Treats & Tricks, Part 6 by Marc Shapiro -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- It's very ease for me to be afraid," says veteran actress Kim Darby as she huddles over a portable heater, her hands wrapped around a Styrofoam cup of coffee. It's midday inside the Myers house. The temperature is at zero and falling. Darby is about to die on the set of Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers (formerly Halloween 6, which we're still calling it for simplicity's sake). And, all things being equal, the actress feels the weather could not be better. "It's so cold," she says from beneath a heavy coat in whispers that turn the air foggy. "But I guess that and the emptiness of the house add to the element of fear we're trying to get across." "OK, Kim! yells a voice from the other side of the classic old-style home. "We're ready for you." Darby makes her way across the equitment crammed floor to a living room area filled with all manner of antiques and aging furniture. She peels off the jacket she's been wearing to reveal a sensible housewife's dress. Director Joe Chapelle, fresh off good notices for his indie feature Thieves Quartet, greets the actress and positions her in an alcove between the living room and kitchen. "Now the phone is going to ring," he instructs. "You'll pick it up. The voice on the other end will say, 'He's in the house.' You'll get frightened. You back away, turn around and see..." Off in the corner of the living room, George Wilbur is slipping into the Michael Myers mask. His transformation is immediate, and the assembled cast and crew's conversations drop. He moves to a corner of a room where he will be directly in Darby's sightline. "All right," calls the director. "Let's try it." Darby moves into position and, as the camera rolls, a sense of fear and foreboding floods across her face. She jumps slightly as the telephone rings. Tentatively, she picks up the receiver. She hears the dreaded words. Fear builds into a wash of total terror. She backs away from the phone, turns and sees the death's head of Michael Myers staring at her. Her face reflects sheer horror. "And we cut!" yells Chapelle. "That was great!" He turns to the cameraman and asks, "Do you think we can get a little sharper angle when she turns and sees Michael?" The director gets an affirmative. "OK, let's try one more time." Halloween movies aren't usally shot in October. Michael's adventures are generally warm-weather projects, knocked out in teh friendlier climes of June or July. But, owing to script problems and legal wranglings, the sixth Halloween has returned to Salt Lake City (the home of the previous two films) in the dead of winter. The streets run alternately slick and icy and muddy and slushy. Snow is piled high on usually well-kept lawns. Houses perfectly preserved from a bygone age take on a truly haunting quality as the sun peeks out for rare appearences amid the seemingly constant gloom and numbing cold. Nonetheless, there's plenty of enthusiastic talk on this Halloween's set: talk of the film resurrecting the franchise six years after Halloween 5 all but buried it, and that shock jock Howard Stern was offered a part in the film but turned it down. There are the ongoing pronouncements that Quentin Tarantino and Sam Raimi cohort Scott Spiegel were once attached to the project but bailed. And, finally, there's a not too subtle buzz about star Donald Plesence's recent health problems and, despite his reported spryness during his scenes, speculation that this might be his last dance with Michael. "Replace Loomis?" sighs actor Mitchell Ryan, who plays one of the new film's key charactors. "I don't know." "Ideally, everyone will come back," says Chapelle. "But at this point, I would say that age is definitely a question." Back at the production office, producer Paul Freeman denies that Tarantino and Spiegel were ever in the picture, but enthusiastically reports, "We are reinventing the franchise." He also sheds light on the movie's tangled journey to production. "The official start date for Halloween 6 was November '93," he reveals. "But at that point, there was no script or storyline and we had to get busy. We had an initial draft, but we threw it out because it didn't meet all the requirements to make a Halloween 6 that was in the best interest of the franchise." The production team finally found the solution to their problem in the form of a missive from 25-year-old Halloween buff Daniel Farrands, and the film rolled on Halloween 1994. However, well into the projected 30-day shoot, nobody is quite certain how this Halloween will end. "I'm not even sure," laughs Farrands during a coffee break in a meal tent adjacent to the Myers house. "I've written five drafts of the script and about 10 revisions on the ending. So your guess is as good as mine at this point." Jokingly describing himself as "the definitive Halloween fan," the young screenwriter got in on the action four years ago when he met Halloween 5 producer Ramsey Thomas. "Ramsey introduced me to Akkad, who was looking for writers to come up with ideas for Halloween 6 - which, at the time, they were planning to shoot right after Halloween 5," he recalls. "I kept bombarding Moustapha with story ideas during the time there was the legal rights battle with John Carpenter and Debra Hill. Finally, when that was settled, I came up with a storyline they liked." The new sequel, which also stars Marianna Hagen, Mariah O'Brien, Paul Stephen Rudd, Keith Bogart, Devin Gardner, Bradford English, Leo Geter and Susan Swift, appears on the surface to be a retro Halloween, mixing supernatural elements with the first film's Tommy Doyle (now a young man obsessed with Michael), 4 and 5's Jamie Llyod and a new take on Michael that expands on Carpenter's backstory. "We've even got a Jamie Lee Curtis cameo," laughs Farrands in reference to a photo of the actress that appears over the opening credits. "Basically, this Halloween is a summation of everything that has come before and a next step forward. Tha man in black is more fully devolped and has a real storyline. Michael is once again seen less but, because it's always in conjunction with the dark corners and in scenes that build on suspense, he's much more terrifying. Being the quentessential Halloween fan, I felt that I had to write this from the point of view of what fans of the series would like to see." What they'll be viewing is a story that begins with Jamie (now a young women played by J.C. Brandy) giving birth to Michael Myers' child under the eyes of a group of mysterious cultists. Fleeing with her baby, Jamie is pursued by both Michael and the mysterious man in black, and the chase ends up, naturally, in Haddonfield, where a half-decade moratorium on Halloween celebrations has just ended. There, a new family has moved into the Myers house, and Tommy Doyle (Rudd), Curtis' young charge from the original now grown up, has taken up residence across the street, feeding an obession with Michael. As the body count rises, Dr. Sam Loomis (Pleasence) arrives and attempts to help Tommy put an end to the horror once and for all. Following the mess of Halloween 5, Farrands is very much in the hot seat. "A part 6 of anything is rough, but coming six years after a very bad part 5, I was well aware that I had to come up with something really good to save the series." Director Chappelle is on the same rescue mission as his young scripter. And when he walked onto the set for the first day of filming, he was feeling frazzled, and with good reason. With only a week's time before the movie's official green light and the first day of filming, Chappelle spent five solid days checking locations, mentally plotting out shots and doing all the manic things required when one only has a week of prep time. Adding further angst was the on-set presence of bean counters from Miramax and their partners in distribution at Disney. Chappelle knew why they were there: Budget problems with Miramax's other '95 horror entry, Hellraiser: Bloodline, has made the bossman nervous. So nervous, in fact, that is widely reported that the company slashed a cool million off the Halloween budget, and that some suits were going to be hanging around to make sure their money was well spent. "I can understand their concern," Chappelle recalls during a conversation around yet another portable heater on the back porch of the Myers house. "But they only stayed a week and then left, so I guess they were happy with they saw." A Chicago native, Chappelle made the leap to Halloween on a rep built on the little-seen $30,000 wonder Thieves Quartet. And he is confident that coming in for the sixth entry of a series that has had its ups and downs does not constitute a trial by fire. "Initially, I was a little concerened, but then I thought about it. The good thing is that expectations for this movie are not going to be very high. People are going to expect the worst. And after 5, it can only get better. I think we're going to surprise a lot of people, because they aren't going to expect anything more than what the title suggests." Chappelle plans to surprise audiences through a general but not complete lack of blood and guts and a return to the strengths of Halloween films gone by. "I'm trying to build suspense until the actual event that everybody knows is going to happen does happen," he says. "I'm attemptingto make the house and all the spaces in this film charactors unto themselves - all the time going on the time-honored Halloween premise that we're dealing with bogeyman, the scary guy who can jump out at any moment." "The trick is to make every shot interesting," he continues, "and to add textures and subtexts as much as possible. So when, hopefully, people go back and see the film a second and third time, they'll be thinking, 'I didn't see that' or 'I missed that.'" But the job hasn't been easy, particularly due to the wintry weather. An outdoor night sequence featuring a lightly attired women had to be bounced when the actress started turning blue. Unexpected snowfall forced the company to juggle scheduled outdoor scenes with quickly assembled indoor substitutes without missing a beat. But through the pitfalls, Chappelle continues to put a positive spin on this filmmaking adventure. "My feeling is that even if a movie has a part 25 after it, you can still do it right," he asserts. "Sure, you can phone a project in. But you can also go in with the attitude that you're going to make it great. Just because there's a number after it doesn't mean it can't be a great movie." It is another typically frigid night as the latest Halloween takes to a residential city street to filma de rigueur setpiece: a young women fleeing in terror with Michael in hot pursuit. Actress Hagen is walking gingerly around the icy street, testing her footing as cameras are set in place. Returning from Halloween 4, Wilbur appears in his mechanic's uniform and a mask that now more closely resembles his features than those of William Shatner (as the first one did). The actor makes small talk with the crew before taking his mark. At Chappelle's cue, Hagen, playing spunky single mom Kara Strode, half runs, half limps across camera range, looking fearfully back as Wilbur follows in slow, steady pursuit. The scene's long shots and close-ups of Hagen come off without a hitch, and the cameras turn to record Wilbur's part in the chase. A couple of takes go smoothly, but on the next, after a good start, he hits a patch of ice in midstep and pitches forward. Somebody yells, "That's the one will use," and the company dissolves into laughter. "Michael Myers does not run," chuckles Wilbur a few days later, "but in that case I probably would have gotten better traction if I had." Every the mild-mannered opposite of the monster he's playing, the actor has largely gotten over the disappointment of not portraying Michael in Halloween 5 (although he did appear briefly in that film courtesy of some leftover footage from 4), but it still smarts a little. "I wanted to do 5, but they chose not to have me and went a different route. I was disappointed. To this day, I haven't seen the film because I wasn't in it." Wilbur, however, licked his wounds when he was asked to come back for part 6. He smiles sheepishly when asked if he's been requested to perform Michael any differently this time. "Not really," he says. "I go get to be a father in this one, but that's about it. And no, I don't cry. I mean, what could you do differently with Michael? There's really not a whole lot you can do without taking him out of charactor. It's all the same stuff. I tilt my head every once in a while and then I kill people with an ax, a knife or a crowbar." "But being consistent over all these films is what has made Michael Myers the great monster that he is," Wilbur points out. "And, unfortunately, to a large extent he's what's out there now in the real world. I mean, how many Freddy's and Jason's do we see on the evening news? The real monsters are all kind of like Michael." Wilbur is aware that a Halloween 7 is already on the drawing board, and would gladly continue to play Michael Myers until the cows come home. "Money is the name of the game," he says, "and if this one is a success, there's no reason why they won't continue to make them. With any luck at all, I'll be playing Michael until my grandchildren are old enough to take my place." In this outing, the violence isn't all Michael's responsibility, though; what would a modern horror film be without a dysfunctional family populated by abusive adults? And as the cameras roll on a cramped kitchen space, there's a real blowup in progress at the breakfast table as Kara's father, John, yells at her about having a child out of wedlock and attempting to get an education while the wolf is at the family's door. The patriach, played by John Goodman lookalike English, is in smoldering high heat as the verbal barrage has the family mentally running for cover. After the fireworks, Hagen, with no small sense of humor, explains how she landed this latest Halloween heroine. "I got this part the old-fashioned way: I auditioned for it," she says. "Then I rented Halloween I, II and 5 so I could figure out what the other horror bimbos were doing and then copy them. Just kidding!" The actress, who has a string of regional theatre and sitcom credits behind her, gets semo-serious as she explains how her current gig is not your typical scare fare. "They were interested in getting real actors for this movie and in the women not being the typical horror bimbos who you're happy to see get murdered," she explains. "I'm basically playing a Jamie Lee Curtis prototype. My charactor is very cerebral. Kara has a lot of head energy." And the style of acting, she says, is also off the beaten horror track. "We're playing this like Ordinary People," she claims. "The approach is totally realistic. It just happens to be a reality in which people are being murdered with big butcher knives." For his part, veteran actor Ryan liked his role so much that he was not only willing to work under the constraints of the film's minuscule budget but also, despit being offered the part with no strings attached, volunteer to come in and audition alongside much younger, less experienced actors. "It was a great part; it was too good to turn down," says Ryan over a late-night dinner. "I'm playing two distinct charactors, one of them this mysterious stranger in a black outfit and cape. For a good part of this film, nobody sees anything of him but this marvelous shape who in manipulating Michael and those around him." The actor, making his first horror film in a long career that includes Lethal Weapon and, just prior to Halloween 6, a small role in Judge Dredd, describes the sequel as being "more of a Gothic mystery. I spend a lot of time in tunnels and dungeons and inside dark old houses." Like others on the shoot, Ryan has heard the buzz that his charactor is being groomed as a recurring one will become a continuing presence in the series. "I've heard that talk and, at this point, I just don't know," the actor reports. "I can tell you that I survive this film and they've already talked to me about bringing me back on the next one. That would be fine. But the next one probably won't be made for another couple of years. Who knows? I could be dead by then," he chuckles. Pleasence himself may have returned to the same acting well several times to portray Dr. Loomis, but that's not especially evident when the thespian is at work on Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers. The scenes in which Loomis is brought out of self-imposed exile to once again battle Michael Myers indicate that Pleasence has not lost the charactor or his commitment to bringing him to life. The frustration, the fear and, most importantly, the determination to finally bring the Shape's reign of terror to an end is there in spades. Owing to the cold and recent health problems, Pleasence stayed pretty much to himself when not on the set. In a brief conversation as the production neared its end, the late actor admitted that he thought he'd seen the last of Dr. Loomis years ago. "We did 5 and, after hearing nothing for years, I felt that was that and I would never play Loomis again," he said. "And, in a sense, I was relieved, because I felt 5 had taked a totally absurd turn and that it had lost a lot of what the previous Halloween movies had fought hard to create, which was a real sense of terror and suspense. But then I was notified about six months ago that they were doing another one, and I got excited about it. The script is good. The director is quite good. So here I am again." According to Pleasence, the added supernatural elements served to turn his charactor in a more logical, focused direction. "After a time I was beginning to feel that Loomis had become Chicken Little, running around prophesying this dooem that nobody would believe until it was too late," he observed. "But, with the addition of the psychic elements, he has a real demon to embrace." The actor took a moment to look back wistfully at Halloweens past. "The first one still remains the best," he declared. "I thought II also had its share of fine moments. Part 4 seemed to make some steps back to getting things on track. But 5? It was just rubbish." As for his own role in the continuing series, Pleasence admitted surprise at the obsessed doctor's logevity. "When I started in the first Halloween, I had no idea that Loomis would become such a memorable charactor. I thought it would be a one-time thing and that would be that. I never figured that he would go on and on and on," he laughs softly. Pleasence, post-Halloween, was making plans to return to his first love - the theatre - in a production of King Lear, while still pursuing other film roles. In regards to future Halloweens, he reported that he had heard rumours that this might be the last of Loomis and that he might have trouble answering the bell for Halloween 7. He paused a moment, mulling over a response that questioned his future in the genre that made him a star. "Do Halloween 7?" he pondered. "Surely."