DIRECTED BY: John Carpenter
WRITTEN BY: John Carpenter and Debra Hill
MUSIC BY: John Carpenter
DISTRIBUTOR: Compass International
STARRING: Donald Pleasence, Introducing Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, Nancy Loomis as Annie, and P.J. Soles as Lynda, Charles Cyphers, featuring Kyle Richards, Brian Andrews
RUNNING TIME: 91 Minutes (Theatrical), 101 Minutes (Television Version)
Halloween opens with the murder of a teenage girl by her 6 year old brother, Michael Myers, on Halloween 1963. The boy is put in a mental hospital where he stays for 15 years. On October 30, 1978 he escapes and heads back to Haddonfield where he starts stalking, with intent to kill, a group of 3 girls. His doctor, Sam Loomis, also goes to Haddonfield and hopes to find him before he can kill anyone. Michael kills several people before being shot by Dr. Loomis. After being shot he does not die. He tumbles out a second story window but is not there when Dr. Loomis looks down at where should have landed.
Halloween began as an idea by producer Irwin Yablans. He wanted to make a horror movie about a psychopath killing baby-sitters. He had the idea of setting it on Halloween night. He enlisted young filmmaker John Carpenter, who had previously made Assault on Precinct 13, and Dark Star. Carpenter said that he and Debra Hill could make it for $300,000 in 4 weeks of shooting time. He said that he would do it on 2 conditions. One is that he have final cut (meaning he gets to make the editing decisions about what will be in the final product) and that he have his name above the title (which is why the on screen title is "John Carpenter's Halloween" dispite the fact that he was nobody at the time)
Carpenter and Debra hill wrote the screenplay together in three weeks. Hill wrote all of the scenes with the teenage girls going about their lives and Carpenter wrote all of Dr. Loomis' scenes. Back in those days a film that was made for a small amount of money was just considered a cheap film. Studios used to brag about how much they spent on large films, now they apologize. Carpenter decided that even though they had little money they should make it look expensive. They shot it in Cinemascope Widescreen 35mm, which is more difficult to work with than Flat ratio 35mm and is usually used for big studio films like Lawrence of Arabia, or The Godfather, not low budget slasher films.
For the role of Dr. Sam Loomis they first offered it to Christopher Lee than Perter Curshing, both of whom turned it down. Donald Pleasence accepted the role. When he first met Carpenter he said that he did not like the script or his character, but his daughter liked Precinct 13 so he would consider it, but he wanted Carpenter to explain why he should do it. He was really just testing Carpenter to see how much he wanted to make the movie. For the main character they cast Jamie Lee Curtis, who had never been in a film before she was paid $8,000.
With only $300,000 to spend they had to make the most of it. Pleasence was paid $20,000 for a single week during which all of his scenes were shot. Nick Castle was paid $25 a day to play The Shape. They had a very small crew, with lots of people's friends and girl friends helping when they could. Carpenter's college buddy Tommy Lee Wallace (also Nancy Loomis' boyfriend) served as production designer, art director, location scout, and co-editor of the film. For the famous mask they used a William Shatner mask with the eyes cut out, spray painted white, with the hair teased up. They also considered a clown mask, which they found eerie looking; but after seeing the painted Shatner mask they knew it was the only choice.
The Myers house was an abandoned house that was owned by a church. The house relay did look run down so they shot the 1978 stuff there first. The "run-down" stuff was shot first. Durring the course of filming they spent their spare time fixing it up. The Michael Myers POV shot was done on the last day of shooting. The entire cast & crew spent the day fixing the house while waiting for night to fall. The continuous POV (point-of-view) shot of Judith Myers' murder was inspired by Touch of Evil. The hands holding the knife belong to Writer/Producer Debra Hill, because she had the smallest hands of anyone on the crew. The hardest part about that shot is that durring the time that Michael is going around to the back of the houes, before he goes inside, the crew had to reset all of the lights that were needed for when he was looking in from the front. When Michael puts the mask on they used it to hide the one cut in that shot. While Carpenter was shooting the opening scene Debra Hill shot the scene with Laurie and Annie talking in the car after Sheriff Brackett tells them about the hardware store robbery. Jamie Lee Curtis and Nancy Loomis improvised the dialogue; the scene was added at the last minute because they realized that they would need to fill out the running time.
The movie was shot in southern California in March on 1978. Pumpkins were rather difficult to get at that time of year. For the leaves on the ground they painted leaves brown. After using them in a shot they would rake them up and use them again in another shot to save money. Most of the kids, with the exception of Lindsey and Tommy, were crew members' children. Carpenter also wrote the music for the film, which consists of one 5-4 time rhythm piano melody and some electronic musical sounds. The credits list the music as having been preformed by the "Bowling Green Philharmonic Orchestra". Their is no such thing. Bowling Green is Carpenter's home town and has no Philharmonic Orchestra. This "orchestra" is carpenter and a few of his, musically inclined, buddies.
Once the film was ready for distribution is opened on 4 screens in Kansas City. The first day it made $200 per screen. Word of mouth spread fast and within a week it was making $2000 per screen. Compass International picked up the distribution rights and the film went on to make $55 million (and this was in 1978 dollars no less!!!) When the movie was released nearly every critic hated it. The only good review was in the Village Voice which compaired it to Psycho. Than as it became more popular the reviews got better, and several reviewers, re-reviewed it with golwing praise. For many years it was the highest grossing independent film of all time. It spawned a slew of imitators and kicked off the 1980s slasher craze. Terror Train and the Friday the 13th movies both borrowed liberally from Halloween's style.
During the production of Halloween 2 John Carpenter and Debra Hill sold the rights to this movie to Network TV. The network censors demanded that several cuts be made. In order to fill in the running time Carpenter used the crew from Halloween 2 for a 3 day shoot in which they shot some extra footage to put into the network TV version of this film. P.J. Soles and Nancy Loomis reprised their roles (Loomis in voice only on the other end of a phone conversation) for a short scene.
Carpenter and Hill put these scenes into the movie that they delivered to the Network and the censors made cuts to the film. They cut out much of the violence, the nudity, and the fact that the girls are smoking marijuana in the car scene.
The original TV version, without the cuts, was available on a Restored Limited Edition of the film that Anchor Bay released. It was a numbered limited release; I have #3590. It is a 2 disk set. Disk 1 contains the theatrical cut, Halloween Unmasked 2000 (a behind-the-scenes featurette), lots of old TV and Radio commercials, and a re-mastered THX transfer. Disk 2 has the Uncut TV version. The Restored edition is no longer in stores but can be found on ebay from time to time. Most of the DVD content can also be found of a 2 tape limited set called Halloween 10-31-78: The Limited Edition. Anchor Bay will be releasing the Uncut TV version later this year but it will not be a numbered limited collectors' edition.
None of this stuff made it to the Anchor Bay DVD release because Criterion does not license their bonus materials to other companies and Anchor Bay did not want to give a sizable portion of the profits to Criterion to make the DVD into Halloween: the Criterion Collection. I'm told that Anchor Bay tried to get John Carpenter to record another commentary for their DVD but he said no, for either scheduling reasons or because he didn't want to do another commentary for the same movie.
You can get a VHS tape of Halloween with the Criterion commentary from Orange Grove Video.