Halloween H20: 20 Years Later

On October 29, 1998, Marion Chambers Whittington, Dr. Loomis's old nurse, comes home in Langdon, Illinois, and finds that someone has broken in. She goes next door for help. Jimmy Howell, still wearing his hockey gear, checks her house and finds a messed-up office but nobody there. Marion then sees that her file on Laurie Strode is empty. She runs back next door and finds Jimmy dead with an ice skate in his face and his friend Tony Allegre dead with a knife in his back. Michael Myers corners her and cuts her throat just as the police pull up outside. The detectives who go through her house learn that Loomis, who has since died, spent the rest of his life tracking Michael.

Laurie Strode faked her death years ago. She now lives as Keri Tate, headmistress of Hillcrest Academy, a gated private school in Summer Glen, Northern California. She drinks too much, takes pills to keep the nightmares down, and sees Michael everywhere. She is secretly dating the school's guidance counselor, Will Brennan, and smothers her seventeen-year-old son John, who wants to go on the school's Halloween camping trip to Yosemite. She says no.

Most of the students leave for Yosemite. John stays behind with his girlfriend Molly Cartwell, his friend Charlie Deveraux and Charlie's girlfriend Sarah Wainthrope, and they plan a private party. On the way west, Michael steals a car from a mother and her daughter at a highway rest stop. At lunch Laurie opens up to Will about her fear of losing John. Her secretary Norma Watson and security guard Ronny Jones keep the campus running. Laurie finally tells Will who she really is and that Michael is her brother.

That night Michael gets onto the campus. Charlie goes to the kitchen to look for a corkscrew, and Michael kills him. Sarah comes looking for Charlie. Michael crushes her leg with the dumbwaiter, stabs her, and hangs her body from a light fixture. John and Molly find her, and Michael chases them and cuts John's leg. They get to Laurie, and for the first time in twenty years Laurie and Michael come face to face through the window of a door.

Laurie gets John and Molly out through the gate, then goes back in. She locks the gate with herself and Michael on the inside and grabs a fire axe. Will is creeping through the halls with a gun and shoots Ronny by mistake. Michael stabs Will to death. Laurie hunts Michael through the school. In the dining hall she stabs him again and again until he falls from the balcony onto a table below. He looks dead.

Ronny, who survived the gunshot, tells Laurie it is over, but she does not believe it. She takes the coroner's van with the body bag in the back. Michael sits up and comes through the partition. Laurie slams the brakes, sending him through the windshield, then drives the van off a cliff and pins him against a tree. She walks down, picks up the axe, and when he reaches for her she cuts off his head. Halloween: Resurrection later reveals the man she killed was a paramedic Michael had switched places with.

Story notes

• Twenty years after the 1978 murders, Laurie Strode has built a new life under another identity as the headmistress of a secluded California school.
• Michael finds her, forcing Laurie to stop running.

Release & Reception

The film opened in Los Angeles on July 27, 1998, and everywhere else in the US on August 5, 1998. It was the first Halloween film to come out in summer instead of fall.

It made $16.2 million its first weekend and $55,041,738 in the US, about 11.7 million tickets. It was the first Halloween film to make more than $50 million. Wikipedia puts the worldwide total around $75 million, with about $20 million from outside the US and about $3.5 million of that from Germany.

Reviews were mixed. Rotten Tomatoes has it at 54 percent from 69 reviews, and Metacritic gives it 52. CinemaScore audiences gave it a B-minus. Roger Ebert gave it two stars out of four. Bob Graham of the San Francisco Chronicle said Curtis gave as compelling a performance as any that summer. Lawrence Van Gelder of The New York Times said it was too predictable. Marc Savlov of The Austin Chronicle said Miner gave up halfway and fell back on standard stalk and slash.

Awards: Saturn Award nominations for Best Horror Film and Best Actress for Curtis; a Fangoria Chainsaw Award for Curtis; and four 1999 Blockbuster Entertainment Award nominations, for Curtis, Adam Arkin, LL Cool J and Josh Hartnett.

Press and marketing

• Theatrical key-art / poster campaign reference: Scream Factory direct-order poster — screen-connections.com.

Cast

Crew

Production

Jamie Lee Curtis got it started. For the twentieth anniversary she went to John Carpenter and Debra Hill, hoping Carpenter would direct and Hill would produce. Carpenter agreed to direct, but his fee was $10 million and he wanted a three-picture deal with Dimension. Dimension said no, and he dropped out. Steve Miner got the job. In 2018 Curtis said she regretted not telling everyone she would only do it if Debra Hill produced.

Earlier ideas included Daniel Farrands's treatment Michael Myers: Lord of the Dead, and Robert Zappia's Halloween 7: Two Faces of Evil, with Michael stalking an all-girls boarding school and a copycat killer. Zappia's script was first meant to go straight to video, but people liked it enough to make it a theatrical film built around Curtis.

Kevin Williamson, who had just written Scream, did a treatment. The working title was Halloween 7: The Revenge of Laurie Strode. His version had a student's book report that touched on the later sequels. That was dropped, and the film became a sequel to Halloween II only.

Curtis wanted Laurie to kill Michael for good, and so did Dimension. Moustapha Akkad would not let Michael die. Curtis almost left the project weeks before filming. Williamson came up with the fix: Michael would swap clothes with a paramedic, so the man Laurie kills is not really him.

Josh Hartnett made his film debut here. He signed on after he heard Curtis was in. Michelle Williams took her part without having seen the earlier films. P.J. Soles and other original cast members were asked about cameos and said no. Janet Leigh came back to the movies for the first time in eighteen years, since The Fog. It was her third film with her daughter. Curtis tried to get Mike Myers to do a cameo, and he said no. Chris Durand, who played Michael, also did stunt work as the killer in Scream 2.

Filming ran from February 18 to April 20, 1998. First assistant director Mark Cotone came up with the shot of Michael lowering himself down behind Laurie. The bit where Laurie asks for more wine while her glass is still full was made up on set to show how messed up she is. Curtis's stunt double broke her foot during the gate escape.

The mask caused trouble. The studio was unhappy with the first mask, so weeks into filming a new one from Stan Winston was brought in and a lot of scenes were reshot. A mask from The Curse of Michael Myers shows up in the scenes at Marion's house, and Miner did not want to use it. In the shot where Charlie bumps into Michael, the mask was touched up digitally.

Bob Weinstein was not happy with John Ottman's score. Much of it was replaced with Marco Beltrami's music from Scream.

The official archive credits Jamie Lee Curtis with helping originate the twentieth-anniversary return concept.

The production used several Michael Myers masks during filming, which contributes to visible mask changes across shots.

Kevin Williamson supplied an early seven-page treatment for the project.

The working title was Halloween: The Revenge of Laurie Strode before H20 became the title.

Principal photography began February 18, 1998, and wrapped April 20, according to the official production archive.

The first shooting day covered the rest-stop sequence; Jamie Lee Curtis began filming on the second day.

Charles S. Dutton was cast as a detective whose role disappeared during rewrites.

Jamie Lee Curtis advocated filming in the widescreen 2.35:1 Panavision format.

The official trivia archive credits first assistant director Mark Cotone with the idea of Michael lowering himself behind Laurie.

Tom Kane supplied the Loomis voice heard over the opening montage.

Laurie’s request for more wine while her glass remained full was devised during filming to reveal her continuing distress.

Filming locations

• Canfield-Moreno Estate, Silver Lake, Los Angeles: Hillcrest Academy
• La Puente, California: The town of Summer Glen
• Melrose Hill, Los Angeles: The opening in Langdon, Illinois
• Chatsworth, Los Angeles: More school and road scenes
• Canoga Park, Los Angeles: More exterior scenes
• Malibu, California: Ronny's guard house, built there instead of at the school location
• The two principal location bases were La Puente, California, standing in for Summer Glen, and the hilltop Canfield-Moreno Estate in Silver Lake, which became the private-school campus at the center of the film.

Effects and makeup

Several Michael masks show up in the finished film. The studio did not like the first one, so a Stan Winston mask replaced it weeks into the shoot and many scenes were redone. A mask from The Curse of Michael Myers is used in the opening at Marion's house.

When Charlie bumps into Michael, the mask was fixed up digitally.

Gags include the ice skate in Jimmy's face, Sarah's leg in the dumbwaiter, and the beheading at the end.

The Shape's look went through multiple practical-mask iterations during production. After weeks of photography with an earlier design, the filmmakers commissioned a new Stan Winston-created mask and reshot many masked shots during the final week to bring Michael closer to the original-film silhouette.

Props and costumes

Michael Myers masks: Propstore has sold a Chris Durand screen mask and a stunt mask from the film.

Jimmy's hockey mask is a nod to Steve Miner's Friday the 13th films.

Norma stands next to the same model car Janet Leigh drove in Psycho, and the music nods to Bernard Herrmann's Psycho score.

Laurie's fire axe for the finale.

A Hellraiser Cenobite statue, and Scream 2 playing on a TV, are among the horror nods on set.

H20 is unusually complicated for prop continuity because several Myers masks appear in the finished film: a Halloween 6-derived mask in the opening material, an intermediate KNB design, and the later Stan Winston version used for extensive reshoots.

The guard house was a purpose-built piece placed on a deserted Malibu road rather than part of the school location, making it a production construction rather than an existing campus feature.

Production artifacts

Scripts and documents

The killers

Deaths

John Ottman wrote the original score. Bob Weinstein did not like it, and much of it was replaced.

Music by Marco Beltrami from Scream was added in its place. Beltrami is not credited.

"What's This Life For" by Creed is in the film. The music video was on the 1999 DVD.

"Mr. Sandman" plays over the opening.

Varèse Sarabande later put out Ottman's music as the album Portrait of Terror in 1998.

Home Media

• VHS and LaserDisc from Buena Vista Home Video. UK VHS on December 15, 1998.
• October 19, 1999: DVD in the Dimension Collector's Series, with the Unmasking the Horror documentary and the Creed music video.
• UK DVD on October 22, 2001, reissued April 25, 2011.
• January 12, 2010: Canadian Blu-ray from Alliance.
• April 26, 2011: Echo Bridge DVD. May 3, 2011: Echo Bridge Blu-ray with an open-matte 16:9 picture, which reviewers tore apart.
• September 23, 2014: Scream Factory Blu-ray in Halloween: The Complete Collection, back in the original 2.35:1 shape with 5.1 DTS-HD Master Audio.
• October 4, 2022: The Halloween 4K Collection (1995-2002) from Scream Factory, with 4K and Blu-ray discs.
• September 25, 2023: 4K Ultra HD steelbook from Paramount.

Store exclusives

• Portrait of Terror score album, Varèse Sarabande, 1998, on CD.
• Halloween H20 Michael Myers mask and H20 Version 2 mask, Trick or Treat Studios, officially licensed.
• Ultimate Michael Myers 7-inch figure from NECA, with a fire axe, kitchen knives and an ice skate among the accessories.
• Trick or Treat Studios Halloween H20: Michael Myers Mask, cataloged for Halloween H20.

Replica props and masks

The catalog

Trailers & clips

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) — Official clip — Jimmy!

Miramax

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Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) — Official clip — On Guard

Miramax

Gallery

Posters & Key Art

Film Stills

Behind the Scenes

Props

Costumes