The rejected horror film that became a classic

How Halloween defied the odds - and broke box office records

A new Halloween film came out earlier this month.

Who would have thought Michael Myers would still be terrorizing Laurie Strode (aka Jamie Lee Curtis) more than 40 years after Halloween debuted?

I never saw Halloween in the theatre, though I certainly remember the Halloween, Jason, and Freddy films being part of the essential VHS rentals at slumber parties during my teen years.

Halloween was the original of these films - but where did it come from?

I was curious…

In 1977, an aspiring film producer named Irwin Yablans had a problem.

He wanted to make a film – but he couldn’t afford to buy the rights to a book or play. 

He needed to come up with an idea.

Then – on Halloween night – inspiration came to him.

He had an idea for a scary film that would combine Halloween, babysitters, and a killer.

He thought back to the radio horror programs he listened to growing up – and wanted to create something in that spirit. Something that would frighten people, not repulse them.

“I wanted to make a movie like Inner Sanctum, the old radio show, the kind of show I used to listen to as a kid, hiding under the bedcovers,” he said. 

“No gore, no blood, let people supply their own demons, from their minds.”

He reached out to a young director named John Carpenter, whom he had worked with once before.

“When I hired John Carpenter, no one would give him a job because he hadn't done anything. It's the old routine. I gave him the opportunity to direct, so he worked for very little.”

Carpenter agreed to write the script and direct the film for $10k and a percentage of the potential profits. He brought on Debra Hill to co-write the script and produce the film.

Carpenter and Hill came up with the story and wrote the screenplay in just a few weeks. Their story was about a six-year-old boy named Michael Myers, who murders his teenage sister on Halloween night in 1963 and is sent away to a mental institution. Their story would pick up 15 years later, after Myers escaped from the institution, and returned to his small Illinois hometown to kill again. 

Yablans agreed to give Carpenter creative control – and his name above the title – if he could make the movie for a modest $300k. 

Eager to have the film ready before the October holiday, Carpenter, Hill, and a ‘young, hungry crew’ got to work on Halloween in the spring of 1978.

The ‘young, hungry crew’ of Halloween, 1978

They invested a large part of their budget in Panavision’s Panaglide, new technology that would move the camera smoothly throughout a scene. This allowed the audience to ‘follow’ the killer as he stalked his victims.

In addition to directing and co-writing the film, Carpenter also supplied the eerie piano composition that adds to the film’s tension. He composed the film’s score in just three days, because, in his words, “I was the fastest and cheapest I could get.”

After the film was complete, Yablans invited all of the major film studios to screen Halloween, hoping that one of them would agree to distribute the film.

But none of them were interested.

Every major studio rejected Halloween, meaning Yablans would have to distribute the film himself – a risky proposition during the studio-dominated era. 

Yablans decided to open Halloween in a smaller market – and on October 26, 1978, Halloween opened in Kansas City.

The filmmakers’ expectations were low, but word of mouth for Halloween was phenomenal. Soon they were showing Halloween in Chicago, then New York, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and then into smaller markets.

Even though the title holiday had long passed, audiences kept turning up and buying tickets. 

Halloween went on to gross an incredible $70 million worldwide, and launched the careers of Carpenter, Hill, and actress Jamie Lee Curtis. 

Halloween also inspired a crop of low-budget imitators – and forgettable films that focused less on craftsmanship and more on explicit gore and sex. 

But Michael Myers, Jamie Lee Curtis, and Halloween have continued to entice audiences for four decades. The franchise had earned $640 million in 2018 when Halloween 2018, the first film in a new trilogy was released. 

The latest, Halloween Kills, is the second film in the new trilogy (and the twelfth Halloween film overall). Halloween Ends is due for release in 2022.

Not bad for a low-budget film that was rejected.

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Keep Smiling - and Stay Curious!

-Beth