John Carpenter never wanted the story of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode to continue past his seminal 1978 film, and though he did end up co-writing (along with Debra Hill) the 1981 sequel, his hope was that the Halloween franchise would become something of an anthology series in the years to come. His vision was that each new installment would tell a Halloween-set horror story that had nothing to do with Myers, which is of course how we ended up with Halloween 3.
And we may have seen the first glimpses of that vision in Halloween 2.
As an injured Laurie Strode is being driven in an ambulance to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, where the bulk of Halloween 2 is set, director Rick Rosenthal takes a brief moment to spotlight the horrifying night being had by a mother and her young son: characters, oddly enough, who have nothing whatsoever to do with the actual plot of the film.
In our brief encounter with the mother and son, we see that the young boy (dressed as a pirate) has bitten into either an apple or piece of candy that had a razor blade stuck into it, and Rosenthal sure doesn’t beat around the bush or merely play around with suggestion: there’s a gnarly close-up shot of the blade wedged in the kid’s mouth, blood dripping out.
From there, we share only two more brief moments with the mother and her badly-injured son: first, they’re told to take a seat in the waiting room, and later we see that the boy has been dispatched from the hospital and will live to trick or treat another day. And that’s it. The boy never shows up again. He never crosses paths with Michael Myers. He never plays any real role in the story. His appearance, it seems, exists only to show that Michael isn’t the only threat on Halloween night.
And isn’t that exactly what Carpenter wanted to show, post-Halloween 2?
We’re left to wonder who in Haddonfield is trying to kill kids with tainted candy on Halloween, and paired with the gruesome image of a boy with a razor blade lodged between his lips – the fear of every parent brought to life on the screen – this hint at the even darker side of the holiday is enough to make the boy’s brief appearance perhaps the single most chilling aspect of Halloween 2. And again, it was the first real taste of what was to come the following year in Halloween 3, the plot of which centered on a man who aimed to kill children with horrific Halloween masks.
Hey, maybe Conal Cochran tainted pirate boy’s candy. Now there’s a fun theory!
Due to its graphic and disturbing nature, the side plot involving the boy and the razor blade was severely truncated in the TV version of Halloween 2 – which can be found on Scream Factory’s must-own Collector’s Edition Blu-ray release of the film. That cut runs a full minute shorter, and one of the reasons for that is because the razor blade side plot has been reduced to just one tiny scene: we see the boy and his mother being told to take a seat in the hospital’s waiting room, but the scenes that came before and after it were given the axe. In the TV cut, you never see that close-up shot of the razor blade in the child’s mouth, and it’s not hard to figure out why it was removed for TV audiences.
It’s just that damn unsettling.
