‘Halloween’: 40 years of the Boogeyman

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

The body of Michael Myers engulfed in flames at the end of Halloween II, the story of The Shape had seemingly come to an end. John Carpenter and Debra Hill were once again approached to be involved with a sequel, but they were understandably reluctant. Only after Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad yielded to their desire to have a Myers-less follow-up did they hop aboard.

British sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale, known for his work on BBC Television with such broadcasts as The Quartermass Experiment, was tasked to write a script, thanks to being hand-picked by Carpenter himself. Kneale crafted a story around a devilish toymaker named Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy) who hatches a plan to offer up the entire country’s children as the ultimate sacrifice to the gods. The founder and CEO of Silver Shamrock Novelties, Cochran employs the fascination with the commercialization of Halloween and trappings of consumerism with an infamous TV commercial, set to lure in kids from all over the country with his company’s masks: a pumpkin, a skull and a witch. Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin), the daughter of a murdered shop owner, and Dr. Challis (Tom Atkins, who had previously starred in Carpenter’s The Fog and Escape from New York) stumble upon his diabolical plan in an attempt to uncover the truth behind Grimbridge’s father’s death.

Kneal’s script didn’t seem to fit what the producers wanted, however. Higher ups, including Universal distributor Dino De Laurentiis, pushed for more extreme violence in ways that didn’t sit well with Kneale and his intended vision. As a result, he exited the project and requested his name be removed from the credits.

Director Tommy Lee Wallace then took over script-revising duties to tighten certain plot elements and expand upon others. “I’m going to say that maybe 60 percent of Nigel’s story made it to the screen. It was a very complete screenplay. It had that action and told that story,” remembers Wallace. “What happened was that Nigel was a dyed-in-the-wool Englishman and didn’t try to Americanize his script or dialogue in any way. So, there was a lot of work to do on that. He was not familiar with the American phenomenon that had happened, which was slasher movies, scary movies, low-budget horror and mostly teenage jargon and behavior. He just wasn’t down with any of that.”

“Therefore, he didn’t have an ear for American pop culture at all. He also had a really pessimistic and grim take on life and times, in general. He seemed to have a prejudice especially against the Irish, for inexplicable reasons,” he continues. “All in all, his tone and the way he wrote the script and ended it all conspired to be a downer ⏤ in a dark and depressing way that wasn’t all that much fun when you got right down to it. It needed help, but it was a pretty complete story. It was his idea to have a fiendish toymaker who is actually a warlock and is going to an international child sacrifice.”

Throughout the process of filming, Wallace also enlisted his actors to often rewrite some of their dialogue. “He let us rewrite certain scenes. He was wonderful. I remember sitting with Tom and Tommy Lee in the morning before we went to go shoot. We rewrote scenes if the dialogue felt a little stilted,” says Nelkin. “We tried to find ways to make it sound a little more real. When you write things, it’s always different when somebody is reading it out loud. When it’s read out loud, you can really hear where it clunks to the floor if it’s not working as a genuine piece of dialogue.”

Halloween III: Season of the Witch set to filming in a small town called Loleta, California. From the roadside motel scenes to the Silver Shamrock Factory (which was a milk-bottling factory in real life), the town supplied ample scenery for the story and a tight shooting schedule. In the final act of the movie, which requires several explosions and smoke, production moved to Don Post Studios in Los Angeles.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch opened October 22, 1982 to $6 million. It eventually grossed $14 million, domestically, and has since earned a 43 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Below, Wallace discusses casting, coming up with the iconic “Happy, Happy Halloween” jingle, Invasion of the Body Snatchers references and pivotal moments. Actor Stacey Nelkin talks sex in horror movies, her time onset and working with dashing leading man Tom Atkins.

Casting

There is an easy on screen chemistry between Tom Atkins (Dr. Challis) and Stacey Nelkin (Ellie Grimbridge) that is quite endearing. To carry the story, the protagonists needed to have such an instant, electric connection to draw the audience into the story. Not to mention, their sex scene had to be convincing enough.

Wallace: Tom was a friend of the group, if you will. I believe Tom was first friends with Adrienne Barbeau. Adrienne and John got married, and Tom was part of that circle that included his wife at the time, named Garn Stephens. Garn plays [Marge] who gets zapped in the face with the chip in the room next door to our heroes. We were all friends, and we’d partied together. It was Debra who suggested Tom in the early days of ‘Halloween III.’ She was promoting it along the lines of the May-December aspect of it. He was an older man and hooks up with this young woman.

I liked Tom very much. I thought he was about the right temperament and look for the movie. At that point, we had already done ‘The Fog.’ He was a known entity on film. I didn’t have to audition him or anything. I knew what he was capable of. I thought he had a good presence. He was within the family, and it was sort of an ensemble idea.

There were a couple few solid candidates for the part of Ellie. Sometimes, it happens that you need a second look or a callback ⏤ or maybe even a third time to be sure of the chemistry between the characters. If you’re going to have any kind of romance, that’s a mysterious chemistry that you can not calculate or predict on paper. You really need to see them on film together. In the old days, it would have been a screen test. In more modern times, we were putting people on video. I think we had Tom come in and read with several people. Stacey and Tom had something together that I thought did very well.

Dan [O’Herlihy] was a terrific actor with a powerful presence and a great voice. I have often felt that it would have been so great if we could have cast a powerful comedian in the role, like Johnny Carson, for example, just because it’s so demented. I look for ways of finding comic actors. There’s something about crossing over that’s appealing to me. But Dan did an iconic job.

The Audition

Nelkin: I think it was way out in the Valley. I went out, and I believe Debra [Hill] and Tommy Lee [Wallace] were in the room. I went in and read. They were desperate. It’s great when people are desperate because they make decisions quickly. [laughs] Sometimes, it goes in your favor. It went great.

I really loved (and still love) the character of Ellie. She’s ballsy. I like that. I found the humor in her. This was probably the only time, but literally, as I got home, the phone was ringing with them telling me that I got the part. That never happens ⏤ that you find out an hour later. Two days later, I was on location or at least doing wardrobe.

Happy, Happy Halloween, Halloween, Halloween!

The TV commercial jingle is as enduring as the original theme of John Carpenter’s Halloween. It worms its way into your brain and won’t let go ⏤ much in the way as popular music is often so inescapable. The tune is peppered throughout the film, as the unsettling backdrop to the theme of child sacrifice.

Wallace: The time came that we needed a jingle, and Debra cautioned me that whatever it was going to be it couldn’t be a tune that we’d have to pay for. There wasn’t any money in the budget. We couldn’t use the theme from ‘The Johnny Carson Show.’ That’s a copyright tuned. We couldn’t use a pop song. All that would cost money, or we’d get sued.

So, I looked into a tune that was around forever. It could have been “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.” It needed to be a tune that had long since passed into public domain. Well, “London Bridge” was such a tune, and I just jazzed it up a little bit. It’s about the same tempo, maybe even a little faster and bouncier. I went into the music studio with Alan [Howarth, the film’s composer], and he recorded first a couple keyboard parts. I grew up with piano lessons, and so, the arrangement is very much based on an old recital piece for kids learning piano called “The Spinning Song.”

The left hand is what I focused on, and that really set the tone for it. It was ridiculously playful and supposed to be “fun.” Of course, we know it’s really no fun because there’s some horrible agenda underneath it all. Then, I just added a bunch of voices. They’re all me singing. Those are sped up, chipmunk-style. They sound like little demented leprechauns, which was the point, of course. It’s one of those hideous things that gets in your head real bad once you hear it a few times. It’s my favorite kind of horror movie ghoulishness. On the surface, it’s very playful and sweet, but you’re going, “No, no, guys, pay attention! This isn’t good! This is bad!” That’s great fun to me.

Nelkin: That jingle was addictive. That was all Tommy Lee. He’s so trippy and such a brilliant guy. He’s a musician first and then a director. He brought that kind of creative spirit to the film.

Tragedy of Consumerism: Past & Present

In broad strokes, Wallace examines the role of consumerism on the populace. It’s his not-so-subtle way of deconstructing our obsession with materialism and what kind of hold it continues to have on our everyday lives. Even now, the film feels far more relevant than it ever did before.

Wallace: I didn’t want it to be subtle. I think that corporate America, especially through mass media, such as commercial television, is corrosive and to be feared and to be guarded carefully. It can be very dangerous. I feel as though as present-day circumstances and events are proving the premise to be correct. Mass media can be manipulated. Consumerism and commercialism can be perverted and misused and abused. By its very nature, it tends to take over in an unhealthy way.

Once upon a time, the Academy Awards were just a banquet. They’d let a few cameras stand in the back. Over time, look how commercial television naturally took over. Now, it’s a TV show. There’s something in that medium that is inherently arrogant and makes itself the story. I think there’s something wrong with that, and we have to watch against it very carefully. I’m not anti-capitalism, but I think it comes in many flavors and sizes and shapes. We have the wrong insidious kind in this country right now.

Nelkin: The movie does touch on how the media, whether it is commercials or actual content of shows, is infiltrating the minds of young kids. They’re all happy and “let me get a mask, too!” They see it everywhere. Now, we see it with social media. It is brainwashing a lot of kids. It’s definitely run amuck and very scary.

‘Halloween III’ really was ahead of its time in that it was really calling on the power of the media, which we knew even then. Commercials and advertisement is where all the money came from, and they’re trying to target this viewer and that viewer. It’s so much more now, as we see online with them gathering all our information. “Oh, you might like this book or that book.”

Robot on Fire

The opening sequence leans heavily on audience manipulation and pulls the strings on tension, mood and atmosphere, unapologetically. The audience is immediately plopped down into the story ⏤ of mechanical beings on the prowl with no ounce of remorse or emotion. Within the first 10 to 15 minutes, Wallace makes it known that what we’re witnessing is a twisted fantasy based on culture, at large.

Wallace: One of my favorite things about the movie is the men in suits. If we want to go back to the theme of me being anti-corporation, one of the scariest things is a white guy in a grey suit. It’s a corporation figure. I love making them the bad guys. In many cases, they are the bad guys. It’s a theme that runs through several movies I’ve been involved with.

Here, it was fun to use one and later see several of them and then to reveal that that’s what they look like ⏤ they’re the functionaries of mad genius, and they’ll do what he says to do. Whether they’re human beings or robots, they’re geared to do that. It’s exactly like these suits in Washington doing the bidding of a crazy person.

Test Room A

In the second act of the film, the Kupfer family arrive at the Silver Shamrock factory for a private demonstration, as they are among the company’s finest ambassadors and sales people. Unbeknownst to them, Conal Cochran illustrates to Dr. Challis the full extent of his intentions. The addicting TV commercial plays; little Buddy puts on his pumpkin mask; his skull is crushed; and a swarm of snakes and bugs is unleashed ⏤ killing the Kupfer family.

Wallace: You can get a wrangler for virtually any living creature. You might start by talking to people who work with dogs and cats and find out if you can train a parrot, an anteater. It goes logically from there, to cockroaches to ants to flies to flees. How about snakes and crawling bugs? That part was no big deal. We found a guy who handled reptiles. You don’t exactly train a rattlesnake. [laughs] You just set up a situation that’s safe for everybody involved and let the rattlesnake do what it’s going to do, which is either just sit there and be afraid or strike.

That’s what it was asked to do in the movie, and it did it very well. With bugs, you just have to channel crawling creatures of all sorts into an area and give them an escape route which is presumably where you’d set your camera. In this case, the mask figured into it heavily for all that where various creatures are crawling out the eyeholes. You have to set the shots very carefully, and you can’t ask too much of any given shot. Generally, you have to do it within one take.

Sex, Masks & Laser Beams

In much of modern horror, a provocative sex scene is often shoehorned into the narrative, whether one is needed to advance the story or not. But at its very core, it comments on our most vulnerable state as human beings. Of course, on a much more basic level, sex sells tickets. In Halloween III: Season of the Witch, our leading characters, Dr. Challis and Ellie Grimbridge, fall for each other and steal away in their hotel room for a moment of bliss, which is intercut with Marge’s tragic death by laser beam.

Wallace: I think I wrote it that way, to cross cut. The thing of it is, if you’re trying to set up a shock, hopefully the first time you’ve seen it, you’re not really expecting this ray to shoot out from the trademark. It seemed like it was made more suspenseful by rhythmizing the cutting in such a way that you’re being pushed between a love scene and this jarring thing that happens.

Somebody hears it, but like we all experience when you hear something that goes bump in the night, you give it about two seconds and then you shrug and go on. It provides that context that says, “No no, something awful is happening.” Somehow, it enhances the first scene and gives it greater dimension.

I don’t think there’s a real complex psychological answer. At the low-budget end, I just think horror movies are scrambling for an audience and to make their money back. If you’re going to do that, well, you have a few weapons to work with. You’ve got the intrigue of a scary situation and people in jeopardy ⏤ and probably for sexist reasons, you’ve got women in jeopardy. Then, if you throw in a scene that’s an excuse to show a woman’s breasts, for example, that’ll get you some extra box office.

Once you’ve got that, it’s probable that it’s an easy to scene to write. These are crass reasons, but I believe it’s not more complicated than that. You could sit down with a psychologist who could analyze, and there are probably all sorts of underpinnings for why that is popular and has always been popular. In the end, it goes to the very sexist reality of women in jeopardy in some way, shape or form ⏤ women being vulnerable, women as victims. All of the above.

Nelkin: One of the first scenes I filmed was the nude scene. It was, “Hi, how are you? Who are you? Let’s get naked!” I woke up at six in the morning and let them put freezing cold body makeup all over me. In those days, they didn’t have those power hoses. Then, it was a cold sponge and water. It was freezing. That was it. Tom was so great and such a gentleman.

I had never done a sex scene before or since. I was with CAA at the time, and they had a whole no-nipple clause where you could show everything but. That’s not much, right? [laughs] But the shooting of the scene was so incredibly technical. It was almost comical. Tommy would be like, “Kiss her an inch and a half over to the left…” It was hardly fun and sexy.

I don’t know if it’s that death makes you think about life. What is life without sex? That’s how we get here. A lot of modern horror has one sex scene, you know, ‘Friday the 13th,’ ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre.’ I wonder what that is about. I guess it gets guys to the theatre. I know girls like to go to those things because it’s a great date movie. You get scared, and you get to huddle in your boyfriend’s shoulder. You can be taken care of. It’s kind of titillating because you’re scared. There’s that fear thrill.

A lot of it is pretty damn gratuitous and has nothing to do with the story. Our movie could have easily done without that. It takes it into a whole other direction. It just does. I guess, it’s all about box office. People go, “Oh, wow, did you see her tits?” It’s that kind of thing.

Ellie and Challis is a weird match. I think we added that line of: “Relax, I’m older than I look.” At that time Tom looked a little older than he was. And I’ve always looked so much younger than my age. They didn’t want it to look like he was robbing the cradle there or that he’s some pervert. You want to keep the tone of the film the way it is. You don’t want people all of a sudden analyzing his age and why they’re together.

What I love about the film is that when you watch it today, you see so many politically incorrect moments ⏤ like Challis flirting with his nurse, him hitting the other nurse on the butt. It’s full of 1980s sociology. You couldn’t do that stuff today. I find that fascinating. It’s really very different. Also, there’s the way he was with the wife, and he was a deadbeat dad.

The Town of Loleta, California

Wallace: In the movie, Loleta was playing the part of Santa Mira. That town had a decidedly peculiar effect. It still does. I was up there with Sean Clark doing a documentary on the locations for the movie. It’s just as weird as it ever was. You pull into town, and it feels like someone is watching you. It’s not a real busy town. It’s stuck out in the middle of nowhere near the ocean. It’s just got a feel to it, an unmistakable, strange feeling about it.

Nelkin: It felt very much just like it seemed in the film. In fact, somebody at one of the conventions ⏤ I think it might have been Dick Warlock [Michael Myers in 1981’s Halloween II] or even a fan ⏤ had been there recently, and they said the same thing. The whole town apparently was up for sale. Nobody wanted to buy it. It has that kind of haunted feel, a very negative vibe to that town. You felt like people were hiding behind their blinds in their houses and peeking out at you. It had a puritanical, Salem in the 1600s spookiness.

Manipulating the Audience

John Carpenter’s way of doing things ⏤ of letting the plot simmer, extending shots, focusing on making the audience feeling uneasy ⏤ clearly rubbed off on Wallace. While Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a straightforward science fiction feature, its classic approach is captivating. Wallace is also able to inject the story with his signature stamp, all while working the audience like a puppet. From the eerie opening sequence to the infectious disease that is the TV jingle to the epic reveal of Ellie as a robot, the film drags the audience for one helluva thrill ride.

Wallace: I think any filmmaker, and certainly any film editor, understands that there’s a dynamic that goes with horror movies. Even in a drama, some of these rules apply. Matching that with comedy, there are a few rules that you really need to adhere to in order to get the good effect out of the audience. In comedy, you’ve got to create an atmosphere of good humor, of expectation of fun, and anticipation of laughter and visual triggers that cause you to smile or even laugh. You have to orchestrate all that as you would a piece of music. It’s like punctuating sentences. The very same thing applies to horror.

You’ve got to go in and create an atmosphere of unease, fear, expectation of grim things, surprises, shocks that scare you, a dread of what’s coming next. Even if you know you’re being manipulated, you can not resist. There’s a ticking clock and an acknowledgement that there’s a bomb under the table. If a bomb goes off under a table, that’s a surprise. If you tell the audience there’s a bomb under the table and let the scene play on, that’s suspense. Those are all just fundamental rules for manipulating an audience. The difference between it just being crap and being a real good drama is how much you care and how involved you are with the story and the characters.

Ultimate Sacrifice

In the third act, when Dr. Challis is captured, Conal Cochran delivers a grand, poetic speech about the origins of Halloween and the need for a massive-scale sacrifice. As the original Halloween plays on a old TV screen, Cochran’s words are given an even more harrowing context.

Wallace: Some of that [speech] came from Nigel [Kneale]. He was interested in talking about the origins of All Hallow’s Eve and the rituals of witches. I just elaborated on that a little and focused it in to the uniquely American take on the season. In Mexican culture and the Day of the Dead, the dead can walk for one day, and we can cross over into their world.

I pushed the idea of how sacrifices were involved way back in the bad old days, perhaps human sacrifices and to turn the plot on this notion that he’s not doing this just because he’s an evil genius. He’s doing this because it’s time again for a big sacrifice. It’s just what the world needs at this point. That’s a demented idea, but it has some kind of cock-eyed logic to it.

I referenced the original ‘Halloween’ because I could. It was fun. And the makers of the movie weren’t going to sue me for having it on screen. It was just a gimmick. It was also a passing reference to a movie we were claiming to be a sequel to. [laughs] Not to mention, getting Jamie [Lee Curtis] in the movie, technically speaking.

The Age Old Question

The big “twist” comes in the third act. As Ellie Grimbridge and Dr. Challis flee from the town of Santa Mira, it is revealed Ellie is, in fact, a robot, and she attacks Challis. The car swerves off the road, and her head and one of her arms detaches from her body. To this day, there has been much debate on how long Ellie has been a maniacal being. Wallace and Nelkin offer some insight on: Has Ellie been a robot the entire time?

Wallace: I’ve given up trying to give a good reason. [laughs] I don’t fucking know. Give me another two weeks to rewrite the script, and I think I could have come up with something. The big question is… how much did it bother you the first time you saw the movie? That’s all I had going for me.

Alfred Hitchcock does talk about that phenomenon. It’s a refrigerator question. That means you loved the movie, and you enjoyed it. You got in your car and went home. You opened the refrigerator for a snack and go, “Wait a minute…was she a robot the whole time?” Well, by then, you bought your ticket, and it didn’t matter the first time around. Thank you very much. If it’s good enough for Hitchcock, it’s good enough for me. [laughs]

Nelkin: I have people at conventions over the years ask me, “Was Ellie a robot the whole time?” I’m like, “No.” It’s when they took me from the room.

That [final] scene was like movie magic. They made that mask of my head, so they could shoot it falling away from me. They had platform built, so that someone could go underneath, and then, they had a hole cut out so they could stick their head up. At one point, that was me. It was all covered with grass like it was supposed to be some field or just off the road.

Then, my body double had the same exact outfit. She was built exactly like me. At that point, it was one of our last scenes. I had been wearing the same outfit for at least a week or two. When I looked across the platform at my body double wearing the same thing, it was so freaky. It was very cool, though. That scene took at least a half a day. Maybe more. Those kinds of things take a while. Today, they’d just green screen it.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Obvious references to Don Siegel’s 1956 science fiction thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers are thoughtfully woven into the fabric of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. From naming the town Santa Mira to the trickery of disappearing bodies to the chilling final frame of Dr. Challis screaming into the camera, “Stop it! Stop it!,” Wallace displays a great appreciation for old-school horror. All the while, he carves out his own niche.

Wallace: All those references are from me. It’s probably my favorite horror movie of all time, and I’m talking about the original. I admire that movie very much, so I gave tribute to it in things like Santa Mira being the name of the town. We shot in Sierra Madre, too. Most of all, of course, we paid tribute with the ending. In the climax scene after he escapes from clutches of the bad guys, Kevin McCarthy’s character runs down a ravine and comes out on a road.

He gets in traffic trying to warn people, and they’re honking their horns. He comes up to a truck, and what he uncovers is all these pods. The implication is the invasion is completely upon us. He starts ranting toward the camera. That’s where the movie was supposed to end, but the studio thought that was too hardcore. So, they put the bookend scenes on the movie. The movie begins in a police station, and he’s back there at the end. There’s a phone call that lets the audience and him off the hook because it’s reported they’re taking care of it, and it’s going to be OK.

When it was my turn to have a dead-stop ending that the disaster was upon us, I decided to end it where ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’ should have and would have ended had the studio not interfered with Dr. Chalis looking right at camera saying, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” And cut. That was for Don Segel and his original movie.

The fact of the matter is, Universal wanted us to change it. John put it in my hands. I’m eternally grateful to him. He supported me just like I was a veteran director with final cut. Well, he actually had final cut, and he gave me the option of either modifying the ending or leaving it as is. To his eternal credit, he stuck with that when I decided to leave it like it was.

I mean, you’re going to ask audiences to sit down for 90 minutes, deliver the goods! Tell the story. They could not have possibly stopped all of that. They could have stopped some of it. Some kids got killed.

Nelkin: I think some of the kids may have gotten saved. It was a little on the late side. There was obviously a bunch of kids that didn’t get saved. They were already marching and going on the streets. It’s a cliffhanger, though, like what is going to happen with these kids? What is going on?

First Reaction to the Movie

Wallace: When it was all over, again, we knew we had a good movie. What we were foolish and naive about was thinking we could put it out for the public and call it ‘Halloween III’ and not set the table or do any advertising that explained what we were actually trying to do ⏤ and expect it to be a success. [laughs]

The audience naturally went into it expecting the big knife, The Shape, Jamie Lee Curtis, and they were disappointed. So, it’s taken all these years for it to find redemption. It’s a really solid movie, and it’s about a season that comes around once a year. People have finally embraced it. I will tell you that the redemption is sweet, because it sure did hurt when it came out.

Nelkin: I always have a very hard time being objective about things I’ve done. [laughs] As a story, I do think it worked. I must say, increasingly over the years, given the kind of attention it’s gotten and this lovely cult following, I’ve come to appreciate it more. What I love about it is it’s more ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ It’s more of a sci-fi film than just a horror, slash ‘em, cut their heads off kind of film. Although, we do have the heads coming off, too. It’s a little more intelligent and not just gratuitous violence.

Changing Places

With the 1978 original Halloween and the 1981 follow-up Halloween II detailing the story of Michael Myers and his killing spree in Haddonfield, audiences had come to expect more of the same. Wallace wrestles with why Halloween III: Season of the Witch was a critical and commercial failure, at the time.

Wallace: Having had that sequel, it was only natural for people to expect that #3 would be the same. It could have been completely mitigated by one of two things or both. First, it should have never been called ‘Halloween III’ ⏤ had it gone out as just ‘Season of the Witch,’ I’m sure it would have had an earlier success.

But on the other side of that coin, it probably would never have gotten made without the ‘Halloween’ imprimatur on it; and second, we just didn’t set the table. We should have had a nice elaborate ad campaign that said, “This year, we’re going to try something different. It’s going to be a new movie every year. There must be a thousand stories you can tell about the season of Halloween.” We just didn’t do that. Universal didn’t do it. And so, we got what was coming to us.

Anthology, a Household Term

With the popularity of such serial series as American Horror Story reconfiguring audience expectations, it is highly likely Halloween III: Season of the Witch would and could fare far better in today’s climate.

Wallace: It’s clear that there’s a huge, ongoing appetite for horror. There always has been. But cleary, the original ‘Halloween’ kicked off a new chapter in that long history. I think audiences would have been receptive, but they were deceived. It took until the last 10 years or so, and I’ve seen the redemption of the movie. It has a lot of cheerleaders and champions. I keep telling them, “If anybody’s left who puts it down, just look them in the eye and say, ‘Didn’t you get the memo? This is a good movie.’”

Mementos from Set

Nelkin: I’m such an idiot. I was offered so many of those masks. None of us thought anything of about getting masks. We were offered all of that stuff. But, no. I didn’t keep anything. I don’t even know if I have the script ⏤ maybe somewhere in some trunk in some closet somewhere. [laughs]