The young woman at the ticket counter smiled politely as my mom handed over the money for the tickets. She didn’t ask questions— she didn’t ask to see an ID. No, she seemed perfectly content to trust that this sage guardian knew what she was doing when she purchased Halloween H20 (1998) tickets for the five fourteen-year-old boys that stood unassumingly beside her.
Hardly the slasher fan, my mom was not, in fact, that keen on letting us go to the movie in the first place, let alone being the one to actually acquire the ticket stubs. Still, after phoning several of the other moms, somehow, miraculously, it was decided that my friends and I would be allowed to go see our first R-rated theatrical feature and that she, my mother, would be the one to take us.
Maybe it was the fact that the name Halloween held with it a certain degree of respectability, even amongst non-horror minded folks. Maybe it was because that, compared to some of the other R-rated pictures at our disposal, this one seemed tamer somehow. Or maybe my mom was just into the idea of watching a Jamie Lee Curtis flick. Regardless of how or why, there we were grabbing handfuls of popcorn as we sat down to watch Halloween H20 on opening day.
Personally, my investment was fairly slight. I had never seen a Halloween franchise film before. I had only recently seen Scream (1996) for the first time and, if not for that, I doubt I would’ve been too interested in seeing Michael Myers do his thing in the first place. Scream was a lot of fun though and from the commercials I’d seen, H20 looked a heck of a lot like Scream.
Without knowledge of the genre, the 90s teen slasher cycle, or even the fact that Scream screenwriter Kevin Williamson had a hand in the story, I walked out of the screening liking the movie without fully loving it. Sure, it had some of the trappings of Scream, a handful of pretty teenagers being stalked by a vicious killer chief among them, but it was a fundamentally different movie that lacked the whodunnit hook that made Scream so enjoyable in my eyes.
The mythos wasn’t lost on me, but without knowledge of the franchise, its power was dimmed. Still, despite it being a less graphic movie with a comparatively low body count, it all built to a showdown that was undeniably effective, even given my complete lack of contextual understanding.
Laurie’s showdown with Michael felt like so much more than the conclusion to a 90-minute story. Sure, the fact that this had been building up for 20 years is right there in the title, but the pathos and urgency that Jaimie Lee Curtis brought to the role made that fact come alive in such a way that one didn’t require multiple movie’s worth of exposition to feel the weight of it.
Looking at an early draft of the script, it is clear that the ultimate battle between Laurie and her brother went through a great deal of change before landing onscreen. Originally designed to more closely involve her son, the scene started out to embody the unique genetic curse that goes along with being intrinsically tied to an inescapable evil. Steve Miner carried this idea to the screen with an intensity that mirrors the words on the page, tracking an evolution that focused in on Laurie and Michael specifically. Still, both the final version of the scene and its early conceptualization parallel one another as they share the burden of the weight of the last 20 years as it all hits Laurie Strode as she faces off against the Shape once and for all.
H20 is a showcase for Jamie Lee Curtis’ raw, emotional power onscreen and a testament to what she’s done with the Laurie Strode character. Her final interaction with the Shape, which seemed to be intended as the last word on the characters, carries with it all the gravitas and meaning one would expect. It bolsters and ultimately strengthens the narrative resolve of Michael Myers’ shark-like tendencies, crafting a source of evil that lives up to the mechanics that moniker suggests.
I may not have known at the time that I was sitting down to watch a movie that was a part of what would someday be my favorite horror franchise that summer morning, but I did know I had seen something different. Something that sparked my imagination and made me curious for more. And although she didn’t much care for the movie as a whole, I’m pretty sure I spotted my mom clapping along with the rest of the audience when Jaimie took one last swing at her incapacitated brother.
THE SCENE
Stealing a gun off of a police officer, Keri/Laurie hijacks the Coroner’s van that the Shape has been loaded into. She eyes the body bag and it starts to move as she looks away. She sees the bag twitching in the rearview mirror. The Shape emerges and she slams on the brakes. He flies through the windshield. She goads him to get up. He stands. She presses down on the gas and hits him, driving with his body stuck to the hood. The van topples down a hill and crashes against the Shape, pinning him to a tree. Keri/Laurie is thrown from the truck but able to stand, walking over to the now burning wreckage. The Shape clutches his head as though confused. Laurie addresses her brother by his name, “Michael.” He reaches for her. Her lip quivers and she reaches back in kind, their fingers about to touch as her emotion swells. She pulls away and in one swift action raises her axe and swings, decapitating him. Sirens sound in the background, getting louder as his head rolls away.
THE SCRIPT
Excerpt taken from the script ‘Halloween: The Revenge of Laurie Strode’ written by Robert Zappia (and later revised by Matt Greenberg with story by credit for Kevin Williamson).
THE SCREEN
NOTE: The script details what ends up being a combination of several separate scenes in the finished film. While some of what is written does appear onscreen before Laurie/Keri finds herself hijacking a Coroner’s van with the body of her maniacal brother inside, the general thrust and intention of the scene is far more present in the film’s unscripted conclusion as opposed to those scenes that more closely echo the text several minutes earlier in its runtime.
The climax of the film and the script share some commonalities but ultimately vary dramatically in execution. In the script, Keri (whom I will henceforth refer to as Laurie) grabs the axe and heads to the gymnasium to confront Michael, much like she does in the film. However, where in the film the sequence culminates in a cat and mouse chase and a somewhat anti-climactic knife bout, the script follows this sequence to The Shape’s demise and Laurie’s catharsis.
Still, much of what is on the page made its way into the addendum coda which so famously concludes Laurie and Michael’s storyline in the film. The screen dispatches of much of the distractions featured in the script (i.e. the involvement of peripheral characters and overt seasonal dressings) focusing in on crafting a far more dangerous feeling breadth of emotional intensity.
On the page, the final sequence begins with Laurie entering the gymnasium and acquiring her weapon:
FIRE AXE
hanging behind glass… she picks up a plastic skull, smashes the glass with it… grabs the AXE and continues inside…
CLICK!
The lights go out… the gym now eerily illuminated only by carved pumpkins lit around its perimeter.
The trappings of the Halloween season are as much a character in the written finale as Laurie or Michael, their glow setting the tone and reminding the viewer of the sort of mythos and untethered spirituality the series is rooted in. The choice to pull away from this level of seasonal influence is a confounding one, but perhaps a reason, along with its original out-of-season release date, why this particular entry tends to be more associated with the summer months, despite the story’s timeline.
In the film, this moment more closely lines up to what appears in the script as the ending. Laurie has already battled the Shape in the school and emerged victorious. The scene opens with Myers being zipped up in a body bag, which again is set to follow their big confrontation on the page. But instead of embracing her son and relishing in being Laurie Strode once more, Laurie stares at the body bag holding her brother, a knowing look on her face. The camera holds on Laurie in a medium shot as she makes her way through the red and blue lights cast by the parked police cars, picking up the axe which has been marked with an evidence tag and quickly gripping and removing a nearby officer’s weapon as she passes by.
The shot continues to follow her as she shouts at the Coroners’ to load her brother’s body into the van and back off. As she pulls away, her son John chases after her, watching helplessly as the van barrels into the night, conceivably carrying the last remnants of his mother’s sanity and life along with it.
This marks another stark contrast between the film and the script. On the page, John is heavily involved in the final battle, jumping out at the last second to intervene when his mother is almost immediately cornered:
The Shape pulls the knife from Keri’s arm, stands above her… he raises the knife high into the air, about to plunge it straight into Keri’s heart, when—
BANG! A BULLET BURROWS INTO THE SHAPE’S SHOULDER.
Spins him around, comes face-to-face with…
JOHN
John’s actions cause the Shape to fall into a pool that sits beneath the motorized gymnasium floor, the setting for several set-piece kills in the script, and the watery grave that serves as the focal point for this version of the climactic fight. In the film, John is largely absent in both Laurie’s initial fight with Michael as well as the final confrontation. Ultimately, onscreen the boy is treated as less intrinsically tied to the fate of his familial relations with Myers and disconnected from the responsibility those under its thumb feel toward putting a stop to it.
Laurie drives the van with a look of determination and knowing. Her fear has all but subsided, in its place the haunted fervor of a person facing the inevitability of what is sure to come next. She has become Dr. Loomis, the representative of righteousness, driven to near madness by the face of unstoppable evil. A series of close-ups follows her eyes and the body bag in the back, reflected in the image of the rearview mirror. It’s not a question of if he will rise, it’s a matter of when.
This replaces all semblance of the sort of explicit diatribes reflected in the script. As written, the scene was to open with Laurie’s impassioned cry of:
“Let’s end this right now. You want to kill me to fulfill your twisted obsession, then go ahead. I’m tired of playing hide-and-seek, brother. Come on, finish what you started, you miserable fuck!”
The film features no such outcry, no belabored taunt brimming with the repressed anger of one who has been waiting a lifetime to let it out. That is not to say that Laurie’s emotional aggression is absent, far from it, it’s laced within every seething glance, every confident strike, and every act of unwavering confidence. She’s released by standing firm, no words required.
Where the script then enters into a fairly brief fight between Laurie and Michael as he attempts to escape the pool, the film provides a similar, if not more action-oriented power struggle between the siblings by way of the Coroner’s van. Onscreen, Laurie finally eyes the Shape standing in the back, having risen from his body bag and making his way toward her. In a series of quick edits, Laurie slams on the breaks and Myers flies forward, crashing through the front window and landing hard on the concrete of the deserted road outside.
The road seems to act as the pool did in the script, a place that separates the Shape from Laurie while placing him at a disadvantage. In the script:
THE SHAPE
strives to climb out of the water as the gym floor continues to close…
Still, whereas in the screenplay Laurie quickly grabs a JAVELIN hanging on the wall and attacks, the film allows the confrontation to breathe. What appears as merely a few lines of set up before their final moments together as brother and sister in text, amounts to several minutes of climax on the screen. And it’s within that visualization that the characters and story as a whole reach the kind of cathartic conclusion the screenplay was attempting to achieve.
Onscreen, the Shape lies there in the beams of the headlights as Laurie watches expectantly. Close-ups of Laurie muttering “C’mon” and “Get up” are intermingled with a wide shot of Myers’ unmoving form. When he finally sits up, he does so mechanically, finally turning his head to Laurie and staring, otherwise motionless as before. The back and forth continues to foster a tension that goes beyond the typical cat-and-mouse interplay, tapping into the hereditary connective tissue that has bonded this abusive monster to Laurie’s self for the bulk of her life.
This rises to a boil when the Shape stands. Laurie’s look of malice and yearning is palpably manifested onscreen as her foot slams down on the gas pedal. Again, a series of quick edits depicts the van flying forward and colliding with the Shape. He’s thrown against the hood, propped up, and locking eyes with Laurie. No glass sits between them, only the open air, as Laurie casts a deranged, devilish smile. No words are required, only the demented glee etched into her face; she is set to end this terror once and for all.
What follows is a rollercoaster ride of quick shots of the van soaring off the edge of a cliff face, Laurie rolling around in the cabin, and the van rolling over and over as it topples downward. Laurie is thrown out into the tall grass and the van finally collides with a tree, pinning the Shape between the trunk and the van’s beat up grill. The chaos fades and the camera follows Laurie in a medium shot as she approaches her brother, picking up the axe once more which has been dislodged from the front seat of the van.
Here is where the moment catches up to the script, offering a variation of what was proposed on the page. As written, just before Laurie strikes the final blow with the javelin:
CLOSE ON: THE SHAPE
Reaches out for her… then, a sound altogether unnatural —
THE SHAPE
(a desperate plea)
Laurie…
Time stands still — TOTAL SILENCE.
In the script, The Shape speaks for what would have been the first time in the franchise, edging a semblance of humanity into an otherwise devoid characterization. The line suggests that a human being may well have been buried underneath the weight of the Shape’s evil, finally emerging in an effort to retrieve some semblance of redemption or, perhaps, experience a modicum of familial connection.
In response to this, Laurie unleashes all that she has buried within herself:
ON KERI: All the love and loss of the past twenty years plays all over her face, then —
KERI
Michael…
(then)
Go to hell!
KERI
plunges the javelin through his body with all her might, pierces his heart… the javelin juts out his back.
Her rejection reflects the agency she has gained throughout the film, finally allowing herself to experience and process the immense grief that has plagued her for so many years. Onscreen, the Shape does not betray his series-long silence, but that does not mean the visualization is robbed of the thematics presented here.
Laurie speaks first, “Michael,” saying his name gently, almost more to herself than to him. From here, instead of words, they exchange looks and, very nearly, touch. Michael reaches out to her, grasping at her hand, almost as a child would reach for his mother. Fighting back tears, Laurie reaches back, a deep, forlorn sadness lining her face— this is her brother, a boy trapped inside a monster that he was never able to escape.
The moment ends and Michael’s eyes continue to cling to Laurie’s. There’s a searching there, a longing that matches his sister’s, a sense that he too simply wants this all to end.
There is no “Go to hell!”, rather a quiet moment where Laurie drops her hand and huffs out a dark breath of relief. Then, without hesitation, she swings the axe hard, decapitating Michael Myers and sending his head rolling across the grass.
In the script:
THE SHAPE
arches his back in pain, grabs the metal rod… tries desperately to remove it, sinks into the water…
And, after the police storm the gym, Laurie comments, “Guess he was stoppable, after all” followed by the Action Description: THE TERROR IS GONE.
The film does away with the less personal pool beneath the gym floor scenario, reveling in Laurie’s own hands bringing about the final blow to the entity that was the Shape. Her final moments with him weren’t about rejecting his humanity, rather considering it and acknowledging the degree of intimacy with which Michael Myers was so uniquely able to damage her, if only because of the blood they shared.
It’s an ending infused with anger, love, and, above all, grief that took the concepts on the page and brought them to roaring life onscreen. Perhaps this is most evidenced by the final shots of the film, where Laurie Strode stands tall, breathing hard and eyes closed, her teeth clenched as it seems as though she’s letting something go. There’s pause and then relief.
The feeling is undeniable. As the script so aptly pointed out: THE TERROR IS GONE.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“My thought from the beginning was this poor girl has been terrorized for 20 years, she’s been on the run, her life has been ruined by the trauma she suffered…” Jaimie Lee Curtis said on the commentary track found on the Scream Factory Blu-ray release of Halloween H20, “so the ultimate idea was that this would be a fight to the death. That we were gonna kill Michael Myers. Let’s get back together and kill the guy.”
The true impact of what I was seeing in the theater that day was certainly lost on my inexperienced mind. And although my friends and I enjoyed the ride, talking about our favorite moments and debating the merits of Michael Myers’ “scariness” on the drive home, it would be several years before the emotional depth and weight of the film’s conclusion would resonate with me on a more meaningful level.
Still, that was the intent behind the film from the start. Jaimie Lee Curtis set out to reunite John Carpenter and Debra Hill for what would be a filmic homecoming, getting the band back together for one final word on the subject of trauma, grief and, of course, Michael Myers. Unfortunately for them, the business of Halloween got in the way.
“Ultimately I found out that you can’t kill [Michael Myers],” Jaimie Lee Curtis said in the commentary, “it’s contracted that he has to live.” Unfortunately, she and the eventual director of the film Steve Miner were not informed of this until days before shooting, resulting in the actress’ resignation to continue with the project. “It felt wrong to jump ship,” she recalled, even though by then John Carpenter and Debra Hill already had.
Still, it was important to everyone involved that they find a way to make their idea come alive and provide the level of respect to the story, the characters and the audience that they felt the property deserved. So, they cooked up an idea that would satisfy the studio as well as their own convictions.
Jaimie Lee Curtis said that she would be fine with the eventual narrative reveal that the man at the end was a paramedic instead of her brother, as she puts it in the commentary, “as long as Laurie Strode knows that she is killing Michael Myers… as long as the audience seeing the movie [knows].” If that were the case, she said, “it didn’t matter” what the studio did or claimed in subsequent entries.
Halloween H20 is a testament to the power of an actress when she takes on the long term responsibility of playing a beloved character, pursuing that character’s arc to its bitter end. Fighting and manipulating through the dark passages of contracts and studio demands, she and the creatives behind H20 crafted an ending with all of the gravity that 20 years of terror and pain would carry along with it. The most impressive effect of all in this film is Jaimie Lee Curtis’ performance, which reaches its boiling point in this final sequence and sends the series off on a high note, regardless of what came in its wake.
From its earliest stages, the script played with much of the thematics the final film would go on to explore, but it’s the finished film that lays those ideas out more clearly, emotionally and intellectually. It may not be the teenage whodunnit my fourteen-year-old-self had wanted it to be, but H20 was indeed something special, acting as a high point in a franchise that was rarely reached again.
And regardless of what the contracts or the studios said, I agree with Ms. Curtis. If the man pinned beneath the tree is the Shape in the eyes of the characters and the audience, well, it doesn’t matter what the sequels tell us.
After all, if you had asked my friends and I— Hell, even my mom—I think we all would’ve said the same thing walking out of the theater that day: Michael Myers is dead and boy-oh-boy did he have it coming. And we didn’t even need to see 20 years worth of movies to know that.
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