The Thorny Production of ‘Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers’

September 29, 2020

halloween 6 michael myers 5 — Dimension Films

For as long as I can remember, you could find a movie from the Halloween series on some TV channel, on repeat, for pretty much the entire month of October. Since I was young, my only exposure to the Halloween sequels was on TV, watching mostly Parts 4 and 5 over and over again with commercial breaks. I was a tad older than Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris), which appealed to my ability to identify with the character and become deeply enamored of the series. As the holiday got closer, Halloween and Halloween II were brought into the more frequent rotation, and even Part 3 would sneak into the mix. Michael was my first big slasher crush (in a strictly my favorite monster kind of way), and I was determined to devour all as much Halloween as I could.

So when I found Halloween 6:The Curse of Michael Myers in my neighborhood Blockbuster, I knew I had to see it. And, it was a huge disappointment. At eleven, I was too young to understand the same girl with the baby was my final girl, Jamie – it wasn’t the same actress and I worked mostly off of facial recognition. And what in the Samhain was Josh from Clueless doing in my horror movie? Thank goodness Dr. Loomis was the same.

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It was gorier than previous films, making me less scared and more grossed out. There were tons of flashy, fast-cut transitions even for the most innocuous scenes. The soundtrack was atrocious, leaving out the classic theme in favor of modern grunge cheese. Of course, these were not things I could articulate at age eleven. Mostly, I just knew it didn’t make sense to me. Why are we in an occult basement? Why is Michael stalking this random family? Where is Michael for half of this movie? Why is Michael attacking these doctors? Am I supposed to believe that Michael can just get bludgeoned with a lead pipe and that’s it? I didn’t want to watch it again. And I wouldn’t, at least not intentionally, until almost 20 years later.

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers takes place 6 years after the events of the previous film. In Haddonfield, there has been a moratorium on celebrating the spookiest of holidays due to the rash of murders by one Michael Myers, the proverbial “boogeyman.” But we don’t open here: we open on an older Jamie Loyd (J.C. Brandy) giving birth in a cultish underground facility. She escapes with her baby and is pursued by Michael, making her way to a police station and calling in to a live radio program, drawing the attention of Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) and Tommy Doyle (credited as Paul “Stephen” Rudd), who has been obsessed with Michael ever since his encounter with him in the first film. Michael kills Jamie but loses track of the baby that is supposed to hold the narrative together (I say “supposed to” because the baby ends up being a kind of MacGuffin/nonsense entity in this cut of the work).

Meanwhile, relatives of the Strode family have moved into ye ol’ Myers house. Daughter Kara (Marianne Hagan) deals with an emotionally and physically abusive father and a mousy, actionless mother. Kara’s brother and girlfriend are putting together a campaign to bring Halloween back to Haddonfield with the help of exploitative shock jock Barry Simms (Leo Geter). None of these pieces really matter much to the plot, mainly just upping the body count with semi-familiar characters. There’s a lot going on that sets up potentially interesting storylines, but it’s simply too much to carry alongside the cult of “Thorn” – a druidic sect with supernatural powers that supposedly created and control the Boogeyman, whose current incarnation is Michael Myers.

The problems with Curse started before the previous film even wrapped. In an attempt to ensure the continuation of a waning franchise, Halloween 5 raised more questions than it answered. A mysterious tattoo on Michael’s wrist became a focal point, alluding to the origins of his source of power. A dog-kicking, spur-wearing Man in Black haunted the corners of the story and busts Michael out of jail. And writers did not care to return to the next installment so the inclusion of these set pieces was left for Moustapha Akkad to sort out with their next production team. Having taken a departure from Halloween 4, Akkad put the series on hold until he could find the right voices to resurrect his franchise.

Luckily, screenwriter Daniel Farrands was an avid, even obsessive, fan of the Halloween series. He came prepared with binders of lore, connecting everything from the young Tommy Doyle to the druidic cult powers introduced in Halloween 3. He had timelines and family trees for both the Myers and Strode families, and extensive research on Thorn, derived from Celtic Thurisaz meaning “giants” and representing a weapon of protection and violence. All of which Farrands planned on exploring in his Part 6 script.

But Akkad had let the rights to Halloween lapse in the interim which led to a bidding war between series originator John Carpenter, who had aligned himself with New Line Cinema (oh boogeyman, the missed opportunities there…) and the Weinstein Company’s Dimension Films. In a closed bid New Line simply couldn’t meet, Akkad and producer Paul Freeman went with Weinstein – bringing Farrands and fledgling director Joe Chappelle with them. Dimension was a much more mainstream studio than Akkad and Freeman had previously worked with, collapsing a lot of the previous freedoms that had been afforded by previous studios. The Weinsteins had a hand in almost every part of the production, often clashing with Farrands’ script, Akkad, and Freeman. But they had the ear of the young director whose career they could make or break simply by how much he listened to them.

Producer Freeman found Chappelle after seeing Theives Quartet (1993), his first feature with a strong style and sense of empowerment as a young director. But he was impressionable and easily manipulated by the studio in what would become a constant conflict with Akkad and Farrands. Akkad believed in the script Farrands had penned, as did the cast. Donald Pleasence recounted in an on-set interview that the script was “one of the best” he had read, not limiting the comment to the Halloween franchise which says a lot about the script’s potential. During shooting, however, the word onset was more gore, more quick inserts, more MTV style, and less of the atmospheric, eerie slow draw that made the original Halloween so special.

The original title of Halloween 6 was Halloween 666: The Origin of Michael Myers, a pretty lame half-origin/half-Part 5 wrap-up throw-away title that was scrapped after Farrands jokingly dubbed it The Curse of Michael Myers, a satirical wink at how troubled the production really was. Like most production disasters, the disconnect and ultimate disappointment of Halloween 6 can be chalked up to too many boogeymen in the production closet. When Curse went through the process of test screening, audiences were unimpressed. The Weinsteins and Chappelle stepped in, insisting the problem was clearly pacing and intensity. Audiences supposedly wanted action, grue, and grunge.

Reshoots began, but Akkad and Freeman were not convinced. Mustapha Akkad, having helmed production for every previous installment, wanted to shoot more of Farrands’ original script. The battle would eventually become legal, with Akkad attempting an injunction on the film’s release but even the lawyers weren’t on his side, ultimately telling him to just “let it go, it’s over.” With a release date on the horizon, Team Original Script gave up their battle and handed everything over to Team Dimension.

Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers was released on September 29th, 1995, and grossed $7.3 million in its opening weekend – a better opening than Parts 4 and 5 and coming in second to David Fincher’s Seven. It closed barely doubling those results at $15 million on a $5 million budget. Critically, it was eaten alive. Noted was the absence of simple brutality in favor of a convoluted plot, over-the-top mysticism, and force-fed shock effects. The thick plot was something you might find in a Chris Nolan film nowadays and had no place in the fandom of Michael Myers. It became a prime example of why, when it comes to horror, less explanation is better.

However, deep in the vault of horror lore, there existed a glimmer of hope for the wayward Halloween film. Bootleg variations from original test screenings traveled from VHS to YouTube, grainy and unfocused, that glimpsed a film that, for one thing, made sense. And had more Donald Pleasence, which is always a win for Halloween fans. For a long time considered the “Holy Grail of the franchise,” Anchor Bay Entertainment partnered with Scream Factory to bring a fully restored release of what had come to be known as “The Producer’s Cut.”

It’s an odd title, mainly because in the world of cinema today, we’re lauded with anticipation of “Directors’ Cuts.” The well-told story that studios and producers get in the way of a director’s vision is often the reason for these releases. They cut, snip, and ultimately tarnish what would have been a great movie. “If only we could see the Director’s Cut,” we say. And a lot of times, we do – Director’s cuts are released over and over again for home consumption, usually adding 10 to 15 minutes to the original film, hashing out previously hazy plot points that don’t actually add much to the story. Sometimes they are huge changes that fix major errors in the theatrical versions (the Snyder Cut, anyone?) Mostly, though, they don’t change much. Maybe adding a little backstory, a little intrigue.

But if you google the term “Producer’s Cut” – there are pages and pages of one and only one movie.

This is because Mustapha Akkad, his son Malek, and Paul Freeman were the ones fighting for the version originally shot. It was edited, mixed, color corrected, and test screened, but never saw the light of day. As mentioned previously, Dimension (along with director Joe Chappelle) shut it down. There is a director’s cut of Curse, but it exists in the vein of the original and mainly serves to work around the MPAA cuts made for gore and violence. Unlike most Director’s cuts, the Producer’s Cut changes the entire goddamn ending!

There are loads of articles and videos deeply articulating the differences between the theatrical and producer’s cuts (Dead Meat’s Cut Comparison does a great job of this in 20 minutes or less ), so I’m not going to do that here. If you haven’t seen the Producer’s Cut, I implore you to watch it. It’s kind of a miracle it exists which makes it all the more mystical, promoting a “buy-in” factor to the thick lore it creates. And while elevated from the boring, confounding former, the ultimate problem with Curse lay in ideation. To put it plainly, in the world of Haddonfield, Curse strays too far away from simplicity and pure slash, relying on an origin story Michael Myers just didn’t need. But you know what, it does restore some of what I’m going to call “the Spirit of Halloween.”

The Spirit of Halloween

In an archival interview with Marianne Hagan (Curse’s final girl, Kara), she states:

“I think what touches us in this movie is that mask…that mask is so scary because of the complete and utter lack of emotion…Because it’s a human face, you almost feel you could reach that person, reach out to them, and maybe try to, in some way, prevent them from trying to do what they are about to do. But the mask covers the face, so he’s almost not human…”

The quote encompasses the horror of the Halloween franchise. It’s a struggle that both Laurie and Jamie face. The difference between the man and Boogeyman. Michael Myers was just a boy who supposedly snapped, possessed by an otherworldly desire to destroy. In almost all the films, we see these moments of connection – reaching out to the monster – and trying to break through the painted mask to the man underneath. There’s an idea that Michael is just a man with a psychotic vengeance against the world (or his family, take your pick). The ultimate horror that evil lurks behind the veil. And one Halloween night, when that veil is the thinnest, Evil broke through and possessed the most innocent of us. There is barely a rhyme or reason, just an unstoppable force of brutality, and the fear of that unknown being so close to ourselves is the true Horror of Halloween.

But people like to pick at the scabs: Why? Why is this happening? What is Michael? Why does he do the things he does? I think it falls into the same vein as why so many of us are obsessed with true crime. Motive is essential; it separates us from the madmen. We need to know we’re not like the Dahlmer’s and Gacy’s and Carol Baskin’s of the world. And so, we make up a story. We use the facts of the cases, listen to profilers, and ruminate on the evidence to reinforce that not only are we not these horrific psychopaths, but we’re also somehow exempt from their wrath.

In Daniel Farrands’ case, he was given the overwhelming task to explain the questions Halloween fans would espouse to other fans. His fan theories begat him the dubious honor of revealing the why of Michael Myers and tying up all the timelines previous films veered towards in one grand finale. And as great as Curse could have been, the overarching premise that the origins of Michael Myers had to be explained was the wrong direction from the get-go. Horror movies don’t need it; they are built on fear of the unknown. Curse is like a true crime story that turns out to be supernatural – not so much a slasher as a metaphysical mystery. And it’s just not in the Spirit of Halloween.

That being said, once I had the opportunity to see The Producer’s Cut, it was quite a surprise that I enjoyed it as much as I did. It threw out the gore for more subtle kills, returning it to the ominous savagery of previous installments. It brought back variations on the original Halloween score. It included small inserts cut from the theatrical that added gravity as well as actual understanding to some of the more random events. And the brand new climax gave eerie clarity to Michael’s supernatural possession without completely diminishing his power (as, say, getting beaten to a green, gooey pulp by a lead pipe would). And, more Dr. Loomis. So much more Dr. Loomis. It was a better way to see this final performance of such an accomplished, amazing actor.

Even though it’s been 25 years since the release of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, it’s only been six since the cut Halloween fans deserve has been restored in style, spirit, and resolution. Through the plague of production and years of clamor, Curse found new life with the help of a production squad that never gave up on its original vision. I don’t say this often, actually most of the time I think producers are money-grubby leeches who wish they had the creativity to make movies so instead hold them hostage to bad ideas via dollar bills, but thank Thorn for the Akkads. Without them, the original cut of Curse would never have happened (and Anchor Bay and Scream Factory – you guys, too). It would still be helmed as the worst Halloween film in the franchise. So, through its resurrection six years ago, it can now firmly be placed on the rankings as above…well…Halloween: Resurrection.

And maybe the Producer’s cut is higher on your personal list. Maybe the deep mythology is your bag of runes, and that’s awesome, too. I think we can all get behind one thing: The Weinstein’s are a couple of idiots who called Marianne Hagan too “skinny and pointy” to be a final girl, and their theatrical version of Curse can just shove the hell off…