Dissecting Slashers: Halloween II (1981)

Carving into Michael Myers' first sequel.

BACKGROUND

Director John Carpenter’s slasher movie Halloween reached theatres on October 25, 1978, just in time to draw in crowds of movie-goers looking to celebrate the Halloween holiday by watching a scary movie in a dark theatre. And some large crowds turned out to see it. The film earned over $70 million worldwide, becoming one of the most profitable independent films of all time. So, of course, producers and investors were instantly ready to start talking sequel. Carpenter and his co-writer/producer Debra Hill were not so eager to dive into a follow-up; they were done with the story and ready to move on to other original projects. But, as Carpenter has put it, they were “forced into making a sequel because of business considerations.” Halloween II was going to happen with or without them and they wanted to collect money they were owed for their work on their first one, so they agreed to sign on for the sequel.

Halloween had originated with producer Irwin Yablans, who had come to Carpenter and Hill with the idea of making a movie called The Babysitter Murders – a concept that evolved into Halloween when Yablans realized the title and setting were there for the taking. Yablans was involved with Halloween II in its earliest days... but then producer Dino De Laurentiis made an offer to buy him out and Yablans, shockingly, took the deal. A deal he would come to regret later. Carpenter and Hill, however, were not disappointed to hear that Yablans wouldn’t have any say in Halloween II (or Halloween III, which De Laurentiis also planned to make happen), as they weren’t getting along anymore.

A few different approaches were considered for the sequel’s story. One idea was to kill off Halloween heroine Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) early on and shift the focus to a new group of characters. Others would have built on the fact that Curtis had clearly matured since the production of the first movie: they could pick up some years later, at which time Laurie would either be attending college (Yablans liked that idea: “a whole dorm filled with juicy coeds”) or living in a high-rise apartment. Instead, Carpenter just decided to have the sequel pick up from the exact moment the first movie left off: masked slasher Michael Myers has been shot six times by his psychiatrist, Doctor Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and disappeared into the night. Although the sequel would be released in 1981, the setting is still Halloween 1978.

Carpenter found writing the script to be a struggle. He had run out of story and was forcing it to continue. He spent nights toiling away at it, drinking a lot of beer. He dropped in a twist he would come to hate (“a terrible, stupid idea”) simply as a way to fill some time and in the end was not happy with what he had written at all. But the movie had to be made, the contracts had been signed, so that’s what he pushed out into the world. He didn’t want to direct the film himself, so he offered his friend Tommy Lee Wallace, who was the production designer on the first movie, the chance to direct it. Wallace hated the script, so he turned it down. Debra Hill was interested in directing but didn’t want to get that part of her career started with a sequel, so she passed it on as well. After considering bringing in David Lynch, the production team decided to give a new director a chance: Rick Rosenthal was chosen to make his feature directorial debut on the film. This was another decision Carpenter would regret.

SETTING

The first movie saw escaped mental patient Michael Myers going on a killing spree in his hometown, the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois. Shot in the same area as its predecessor (Pasadena, California), Halloween II returns us to Haddonfield – and not only are the locations familiar, but Rosenthal worked with returning cinematographer Dean Cundey to make sure the sequel would have the same look as the first movie. Even with a different director at the helm, it really does feel like an extension of Halloween ‘78.

The best section of the film finds the wounded (but not weakened) Michael Myers wandering the streets of Haddonfield. He walks down alleyways and sidewalks, enters the home of an elderly couple to steal a knife, wanders over to their neighbor’s house to randomly kill a teenage girl, and blends in with the trick-or-treaters and other costumed people who are out on the streets.

But that’s only one portion of the movie. Most of the slashing takes place within the confines of Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where Laurie Strode has been taken after suffering a stab wound in the first movie. Myers wants to finish what he started, and kills off the hospital staff on his way to his intended victim. Haddonfield Memorial at night is an eerily empty, dark place – so much so, a lot of viewers have questioned the reality of this setting. It doesn’t seem like a hospital should be quite so dark and empty at night. But it gives Michael Myers plenty of rooms, hallways, and stairways to stalk through – and there would be less confusion about the darkness of the hospital if the theatrical cut hadn’t removed a scene that showed Myers cutting the power.

KILLER

Well, of course, it’s Michael Myers, also known as The Shape or The Boogeyman. To the average person, he just seems like an escaped mental patient. When he was six years old, on Halloween 1963, he murdered his teenage sister Judith. That act got him locked away in a mental institution for fifteen years, and during that time he was in the care of Doctor Loomis. The doctor gradually came to realize there was no humanity left in his patient – and now that he’s loose, it becomes more and more obvious that he isn’t just your run-of-the-mill maniac, he’s an almost-supernatural force of evil, silently moving from place to place and killing people with ease. 

The killer had been primarily played by Nick Castle in the first movie, and Castle had established the slow walk and the deliberate movements of the character. Stuntman Dick Warlock landed the job for Halloween II and based his entire performance on one moment at the end of the first Halloween, the moment when then-Myers performer Nick Castle was on the ground, sat up straight, then slowly turned his head to look over at Laurie. Warlock’s movements are very robotic, and that robo feeling is driven home even more by the fact he keeps his body rod straight at every moment. His performance is good, but he took a stiffer approach than Castle generally did.

Rather than Warlock’s performance, it’s that regrettable twist Carpenter dropped into the script that really changes the Michael Myers character. Desperate to find a way to fill out script pages, Carpenter decided to have Loomis discover that Myers wasn’t just on a random killing spree: he came back to Haddonfield with a very specific target in mind. As it turns out, Myers had a younger sister who was just two years old when he killed Judith. When the Myers parents died in an accident two years later, that little sister was adopted by a family that also lived in Haddonfield. The Strodes. The adoption records were sealed, but now they’ve been opened, and it has been revealed that Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’ younger sister. He isn’t just an evil force out to stalk and kill people at random, he just wants to finish the job of wiping out his family. He’s out to kill his little sister.

As written in the book Taking Shape by Dustin McNeill and Travis Mullins, “In making Laurie and Michael siblings, the filmmakers assign the Shape a clear motive. In doing so, Halloween II outright betrays the original film. The Shape is no longer the quintessential boogeyman but a mere slasher with a sister complex. The entire idea of the first Halloween is that Michael is not a character but the absence of character. He is a void, a Shape.”

It was a controversial decision that fans have been debating for years. Should Myers be a random killer or a family destroyer? After Halloween II established that he just wants to kill off family members (and whoever else might be around them), the franchise ran with that idea for decades and a lot of sequels.

There's also a bizarre scene where we're shown that Myers broke into a school so he could write the word SAMHAIN in blood on the chalkboard, since he's apparently a big fan of Celtic legend.

FINAL GIRL

Jamie Lee Curtis reprised the role of Laurie Strode, and it’s a shame that she wasn’t given much to do this time around. If the filmmakers had gone with the idea of following Laurie to college or to an apartment, they could have done something interesting with the character... but with this idea, she’s just recuperating in the hospital, not doing or saying very much, drifting in and out of consciousness. At least Curtis got a relatively easy paycheck. Deleted scenes would have given a better explanation for why Laurie is so out of it, as we would have seen that she had been given too many doses of sedative. But that explanation was left out of the movie.

At least all of this sleepiness gives her the opportunity to unearth repressed memories about finding out she was adopted and visiting a younger Michael Myers in the mental institution. What a coincidence that she’s happening these memories / dreams at the same time her adoption records are being unsealed, even though nobody actually talks to her about the fact that she’s related to the guy who has been trying to kill her. Loomis didn't know about the adoption because the files were sealed, but I don't know how he missed the fact that this girl visited his patient a few years back.

When the film reaches its climactic sequence, Laurie does finally drag herself out of her hospital bed to participate in a chase through the hospital, and she even gets to fire a gun when she and Loomis have their ending standoff with Myers. For a teenage bookworm who probably never held a gun before in her life, she’s a hell of a shot. She fires two bullets and they hit Myers in each of the eye holes in his mask, leaving him weeping blood.

VICTIMS

One of the charms of Halloween II is its increased body count. While only five people were killed in the first movie (and one of those was off screen), this one has a kill count in the double digits.

The first victim is Alice (Anne Bruner), a teenage girl who seems like she would have fit right in with Laurie and her friends in the first movie and the only character in the film that Myers truly kills at random. Her death wasn’t in the movie until a test screening audience complained that Myers didn’t kill any teenagers in this one, so the filmmakers did some additional photography to give him a teenage victim. Rosenthal objected to the addition of this scene because his Myers was focused on Laurie and only killing people connected to her in some way. Alice has no connection to her – but the fact that she’s targeted at random is something left over from the original interpretation of Myers.

The second death is an accident. Ben Tramer, a teen wearing the same mask as Michael Myers, is pursued through a neighborhood by the ranting and raving Doctor Loomis and is too drunk to figure out how to handle the situation. So he stumbles out into the street and gets smashed by a speeding police cruiser in a fiery collision.

From there on, the victims are almost entirely people who work at the hospital. The security guard, the drunken doctor, the inexperienced nurse, the paramedic and the nurse he has been hooking up with. Some of these characters barely register as people, which is partially due to the fact that some of their character moments were cut out of the movie and partially because they were just slasher fodder to begin with.

The paramedics make the biggest impression. Jimmy (Lance Guest) is familiar with Laurie because she goes to school with his brother, and they strike up a flirtation in the fleeting moments when Laurie is conscious. Leo Rossi plays the foul-mouthed lothario Budd and makes him an amusing character to watch.

DEATHS

There weren’t many movies like Halloween when it was released, but by the time Halloween II came along there had been a major slasher boom – and the more slasher movies there were, the more audiences expected them to deliver some shocking violence and bloodshed, especially after they saw the special effects in Friday the 13th. So Carpenter decided to increase the violence and bloodshed in this movie, even taking over as director for reshoots that added more blood and increased the violence.

We get a stabbing, a strangulation, a fiery car crash, and a bloody throat slashing. A couple of characters are killed with syringes, including one who gets air injected into her temple. A hammer claw gets bashed into someone’s skull. One person is knocked out and hooked up with an IV that drains all of their blood onto the floor. 

The standout violence/gore sequence comes when a nurse is drowned in a scalding hot hydrotherapy tub, more skin sloughing off of her face every time Myers shoves her into the hot water – which, somehow, has no effect on the bare hand he’s using to shove her in there.

My personal favorite of the kills is one that doesn’t even show any blood. Myers steps up behind a nurse, shoves a scalpel into her back, and lifts her up off the floor with the blade. He lifts her so high, her shoes fall off her feet. Then he drops her body to the floor.

CLICHÉS

Some of the clichés in Halloween II are carried over from the first Halloween. There’s the escaped, homicidal mental patient who is also a silent, masked slasher. The heroine is still the good-girl virgin, although now she’s sleeping most of the time. There are shots from the killer’s POV, the doomsayer doctor on the killer’s trail, and the authority figures who can’t seem to accomplish anything or save anybody. There may not be teen characters at the center of the story (aside from Laurie), but there’s still some pot-smoking and pre-marital sex going on at the hospital, with Budd puffing on a roach in the break room and planning to hook up with a nurse in the hydrotherapy tub.

And you have the hospital location, strangely dark and seemingly mostly abandoned, even though it shouldn’t be.

POSTMORTEM

John Carpenter wasn’t happy with the script he wrote for the film, and he wasn’t happy with the movie Rick Rosenthal made out of that script. Neither were the test audiences or producers. Carpenter tried to work alongside Rosenthal to salvage the movie in the editing room, but it still wasn’t working. So Carpenter took full control of the project. He edited the movie with Mark Goldblatt and then Skip Schoolnik, cutting out character moments, removing a sequence that involved Myers killing a TV news reporter and stealing her car, and dropping around 14 minutes of scenes total. He also directed three days of additional photography to make the deaths bloodier and more impactful, to fill in plot holes, and to add in more suspenseful moments – since, as he said, Rosenthal’s cut of the movie was about as scary as an episode of the “coroner investigates mysteries” TV show Quincy, M.E., which was on the air at the time. Carpenter was probably suffering a bad case of déjà vu at this point, because the previous year he had gone through a hellish ordeal trying to make his movie The Fog work, an effort that required extensive reshoots. That was such a bad experience for him, he faced any issues that came up during the filming of 1982’s The Thing head-on so he wouldn’t have to do the re-edit and reshoot dance all over again.

Rosenthal told Fangoria, “In the end, the cut of Halloween II that was released was certainly not mine. I was never a friend of John Carpenter’s. I was just somebody he hired, so I had very little say once they decided to change my cut of the film.” He has also said, “There were a lot of cooks on this film. You had John and Debra, then (producer) Moustapha Akkad, then Dino de Laurentiis, and finally (distributor) Universal.” Feeling the movie was too slow, De Laurentiis would tell Rosenthal to cut a certain moment, but it would be a moment that Carpenter and Hill liked, so it would stay in. 

Carpenter has said that the problem with the film, other than the bad script he wrote for it, was that Rosenthal didn’t have a feel for the material. And he doesn’t feel like he was able to save it with the re-editing and reshoots. He told Cinema Showcase, “I think Halloween II is an abomination and a horrible movie.”

Some of the deleted scenes did make it into the TV cut of the movie – and Carpenter also used the production of the sequel as an opportunity to shoot some material for the TV cut of the original movie, including a scene that foreshadows the sibling twist in Halloween II.

The movie had a troubled production and nobody behind the scenes was really happy with how it turned out – but that didn’t matter to the fans, most of whom warmly embraced the movie when it reached theatres on October 30, 1981. They were happy to have Michael Myers back on the screen, whether he was a random boogeyman or a sister stalker. Made on a budget of $2.5 million, substantially higher than the original movie’s $320,000 budget, Halloween II pulled in $25 million at the domestic box office, where the first movie had made $47 million. It sold less than half the number of tickets that its predecessor sold, but that $25 million haul was still enough to make Halloween II the second-highest grossing horror film of 1981. (An American in Werewolf was #1 with $30 million.)

Since it starts right where Halloween ended, there are a lot of fans who basically see these two films as one long movie, both parts on equal footing with each other. I used to love Halloween II as well, but my appreciation for it has decreased over the years as its flaws become more apparent to me and I dislike the sibling twist more. It's a fine horror movie to watch, it's got a nice creepy atmosphere and the kills are fun, but it is a step down from the movie that came before. You can tell Carpenter and Hill were struggling to justify continuing the story, because there is nothing going on here. Laurie has nothing to do, Loomis is still just stumbling through the dark, and the new characters are cardboard cutouts.

Michael Myers still gets the job done, though. He did it so well, another sequel was sent out into theatres the following year... but they left him out of that one.