Interviews
Why They Didn’t Make Two ‘Halloween’ Movies Back-to-Back [Exclusive]
The long-awaited Halloween is finally out this weekend, after years of anticipation. Late in 2017, there was talk about possibly filming two Halloween movies back to back, so there would be another sequel ready soon. The sequel was nixed so right now this is the only Halloween movie, and producer Malek Akkad barely remembers the sequel plans.
“I actually forgot about that,” Akkad said. “Yes, there was and it was a bit crazy. We didn’t have a script. David [Gordon Green] and his teams, we all could have done it but the idea was let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Let’s see the audience appetite. Let’s see how we all work together. In terms of Trancas’s point of view, we went from having one distributor and now technically three. We have Miramax, Blumhouse and Universal. For everybody involved in this film it’s been a growing process. I think it probably would have been too ambitious to do and that’s I think where we ended up on it. To be completely frank, I forgot about that until right now. It’s been quite a year.”
Had they gone forward with a second film, the Halloween coming out now would still have been the same movie opening Friday. They were not going to save any of this film for a sequel.
“It was going to be a benefit to production and keep the actors and their schedules and the locations,” Akkad said. “It’s a benefit to cost and production but this film was always very much what this film is.”
Perhaps the idea to make two also came from the struggles to get just one made. If they had the green light, it was tempting to get a second film out of it, but Akkad ultimately decided to focus on the one.
“We did start many stops and starts with the previous studios we were with,” Akkad said. “Silly things that were stopping this and starting us and stopping us became very frustrating. This film’s been a nine year odyssey for me. When we finally did get out from that previous deal, we were able to look around and see who we wanted to partner with. We didn’t think we could do better than Blumhouse and Jason Blum.”
The Halloween franchise has enjoyed a strange continuity, where some sequels go together but some sets of sequels completely ignore the others. Even this one ignores Halloween II and H20 yet still stars Jamie Lee Curtis.
“Sort of just by happenstance, the chalkboard was wiped clean in a way that Rob [Zombie]’s chapter was over and now we were going to start again,” Akkad said. “I’ve thought long and hard about this very question many times in the franchise. The first probably being when we decided to do the remake with Rob Zombie and to some extent Resurrection. You can keep going back. The franchise has definitely taken some left turns and I’d be the first to admit there are some installments that are a little better than others. One thing that I’ve come to believe is that this franchise and these characters are bigger than any one installment and any one filmmaker. At least that’s panned out to be true so far. It did take a little getting used to that idea but looking back over the franchise and seeing we’ve taken a lot of these left turns that could be looked at as hard to explain or out of left field anyway. It wasn’t that difficult. After H2O, we brought Jamie back for Resurrection and Michael Myers came back. You can look at many of the different stops and starts.”
It makes the Halloween franchise unique. While Freddy, Jason and Chucky more or less follow a single continuity, Halloween has several different tangents.
“It goes back to these characters and franchises are bigger than any one installment,” Akkad said.
“It’s amazing, our fan base. We love them. We always try to do right by them, always try to expand the fan base. Certainly, there have been times we’ve perhaps disappointed them more than others and other times we’ve been more successful at giving them what they want. You also have to push the envelope a little bit with filmmakers and let them have their voice. It’s an interesting point to say it’s not a continual timeline.”
Halloween opens Friday, October 19.
Interviews
‘Rubberhead’ Director Nick Taylor on FX Maverick Steve Johnson, Practical Effects, and Seven-Year Journey
Horror journalist, producer, and podcast host Nick Taylor moves into the director’s seat for his feature debut with illuminating documentary Rubberhead: The Life & Monsters of Steve Johnson.
It chronicles the wild life and career of SFX maverick Steve Johnson, based on the multi-volume book series Rubberhead: Sex, Drugs and Special FX, and those familiar likely already know Rubberhead isn’t your standard horror documentary.
Johnson is responsible for so many memorable movie monsters, having worked on Fright Night, Poltergeist II, An American Werewolf in London, A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master and Night of the Demons, to name a few. He’s also extremely candid in ways that feel atypical in this industry, open about his failures as much as his successes.
“It was a natural progression for sure,” Nick Taylor tells Bloody Disgusting of his transition into filmmaking ahead of Rubberhead‘s world premiere next week at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 23. “I think with my podcast, I got adept at interviewing people and pulling creative lessons out of them, which was the point of my podcast. I wanted this movie to be sort of a creativity pill for artists where if they’re starting a project or feel creatively stuck, they could watch this movie and be inspired and get actual practical creative lessons.”
Taylor’s background in PR and marketing also organically led him down this path.
He charts the course from book promo to documentary director: “But also Bloody Disgusting had a lot to do with this movie because in the very beginning when I first met Steve, I was helping him promote his book and I said, ‘Hey, I got a marketing background and a journalism background. Let me help you promote this book. I’ll just pitch stories from your life to the media, and we’ll see what happens.’ And John Squires wrote an article about Steve making Slimer under the influence of tons and tons of cocaine, and that went fairly viral.”
“For a week, it was story time with Steve,” Taylor continues. “He would tell me a story from his life, and every story was about a major movie, a major director, lots of drugs and alcohol and insanity. I would write them up, and I think John published about three or four of them. So huge shout out to John Squires because that was really great. So yeah, there were definitely a lot of outgrowths of my journalism background that definitely contributed to this movie.”
Rubberhead condenses the multi-book series into a cohesive feature film with a breezy runtime, sparking the obvious question as to how Taylor approached condensing Johnson’s life down to an under 2-hour documentary film.
“That was one of the more difficult parts of all of this, because we had enough for a series or an epically long six-hour fan documentary,” he answers. “But from day one, I did not want to make a fan documentary. I love them. They’re a lot of fun, but I did want the movie to stand on its own two feet as a character-driven portrait of an artist and a time period and a technology, that being practical effects. I did want to be objective. I didn’t want to make this too long. I wanted to make it re-watchable. So I think we just really had to focus on what the narratives were that we wanted to tell. So there were some basically almost cliché archetypical mythic narratives present in Steve’s life. We could have made this way longer, but we wanted to keep it short. But luckily that’s why you have special features.”
Johnson quickly proves to be an engaging subject thanks to his self-effacing wit and frank self-reflections; expect no shortage of stories about how drugs factored into the height of his career or the failures it wrought.
That rare quality was an asset for Rubberhead, Taylor confirms. “He does not shy away from anything about the drugs, the addiction, the bridges burned, the mistakes made, the lessons learned. He just is honest about all of it. He’s had a lot of time for reflection, and he’s done a lot of reflection, so he doesn’t shy away from any of it, which is huge because it’s very refreshing. I don’t think a lot of people are that way, at least in this industry from what I can see. So I think it was hugely beneficial. We wanted to lean into that, and we wanted to make this sort of a gonzo Hunter S. Thompson sort of wild tale through Steve’s overall life.“
Condensing his life into this doc was a slow and steady process for Taylor, too. “It’s been almost seven years. It’s been a labor of love. We’ve been as indie as it gets. We would shoot what we could when we could, and then we would edit when we could. Then after a while it all came together.”
In a way, making Rubberhead brings Taylor’s horror fandom full circle. It turns out that the very film that sparked his interest in the genre and practical effects also comes with an amusing Steve Johnson anecdote.
Taylor explains, “My gateway for sure was Beetlejuice. I saw that at a very young age; I think I was four or five. I felt somebody had shown me, my soul. I get a little emotional thinking about it. There was something about that movie that felt so strange and unusual, but also felt so familiar. It was spooky, but it was fun, and it was lighthearted, and it had humor, but it also had this macabre celebration to it that I just really got into as a kid. I felt somebody had shown me my own soul. And funny story, Steve got fired from Beetlejuice because Tim Burton gave him his hand-drawn designs and Steve’s like, ‘Oh my God, these look like kids did them. This is not what you want. I know what you want. I’m going to redesign these for you.’ And Tim Burton was like, ‘Yeah, no, you’re not.’ So yeah, funny story.”
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