Halloween: 10/31/98

Halloween: 10/31/98 is a 1998 American slasher film and seventh/eight installment in the Halloween film series. It was directed by Steve Miner and starred Jamie Lee Curtis, Jonathan L. Dee, LL Cool J, Josh Hartnett, and Michelle Williams. The film was released on October 31, 1998, as part of a double feature with Halloween: The Thorn to mark the 20th anniversary of the original Halloween (1978).

The story was developed and created by Michael Dee with uncredited input from series' stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Jonathan L. Dee. The screenplay was written by Michael Dee and Jonathan L. Dee. It is a direct sequel to John Carpenter's Halloween and set in an alternate timeline in which the events that transpired in Halloween II, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers never occurred (rendering those films non-canon).

Set twenty years after the events of the first two movies, 10/31/98 centers on a post-traumatic Laurie Strode living in fear of her murderous brother, Michael Myers, who attempted to kill her all those years ago. When Michael eventually appears, Laurie must face evil one last time, while the life of her teenage son hangs in the balance.

The film also features many homages to the original film, many of Miner's earlier work, Psycho (which was one of the film inspirations for the original Halloween and starred Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis's mother, who portrayed Norma Watson in this film) and Scream, a 1996 horror/slasher film directed by Wes Craven and written by Kevin Williamson that was inspired by the original Halloween. It also shares plot points and casting elements with its sister film Halloween: The Thorn on purpose.

The film received mixed reviews from critics, praising the script, direction of Steve Miner and the performances of Jamie Lee Curtis, Jonathan L. Dee and Josh Hartnett, but received criticism for certain plot points (such as ignoring the previous films) and its shorter running time.

Plot

Twenty years after the events of Halloween, Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), Dr. Sam Loomis' former colleague, returns to her house in Langdon, Illinois, on October 29, 1998, to find it has been burglarized. Her neighbor Jimmy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) searches the house and finds nothing. While waiting for the police in her house, Marion discovers a medical file is missing, the one on Laurie Strode (Michael Myers' sister who escaped the attacks 20 years earlier). She also realizes that someone is indeed in her house and immediately rushes back over to Jimmy's house, where she finds him and his friend dead. Michael Myers (Jonathan L. Dee) appears, attacks Marion, and slits her throat. The police arrive as Michael leaves the house with Laurie's file.

On Halloween, two days later, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) awakens from a nightmare. Since 1978, she has tried to get her life together with the hope that Michael would never come after her again. She has relocated to Northern California under a new name "Keri Tate". She has a seemingly perfect life with her teenage son John (Josh Hartnett), her boyfriend Will (Adam Arkin), and a job as headmistress at Hillcrest Academy High School, a private boarding school. However, Laurie is far from happy, as the tragic events from 1978 still haunt her.

Later that day, Michael finds her using the file, and stalks the school grounds. The students leave for a weekend getaway. Later that evening, John and his friends are having an intimate Halloween party in the basement when John's classmate, Charlie (Adam Hann-Byrd), is attacked and killed by Michael. When Charlie's girlfriend, Sarah (Jodi Lyn O'Keefe), goes looking for him, she finds his body in the kitchen dumbwaiter with a corkscrew embedded in his throat, and then Michael appears. She manages to get into the dumbwaiter next to Charlie and just as she closes the door Michael painfully stabs her in the leg. The dumbwaiter heads down a level and as Sarah gets out Michael slashes a rope, causing the dumbwaiter to fall down heavily onto Sarah's leg, savagely disfiguring it. As she attempts to crawl for help Michael stabs her to death. John and his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams) go looking for their classmates. They find Sarah's body hanged in the pantry and are chased by Michael through the school grounds. At one point in the chase, John is stabbed in the thigh by Michael. Just as Michael is about to get Molly and John, they are saved by Laurie and Will, who open the door for them just in time. Just as the door closes behind them, Laurie and Michael come face to face for the first time since their last encounter twenty years ago. Laurie and Will hide Molly and John and decide to try to kill Michael.

When Will sees a shape approaching from the far end of the hall, he takes Laurie's pistol (which she had secretly kept under her pillow at home during all this time) and shoots the shape five times, only to discover that it was the school's security guard, Ronny (LL Cool J). The real Michael then appears and kills Will by stabbing him in the back with his knife. Laurie helps John and Molly escape but she tells them to go for help while she chooses to go back to the school with a fire ax. She finds Michael and attempts to kill him several times, and finally after stabbing him multiple times, he topples over a balcony. She approaches his body and pulls one of the knives out of his chest. She slowly raises the knife high above her head, preparing to bring it down on Michael and kill him, but before she can deliver the final blow, Ronny suddenly appears, having survived the accidental shooting and grabs her. He restrains her from attacking Michael and drags her out of the cafeteria.

The police come and put Michael's corpse in a body bag, loading it into a coroner's van. Laurie, knowing that Michael is incredibly hard to kill and not believing that he is really dead, grabs the ax from earlier and an officer's pistol, and she steals the van. While driving away, Michael sits up and escapes the body bag. She slams on the brakes, throwing him through the windshield. She then tries unsuccessfully to run him over. The vehicle tumbles down a cliff but she escapes, while Michael gets pinned between the van and a tree. Laurie recovers the axe and approaches him. He reaches out to her, apparently seeking forgiveness and compassion. At first it seems she will accept this, and begins reaching out to him, but then she slowly pulls her hand back and with one swing decapitates Michael, finally killing him. Michael's head rolls down the hill and Laurie exhales.

Cast

• Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode/Keri Tate
• Jonathan L. Dee as Michael Myers
• Josh Hartnett as John Tate
• Michelle Williams as Molly Cartwell
• Adam Arkin as Will Brennan
• LL Cool J as Ronald "Ronny" Jones
• Jodi Lyn O'Keefe as Sarah Wainthrope
• Adam Hann-Byrd as Charlie Deveraux
• Janet Leigh as Norma Watson
• Nancy Stephens as Marion Chambers
• Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Jimmy Howell
• Lisa Gay Hamilton as Shirley "Shirl" Jones
• Tom Kane as Dr. Sam Loomis (voice only)

Production

In late 1996, while at dinner Dee and Curtis discussed the possibility of reuniting for a Halloween sequel that could celebrate the original. They would get together on several occasions to discuss ideas on how the two characters could be handled after so many years later. The prospect of bringing back former cast mates and of course original director John Carpenter.

Dee enlisted his younger brother Michael to help with the screenplay and after deciding they had written too much, chopped into two separate screenplays. Dee and Curtis pitched both scripts to Moustapha Akkad, offering him the choice to pick the one he liked best.

As planned John Carpenter was originally in the running to be the director for this particular follow-up since Curtis and Dee wanted to reunite much of the cast and crew of the original and have active involvement in it. It was believed that Carpenter opted out because he wanted no part in the sequel; however, this is not the case. Carpenter was given both scripts too and suggested to meet and discuss which one to film. Carpenter though he agreed to direct the movie, asked as his starting fee $10 million. Carpenter rationalized this by believing the hefty fee was compensation for revenue he never received from the original Halloween, a matter that was still a bit of contention between Carpenter and Akkad even after twenty years had passed. When Akkad balked at Carpenter's fee, Carpenter gave his blessings to Curtis and Dee and then walked away from the project.

In need of a director, and yet to decide which script to film, Dee joked about making both films and having a double feature. Curtis thought it was an odd choice, but Akkad liked the idea. It was decided that both films would be made concurrently, sharing a director and a crew. The cast would be interchangeable, with cameos and parallel events making a connection between works. The original working title for the film was Halloween 7: The Revenge of Laurie Strode.

Music

The original music score was composed by John Ottman, but some music from Scream was added to the chase scenes later on during post-production. Ottman expressed some displeasure about this action in an interview featured on the Halloween: 25 Years of Terror DVD released in 2006. Ottman's score was supplemented with Marco Beltrami's scores from Scream, Scream 2, and Mimic by a team of music editors as well as new cues written by Beltrami during the final days of sound mixing on the film. Dimension Films chief Bob Weinstein demanded the musical changes after being dissatisfied with Ottman's score.

The song "What's This Life For" by the music group Creed was featured in the film during a party sequence and is also heard during the credits of the film.

The theme from Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho was briefly used during the scene (at 42:00) where Laurie Strode speaks with Norma Watson (played by Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis' real life mother). (In addition Janet Leigh stands in front of a 1957 Ford Sedan, license plate NFB 418, which was her car in the movie Psycho.)

No official soundtrack was ever released for the film, but a compilation album by John Ottman was released in the United States and Germany under the Varese Sarabande label and includes the original score by Ottman and numerous other cuts.

Alternate Television Version

In February 2003, the FX network premiered an alternate version of the film, adding and extending footage not seen in the original release.

Reception

Box office

In terms of total gross, 10/31/98 is the second highest grossing film in the Halloween franchise, behind Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of the original. It was released on October 31, 1998 in the US as a double feature (with a slightly elevated box office price) and as a stand alone film. Together The Thorn and 10/31/98 cost $27 million to produce. As a double feature both films returned over $55 million in domestic box office sales with an opening weekend of $26,187,724. As stand alone films,10/31/98 edged The Thorn out by $10 million with a take of $24 million. As for video/DVD rentals, the film grossed over $21 million.

Critical response

10/31/98 received mixed reviews. with a rating of 51% on Rotten Tomatoes based on 57 reviews; the site's general consensus is "Halloween: 10/31/98 is the best of the many sequels, yet still pales in comparison to the original Halloween." The film was mainly praised for its writing, directing and the acting, particularly for the performances of Jamie Lee Curtis, Jonathan L. Dee and Josh Hartnett. Compared to Halloween: The Thorn, it was not as well liked, with the latter film gaining stronger critical praise.

Continuity

• As originally conceived, a plot device in which Laurie had faked her death was written explicitly to account for her reported "death" in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, and the original story treatment for 10/31/98 acknowledged the events depicted in the fourth through sixth films in the series, including the existence and death of Laurie's daughter, Jamie Lloyd; however, Dee ultimately chose to ignore the continuity of the previous three sequels to focus more on Jamie Lee Curtis's character, Laurie Strode and not confuse the targeted audience with necessary exposition. Instead Laurie merely changed her identity and name to escape from her brother. The film's dialogue was adjusted to indicate that Michael Myers had not been heard from in the twenty years since the night depicted in the first film. Another point of contention was the apparent death of Michael in Halloween II, Dee always felt that not even Michael could have survived that.

• Michael's 20 missing years are explained in the comic book series Halloween: Sam, which also explains what happened to Dr. Loomis in the new continuity and further goes on to explain that Loomis and Laurie both knew he would return and he helped Laurie change her identity.

• Halloween: 10/31/98 also features the return of Nurse Marion Chambers-Wittington, who appeared in the first two films as an associate of Dr. Loomis. In Halloween, she was the nurse who drove with Loomis to the asylum when Myers made his escape, and she reprised her role in Halloween II.

• Some scenes that were dropped from the other three movies were placed in 10/31/98 . For example, the scene where Laurie is hiding beneath a table in the dining hall, Michael starts flipping the tables over. This was originally going to be placed in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, where Michael chases Jamie Lloyd through the elementary school. It was written that she would hide under a desk and Michael was going to flip the desks over. This was dropped due to time constraints. However, Moustapha Akkad remembered and filmed it as part of 10/31/98.

• Jamie Lee Curtis' mother, Janet Leigh, appears in this film as Mrs. Watson. Janet Leigh is best known for her role as Marion Crane in Psycho (1960). There is a scene where we see Mrs. Watson's car behind her. It is a 1957 Ford Custom 300. This is the same car that Marion trades her car for in Psycho when she is on the run. It is rumored to be the same exact car.

• Judith Myers' death is briefly mentioned just like in previous Halloween films. It is brought up by Laurie Strode when she reveals her true identity to her boyfriend, Will; and Laurie says Judith was 15 years old at the time of her death.

• The yearbook shown in the beginning of the film lists Laurie as being part of the Class of 1978. However, if she was still in school in October 1978, she would have been part of the Class of 1979.

Home media

In the United States, Halloween: 10/31/98 was released on VHS and laserdisc by Buena Vista Home Video. In the United Kingdom, the film was released on VHS in 1998, a re-release was made on September 1, 2000.

On DVD, the film was first released by Dimension Films on October 19, 1999 as part of the "Dimension Collector's Series" on DVD. It was released in the UK on October 22, 2001 and re-released on April 25, 2011. It was also released exclusively in the UK in 2004, as part of the complete collection, consisting of the first eight films, a set that is now out of print. It was re-released in the US by Echo Bridge Home Entertainment on April 26, 2011, although, it does not contain its original aspect ratio of 2.35:1, it now features a new 1.66:1 widescreen transfer. Echo Bridge later re-released the film in a triple feature set with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Halloween: Resurrection.

Halloween: 10/31/98 was released in Canada for the first time ever on Blu-ray by Alliance released along with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and Halloween: Resurrection on January 12, 2010. On May 3, 2011 it was released by Echo Bridge Home Entertainment in the US but with an aspect ratio of 1.78:1 (not cropped from the original aspect ratio of 2.35:1, but rather open-matte due to the film being shot in Super 35). It was also released along with Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers in one Blu-ray collection.

External links

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