Trivia / Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers

• Breakaway Pop Hit: The #1 mainstream rock hit "And Fools Shine On" by Brother Cane is used in this film's theatrical cut (along with other songs from their album Seeds).
• California Doubling: Despite taking place in Illinois, almost all of the film was shot in Salt Lake City, Utah, with some interior shots in a Los Angeles sound stage.
• Cast the Runner-Up: Mariah O'Brien originally auditioned for Kara Strode before being cast as Beth.
• Contractual Obligation Project: Many of the crew have gone on the record to state that director Joe Chappelle told them from the outset that he didn't like the Halloween films, and was only involved in this project because it got him a three-picture deal with Miramax. His next two films after this were both Miramax releases.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Daniel Farrands was not happy with the final film, or any of its alternate cuts, due to very heavy Executive Meddling. However, he does view the "Producer's Cut" as the one closest to his vision, and even made a big push to get it an official release.
  • Daniel Farrands on the Shout! commentary track claims that Paul Rudd dislikes the film due to how heavily meddled with it became compared to how it was written.
• Creator's Pest: Many of Donald Pleasence's scenes were edited out of the film because Joe Chappelle found him "boring".
• Dawson Casting: Even though Michael is supposed to be in his late thirties in this, George P. Wilbur who plays him was 54.
• Died During Production: Donald Pleasence died sometime after production was complete, which made it pretty much impossible to get the reshoots necessary for the film's ending.
• Executive Meddling: The film had so much meddling that it resulted in two differently altered cuts of the film. One way or another, the executives took over the film after it ran over time and budget and had an ending they didn't find compelling. Their first attempt to salvage it became the "Theatrical Cut". The "Producer's Cut" is the other version, the original version screened for test audiences, which has less violence and cursing, has a ton of alternate takes, a different opening narration, and cuts 20 minutes from the Theatrical Cut. The two also have very different explanations for Michael's killing ways; the Theatrical version offered a scientific reason, but the Producer's Cut said it was supernatural.
• In Memoriam: In Memory of Donald Pleasence. Featured in both the Producer's and Theatrical Cut, but sadly typo'd as "Donald Pleasance".
• The Original Darrin: George P. Wilbur, who played Michael in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, returns to the role after Don Shanks took over for Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Danielle Harris wanted to reprise her role as Jamie, and even had herself emancipated so she could work on it (she was 17 at this point). But when she was offered a scaled fee of just $1000 for a week's work, which was less than what she'd paid to get herself emancipated. The casting department head refused to negotiate the salary, stating she was "a scale character who dies in the first twenty minutes". JC Brandy replaced her.
  ""[but] it's not like I [was] demanding of anything, really ... When you've been asked to do something and then they insult you by saying, "You're a piece of shit, you die in the first act—I don't give a fuck that you were in two other Halloween movies, who cares?"... I was in shock."
  • Brian Andrews, who played the original Tommy Doyle in the first Halloween, was considered for the role. However, when contacted, he refused to accept the role without an agent, and instead of working with him until he got one so his role could be worked out, the producers simply moved on to finding someone else. He later said he regretted it for years. Daniel Farrands claims that Andrews was never considered to reprise his role, but was instead sought for a cameo as the bus station attendant that Tommy talks to. Paul Rudd instead plays Tommy, also replacing Danny Ray, who played him in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.
  • Mitchell Ryan takes over as Dr. Wynn, who was played by Robert Phalen in the original film and Don Shanks as the Man in Black in the previous film.
• The Other Marty: Stunt performer George P. Wilbur, who portrayed Michael in the fourth installment, reprised his role as Michael Myers. However, once reshoots took place, Wilbur was replaced by A. Michael Lerner as director Joe Chapelle found Wilbur to be "too bulky." Wilbur was still the one listed in the credits, however.
• Playing Against Type: Paul Rudd is known as a comedian these days. Not only is the film not a comedy, the character of Tommy is quite dark.
• Posthumous Credit: Donald Pleasence again reprised his role as Dr. Loomis, but died before this film was released, making it the last time his character was involved with the franchise as consequence. That is, until Halloween (2018) where a soundalike actor recorded new lines as Loomis, and Halloween Kills where a combination of the same soundalike actor and a lookalike actor wearing makeup/prosthetics were used to show Loomis in new footage of events never shown from the night of the original film.
• The Production Curse: The film actually got its title because of this. Producer Moustapha Akkad asked screenwriter Daniel Farrands for a title idea. Because of problems with the weather during shooting (unseasonably early snow) and constant on-set re-writes that totally derailed the story, Farrands jokingly suggested "The Curse of Michael Myers" to hint that the production was cursed. Akkad ran with it. And this was BEFORE star Donald Pleasence died and extensive reshoots had to be done without him or the actor who had been playing Michael.
• Promoted Fanboy: Writer Daniel Farrands was a big fan of the series, to the extent of compiling an elaborate research book on it as part of his pitch.
• Troubled Production: The worst case in the whole franchise. The film took six years to get made after the tepid reception of the last film in the Halloween series, The Revenge of Michael Myers in 1989. Its tribulations almost killed the series.
  • Series producer Moustapha Akkad had been intending to make a sixth Halloween film despite the tepid reception of Revenge, meeting with screenwriter and series super-fan Daniel Farrands in 1990. Farrands's ideas stoked Akkad's interest, as he had compiled a notebook filled with research on the series, including a timeline, bios for every character, a "family tree" of the Myers and Strode families, and research on the runic symbol of Thorn that had appeared in Revenge. His intent was to bridge the first two films with the fourth and fifth^note For those wondering where the third film fits in: that film, Season of the Witch, was considered a non-canonical spinoff that featured none of the series's characters and was subsequently ignored, viewed as something of an oddball in the series today., and also to explain why series villain Michael Myers keeps coming back: he had been put under an ancient Celtic curse that compelled him to murder his entire family, one that would be passed on to another young child after he completed his task.
  • Farrands was brought on to write the film, but a series of complicated legal battles held up production for years until Miramax Films (via Dimension Films) bought the rights to Halloween; writing finally began in 1994. Several screenplays by different writers were gone through and deemed insufficient until Farrands's final draft, dubbed Halloween 666, was finalized after eleven drafts. From there came casting. While Donald Pleasence reprised his role as Dr. Loomis, Danielle Harris did not return as Jamie Lloyd, due to both salary disagreements and insults from an executive about Harris's supposed lack of importance in the series. The producers wanted to recast Jamie with an adult actress anyway, but Danielle attempted to keep the part by getting herself legally emancipated. She walked away from the project when the writers reduced her character, an executive invalidated and insulted her importance to the history of the series, and she was only offered scale. Fred Walton was also tapped to direct, but dropped out and was replaced with Joe Chappelle shortly before production.
  • Then production began, and the real problems hit. Shooting in Salt Lake City proved challenging due to an early winter that frequently interrupted production, and Chappelle and producer Paul Freeman had to rewrite the ending on the fly to meet deadlines. Furthermore, Freeman frequently inserted himself into production, rewriting dialogue and action scenes, removing a number of scenes from the script, taking it upon himself to direct second-unit shots, and sending the crew home when important scenes needed to be shot. Freeman's handling of the production was so inept that Miramax eventually stepped in, kicked him off the film, and ordered reshoots.
  • Post-production went no better. Lead actress Marianne Hagan described the test screenings in early 1995 as "consist[ing] primarily of 14-year-old boys" who disliked the ending and the Cult of Thorn storyline. This led to another round of reshoots to craft a new ending, but there was a big problem: Donald Pleasence could not be present for them on account of having recently died. Not only was a new ending shot anyway, but over twenty minutes of other footage was changed as well, leaving gaping plot holes that rendered the theatrical cut of the film nearly incomprehensible.
  • When it was released that September, Curse had the largest opening weekend out of the entire series, but was ravaged by critics and fans and plunged fast. One of its fiercest critics was Farrands, who hated the final film's deviations from his script. The series would be partially rebooted three years later in 1998 with Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, which took only the first two films as canonical. Eventually, when the film was shown on TV, someone unearthed the original Producer's Cut from before the reshoots. While it cuts the violence and profanity for TV airing, it otherwise retains most of the original content, and Farrands has given it his tepid (if still disappointed) approval. The full Producer's Cut was finally released on home video (after having been a popular bootleg for years) in 2014 as part of the collector's edition box set of the entire series and re-released in 4K in 2022 alongside the Theatrical Cut.
• Uncredited Role: Screenwriter Rand Ravich did some uncredited work on the film during reshoots.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Before the "Cult of Thorn" plot was fleshed out, the writers toyed with the idea of having the Man in Black be revealed to be Michael's father.
  • Denise Richards apparently auditioned for the role of Beth, but was rejected for being "all boobs." In addition, according to Daniel Farrands, Beth was black in his original script, but Moustapha Akkad insisted on casting a white actress because he mistakenly believed there weren't any African Americans living in Illinois.
  • The part of Dr. Terrence Wynn was written with Christopher Lee in mind. Unlike with Brian Andrews, Lee was never even asked to do the film because the Weinsteins disapproved of the casting, and they instead asked Mitchell Ryan because he had played the villain in Lethal Weapon (1987). This also would have been a Casting Gag, as Lee was one of the first people John Carpenter approached to play Dr. Loomis in the original film, but he declined (and to boot, Lee claimed that was the biggest mistake of his career, although he also said the same thing about turning down what became Leslie Nielsen's role in Airplane!).
  • They wanted Howard Stern to play the shock jock, but he was working on Private Parts at the time.
  • Daniel Farrands states on the DVD Commentary that Mike Myers was considered for a part on Barry Simms's radio show as a play on sharing his name with Michael Myers.
  • As mentioned above, the original ending (seen in the Producer's Cut) has the Thorn curse passing to Loomis, with Michael, now presumably freed from his compulsion to kill, disappearing to parts unknown. Had the following sequels actually ran with this idea, the franchise's status quo could have been drastically altered.
  • In the original draft of the movie, when John came home from work, he turned on the TV and the scene of Little Buddy dying from the mask in Halloween III: Season of the Witch was shown.
  • Originally, Kara's fate varied in various script drafts. In the first draft, Kara is murdered by her son Danny in the Haddonfield Bus Depot, while the near final draft had the film ending with Tommy and Kara driving away. The film as released ends with Kara and Tommy driving off with the children, Danny and Steven.
  • There were multiple scripted endings including one where Kara, Tommy, and the baby ended up back at the bus station only to see Kara and the baby disappear, leaving Tommy "holding the bag" and looking guilty for much of what happened. Another one saw Dr. Wynn fly away on a helicopter only to have it explode due to a bomb in his bag.
  • The script originally opened with a montage of sorts featuring scenes from the earlier films, "to bring us up to speed."
  • Peter Jackson was asked to direct.
  • Scott Spiegel's draft dealt with a now homeless Michael Myers, trying to find his way back to Haddonfield so he could gain revenge on those who wronged him. Reportedly when Moustapha Akkad read this draft, he threw it across the room into a waste bin.
• Word of God: Daniel Farrands shot down the rumor that Quentin Tarantino was considered for the film with Scott Spiegel on the Shout! commentary track, stating the rumor came from Spiegel having written a treatment that was rejected.
• Working Title: Halloween 666: The Origin of Michael Myers. There are even existing ad prints and early trailers with that title. Later, it became Halloween 6 and finally Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants:
  • Producer Paul Freeman and Joe Chappelle reportedly rewrote the ending on-set, even from shot-to-shot as production deadlines loomed. Freeman also sent the crew home when crucial scenes needed to be shot, deleted scripted scenes indiscriminately, rewrote dialogue and action sequences, and assumed the responsibility of directing second-unit shots and the supervision of post-production of the original cut. These complications resulted in Dimension Films's parent company (and the film's co-production company) Miramax taking over the film's production and ordering many of the reworked sequences to be reshot.
  • The Man in Black's identity was constantly changing due to producers not knowing whether or not he would be a blood relative of Michael Myers. The original ending (as seen in the Producer's Cut) was also basically improvised on the spot to meet deadlines, and Daniel Farrands says it would've probably been reshot regardless of test screen approval.

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