This month marks the 35th anniversary since Michael Myers stabbed, slashed and murdered his way into our hearts. The horror film “Halloween,” released Oct. 25, 1978, was a landmark in the genre, unleashing a flood of imitators and spawning a handful of mediocre sequels. The series is enjoying a special return engagement to theaters this season. (To find a showing near you, go to HalloweenOnScreen.com.)
To prepare, The Post chatted with legendary director John Carpenter for his memories of “Halloween.” Here are five things you might not know about the original film.
-
1. Michael Myers was William Shatner
Everett Collection Sort of. The script called for the killer to wear an “emotionless, human-face mask,” Carpenter says. Because the production was working on a shoestring budget and couldn’t afford to fabricate an original mask, someone simply picked up a Captain Kirk toy mask at a store on LA’s Hollywood Boulevard and painted it white. “It looked nothing like Shatner,” Carpenter says.
-
2. The famous score was thrown together in just three days
“On my previous movie, I had one day, so this was a luxury,” Carpenter says. “I had this theme in my head already. My father, when I was younger, had taught me 5/4 time on a bongo. I just took that idea and did it in piano octaves. It went up a half step at the end. That was it.”
-
3. Originally, the movie wasn't set on Halloween night
Everett Collection “That was the distributor’s idea,” Carpenter recalls. “He said, ‘Let’s set it on Halloween night and call it ‘Halloween.’ No one had done that. It’s one of the ways the movie was distinguished from other horror movies. I loved the idea.” The film had originally been titled “The Babysitter Murders.”
-
4. The killer was partially based on Yul Brynner
Everett Collection Carpenter was inspired by the 1973 sci-fi movie “Westworld,” in which Brynner plays a malfunctioning, gun-slinging robot — at least when it came to his killer’s superhuman persistence. “At the end of the movie, Brynner keeps coming even though he’s just an exo-skeleton or something. I had a little of that in there [with Myers],” Carpenter says.
-
5. Carpenter is not frightened by his own movies
Nick Castle as Mike Myers in "Halloween." Everett Collection “No! God, no. Are you kidding me?” he says. “I can’t even watch my own movies anymore.”