Review: Sweet relief. ‘Halloween Ends.’ For now.
It was early in my tenure working on ‘The Conjuring.’ We were in the editing phase, doing sound design, set design, and the like, which had to be shot on a low budget. One of us had been writing about these kinds of things since he was a kid, and I knew that one of the reasons he was the best kind of writer was that he could keep us on track. But I was also concerned that the movie would be so derivative that we’d be stuck with a movie that, in so far as the director was concerned, would never get released.
We went to Warner Bros. to talk to them, and they said, “Oh yeah, you guys are not only a great crew, but you’re great writers, so yeah, that’s what we’re looking at.”
I thought, “Well, you may be right. I think we could do this.” Then they said, “No, we’re going to do a traditional theatrical release.” But at that point, I still hadn’t read the script. I think I had to look it up from Wikipedia. I thought, “So we can read it and maybe we’ll know what we’re going to do.” I thought, “Maybe it’ll be like the ‘Hulk’ thing, where they read the script and decide what they want to do.”
It was pretty apparent to me that it would be a bad movie. “Halloween,” I thought, is a horrible movie. The script is just the same as every other horror movie that has ever been made. There’s no originality. That’s what I meant when I said that the “Hulk” thing was the worst thing in the history of movies. If you go back to the ‘Matrix’ movies, things like that. You know what I’m talking about.
After we read the script, we went down to the office where people who knew us were sitting, because that’s how the movie is put together. It’s done under very specific conditions, and for me, that’s one of the best parts of working on a movie.