween.
Norma Watson: Oh. Miss Tate. I didn't mean to make you jump. It's Halloween. I guess everyone's entitled to one good scare.
Laurie Strode: I've had my share.
Top and Above: Laurie decides to face Michael in a fight to the end!
One of the biggest sources of tension between the filmmakers was the issue of the film's ending. Kevin Williamson's treatment had the Shape being cut in half by a helicopter rotor while early drafts of the script had Laurie stabbing him through the heart with a javelin while he was pinned between the two pieces of a retractable gym floor. Moustapha Akkad wanted the Shape to live at the end so he could produce more Halloween films while Bob Weinstein at Dimension Films wanted the Shape to die. Weinstein instructed screenwriter Robert Zappia to write two endings and send the ending with the Shape surviving to Akkad while they would actually shoot the ending where Michael was killed. Zappia refused (much to Weinstein's annoyance) and Williamson developed the film's ending where the Shape is "killed," as well as the twist shown in Halloween: Resurrection (2002) where it is revealed that Michael had switched clothes with a paramedic. This solution managed to appease both parties.
TRIVIA: Moustapha Akkad had planned for the killer in H20 to not even be Michael Myers, but in fact a copycat killer, and that this would be explained in the next Halloween movie. This idea was scrapped for the story for Halloween: Resurrection.
Top: Director Steve Miner (right) on set with the cast;
Above: Jamie Lee Curtis with mother and co-star, Janet Leigh at the LA premiere
H20 would be the first film in the Halloween series to be released in the summer, a tradition that would continue with Halloween: Resurrection and Rob Zombie's Halloween and Halloween 2, to below expectations box office (although H20 is the second highest grossing film in the series after Zombie's Halloween remake in 2007, with $75 million gross worldwide) and to generally mixed reviews. Kevin Thomas of the LA Times wrote "Halloween: H20 is as stylish and scary as it is ultra-violent. It brings back a stunning Jamie Lee Curtis in the role that made her a star and it's a work of superior craftsmanship in all aspects", and David Nusair surmising it was "Unquestionably the best of the Halloween followups...". Roger Ebert wrote about the Shape, "Here is a man who feels no pain. He can take a licking and keep on slicing. In the latest Halloween movie, he absorbs a blow from an ax, several knife slashes, a rock pounded on the skull, a fall down a steep hillside and being crushed against a tree by a truck. Whatever he's got, mankind needs it!".
ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE: 51%
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