Halloween (1978 film)

"Everyone is entitled to one good scare"

"The opening shot was inspired by Touch of Evil. Orson Welles did a couple of one-take sequences, but the most astonishing is not the opening sequence which everybody remembers. In a motel room, in the middle of the movie, a man is broken by Orson Welles’ character. It’s almost a reel-long one-shot. It’s astonishing. I was inspired by the idea of that. So in the opening scene, we were coming up on the outside of the house, around and up the back steps, and as we passed through a room going into another room the crew would re-light it behind us. We were just flying on the edge, but that was the spectacle, the money shot. Plus we had a naked girl upstairs! You couldn’t ask for more than that. There are a couple of cuts in that first shot. The mask allowed us to do a cut, and there were botched takes — we didn’t make it up the stairs, there was a camera shadow, something would happen. But it was fun."

"The mask that Michael Myers wore was written as “the pale features of a human face” – that’s what the script said. However, we had no money to manufacture such a thing, so what did you do? There were two options – one was a clown mask, which was a better mask, but the Captain Kirk mask was altered, spray painted, eye holes cut, with the hair. I don’t know if he knows the story."

"I didn’t think there was any more story, and I didn’t want to do it again. All of my ideas were for the first Halloween – there shouldn’t have been any more! I’m flattered by the fact that people want to remake them, but they remake everything these days, so it doesn’t make me that special. But Michael Myers was an absence of character. And yet all the sequels are trying to explain that. That’s silliness – it just misses the whole point of the first movie, to me. He’s part person, part supernatural force. The sequels rooted around in motivation. I thought that was a mistake. However, I couldn’t stop them from making sequels. So my agents said, ‘Why don’t you become an executive producer and you can share the revenue?’ But I had to write the second movie, and every night I sat there and wrote with a six pack of beer trying to get through this thing. And I didn’t do a very good job, but that was it. I couldn’t do any more."

"Donald Pleasence - Dr. Sam Loomis"

"Jamie Lee Curtis - Laurie Strode"

"P. J. Soles - Lynda van der Klok"

"Charles Cyphers - Sheriff Leigh Brackett"

"John Michael Graham - Bob Simms"

"Kyle Richards - Lindsey Wallace"

"Nancy Stephens - Marion Chambers"

"Tony Moran - Michael Myers (age 21)"