‘Halloween’: 40 years of the Boogeyman
In a wide-ranging retrospective, cast and crew from the Halloween franchise reflect on Michael Myers.
From Tommy Lee Wallace to Jodi Lyn O’Keefe to Scout Taylor-Compton, Franchise Heavy Weights Reflect Upon Michael Myers’ Bloody Rampages
We’ve all heard of the Boogeyman. Up until 1978’s Halloween, the personification of this faceless entity had never quite been captured to such great effect. John Carpenter and Debra Hill unleashed the true meaning of sheer terror with The Shape, a walking, stalking being that seemed to glide on air and always lurked just beyond the shadows. The horror genre would never be the same.
Even though such landmark films as Psycho, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Black Christmas certainly laid the groundwork, Halloween busted down the door for the slasher sub-genre, bringing it further into modern times, and it was something audiences were clearly craving. It was low-budget, starkly lit and relied heavily on the unknown, letting imaginations run wild and the tension to build. It set a precedent that would spawn such knock-offs as My Bloody Valentine, Friday the 13th (writer Victor Miller once blabbed that his co-conspirator and director Sean Cunningham wanted to rip it off, unapologetically), Prom Night and countless other blood-suckers. Many of the tropes we’ve come to expect in a modern horror film, including jump-scares and the sex-positive characters meeting their tragic ends, were cemented with this Hitchcock-style ghost story.
Michael Myers has since slashed his way through 11 sequels, including the 2018 reboot/sequel, simply titled Halloween, that plays as an evocative companion piece to the original. With director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride at the helm, the new iteration is set 40 years after the horrific events that chilly October night in 1978 and sees Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) wrestling with PTSD and its rippling effects across generations, from daughter Karen (Judy Greer) to her granddaughter (Andi Matichak). While three women come to terms with trauma, toxic masculinity and attempt to find their way in the world, Myers breaks loose during a prison transfer from Smith’s Grove and makes his long-awaited return to Haddonfield.
“It’s a simple story, and it’s a good legend. I think John and Debra wrote a good, solid movie about a mysterious character. Either in his heart or at least as a professional, John believes in the existence of pure evil. That’s a powerful force,” says Tommy Lee Wallace, production designer on Halloween and later the director of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. “It drives religion in the form of the devil. He took that fear and superstition and put it into a character. There are other movies that pre-date ours, such as ‘The Bad Seed,’ which takes that premise of ‘hey, look, sometimes it’s just that the person is off.’ That’s a noteworthy, simple concept that people can embrace.”
Even if no other Myers-centric films had been made, Wallace stresses “the Michael Myers legend would have endured. The legend has now doubled back on itself several times. It’s a little bit like Star Wars. People eat that stuff up. I can tell you from personal experience that John and Debra were sick and tired of ‘Halloween’ and the legend right after ‘Halloween II.’ You’ve got to set yourself back in that time. Sequelitis had not hit the world. There were a few sequels here and there, but it just hadn’t happened, certainly not in the horror world.”
The endurance of such a relentless entity, now 40 years on, is a marvel of cinematic storytelling, but it certainly speaks to our fascination with the deranged and wanting to live vicariously through our on screen protagonists . “A faceless person is terrifying,” says PJ Soles, who played Lynda van der Klock in the original film. “Who is under that mask? What does he want? Dr. Loomis says it best, ‘He’s evil, pure evil.’ When we can’t understand or make sense of something, it is terrifying.”
As an outlier in the series, Stacey Nelkin, star of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the lone entry not focused on the bloodthirsty Myers character, considers the cathartic nature of the figure. “When I go to these conventions, I can’t tell you how many guys dress up as Michael Myers. They all want to be him. That’s what I love about the conventions, and the people really get into character,” she says. “These are adults, and they’re exploring that dark side. You put on a costume, and you become somebody else for a day or a weekend. It’s so healthy to be able to do that.”
Even more, Michael Myers is the modern interpretation of the classic movie monsters like Frankenstein, a methodical but savage beast. “They sell his mask at Halloween time, and he landed in the public consciousness. Whenever you tell stories across generations, it’s just kept him alive,” notes Dwight H. Little, director of Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. “There’s something about the way he moves, not being able to see his eyes behind that mask and his lack of remorse and even strategy. He moves forward in an inexplicable way.”
He adds, “There are always those stories at camp where they always say there’s a mental patient that escaped, and he’s stalking in the woods. It’s almost like folklore, in a way. There’s something out in the woods, and it’s not good.”
Rick Nathanson, production designer on the set of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, perceives the character as almost ritualistic in nature, returning every crisp Halloween to quench an unknown marching order. “I think Michael Myers has lasted for so long because he’s this enigmatic character, the dark side within each of us that raises its head. In this case, it comes back every Halloween. That’s what this series was designed to do, and I think it has done it quite successfully. John and Debra did a wonderful job. Moustapha Akkad did an excellent job in financing it and owning the rights.”
Even with Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake and 2009 follow-up, Michael Myers brings our illogical fear of the unseen, the unknown and of The Boogeyman to life. “He puts a vision that you can see to the Boogeyman. Before Michael Myers, you knew about the Boogeyman, but you could only think about him. But now, you can see who he is,” says Daeg Faerch, who portrayed a 10-year-old Myers in Zombie’s 2007 film. Co-star Scout Taylor-Compton, who stepped into the role of Laurie Strode, looks to the kill sequences and the original’s slow-burn approach as the reason behind our madness. “When I watch the first one, I always wondered why he wanted to kill her. That always bothered me,” she says. “I think there’s just something that draws us in, and his kills are so different than a Freddy Krueger or a Jason Voorhees. The first movie is kind of…relaxed. It’s just so strange, and you just can’t look away.”
Funny enough, Michael Myers would later borrow traits from Jason Voorhees in later sequels, something not completely lost on Halloween: Resurrection star Thomas Ian Nicholas. “John Carpenter started this whole wild ride. I think that the initial Michael Myers was a bit different than the other killers that followed,” Nicholas says “Obviously, he became a little beefier, almost like a Jason Voorhees, in the later sequels ⏤ like ours. There is something left to the imagination because he’s so emotionless. Nothing suprasses the imagination.”
Pat Skipper (Laurie Strode’s father in the 2007 film) explains it more simply: “Down deep, we are all still children. We all believe in the Boogeyman.”
But there could be more to it. Mary Birdsong, who plays Nancy McDonald, publicist to Dr. Loomis in 2009’s Halloween II, finds startling parallels to today’s social climate. “Especially now, because of the mass shootings, we’ve learned how to psychologically profile these lone wolves and outsiders. It’s sad in a way,” she shares. “I think there’s a real complexity to Michael Myers and something in him that we can see a little in ourselves. He is an amplified, dark, violent version of that. He’s obviously resonating in our culture in terms of horror. We’re living our day-to-day in a horror film. Our children could potentially run into a ‘Michael Myers’ any day. That’s a terrifying thought. It makes it no mystery that he’s still resonating with us and probably always will. God bless him. He just keeps trying.”
Laurie Strode is just as engrained in the Halloween lore, embodying the modern archetype of what is commonly known as The Final Girl, the last survivor of a night of bloody carnage. Throughout the last 40 years, Jamie Lee Curtis has stepped into the role for a total of five films, from the bedridden victim in 1981’s five-minutes-later follow-up Halloween II to the broken woman driven to madness for 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection to 2018’s super-charged reset. Curtis’ performance in the original, though, is woven with rich sincerity and astute awareness of environment and imminent mayhem. “Laurie is the smart girl, although she does drop that knife (prematurely) too many times. I suppose it’s her inner strength, despite her fear, that enables her to fight off The Boogeyman,” says Soles. “This is an attractive trait whether the character is male or female.”
Jody Lyn O’Keefe, whose first major picture role came with 1998’s Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, in which she starred alongside Curtis, notes Curtis’ passion and truth in performance. “You believe everything that she’s doing. You see everything that she’s gone through, and you never catch her ‘acting.’ That’s what made her so powerful,” she says.
For Taylor-Compton, it was Laurie’s eventual rise to take charge that connected so well. “We always want to see the victim become the strong badass. That’s what we first saw in the original. That had never happened before,” she says. “You want them to get away and to take care of themselves, so you root for them. It’s all about survival. When they can do it in a pretty badass way, it makes for a really good movie.” Horror icon Dee Wallace agrees, “Laurie was intelligent and vulnerable and strong. She was fearful. She was everything. The more you can be that everything, the more the audience relates and embraces you.”
In celebration of not only the new Halloween film but the original’s landmark 40th anniversary, B-Sides & Badlands spoke with everyone from Tommy Lee Wallace, Stacey Nelkin and Ellie Cornell to Dwight H. Little, Jodi Lyn O’Keefe, Thomas Ian Nicholas and Daniel Farrands about why we’re so hooked on The Shape, what they remember most about working on their respective installments and the franchise’s peak, most blood-soaked sequences.
