Even though many of the great horror franchises remained canon for decades, the actors behind the iconic slashers were continually recast. The Halloween franchise had several different actors portray Michael Myers throughout the years, with Chris Durand donning the “William Shatner” Shape mask in the Steve Miner-directed Halloween H20 (1998).
Halloween H20 took place 20 years after the events in John Carpenter‘s Halloween, which means that there had been several incarnations of Michael Myers over the years – five to be exact. All canon. All the same Michael. In the seventh film, H20, Michael once again comes back for Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), which means he’s the exact same character from Carpenter’s 1978 slasher. Yet, Durand had never seen any of the Halloween movies when he strapped on the boots of the horror icon.
“When I did the interview for [the film], they had mentioned separately from talking to me, I just overheard them saying that they weren’t going to do what came before,” Durand told Screengeek at the London Comic-Con. “So when I got [the part], I remembered that and I didn’t watch any of the films. Since we weren’t going to do what came before, I did what I thought was right and tried to figure out this character from the ground up.”
He adds that he actually misunderstood: “In retrospect, they were talking about 4, 5 and 6 and not referencing those – but it worked to my advantage because I didn’t really stress about trying to live up to somebody else’s performance or get caught in the trap of mimicking what somebody else had done.”
Sure, it may have worked to his advantage as an actor, and it’s pretty clear none of us even noticed any discrepancies, but it’s still hard to swallow something of this magnitude nearly 20 years later. It also has me wondering how none of the filmmakers asked Durand during casting if he had seen any of the original films, or had told him to look at any prior performances as an example of direction for H20‘s Michael?