Kind of cool thing that happened to me when I was doing Rob Zombie’s Halloween was there’s a scene where Michael Myers is killing the Daniel Harris character. I can’t think of her name offhand, but it cuts to, in the script, Laurie Strode with the kids that she’s babysitting. And then it cuts back to Michael Myers towards killing the Daniel Harris character again. And we’re getting ready to do the second part of the killing scene when Rob leaned over to me, and he goes, Hey, just out of curiosity, what do you think of the scene? And I go, Oh, it’s cool. I love Michael Myers killing people. I think it’s great entertainment. He goes well, but what’s your opinion on it? And I go, well, it’s kind of odd that you cut back, and he’s still killing her. I don’t know if that’s kind of in the vein of any other Halloween film, but it is your film. And he looked at me, and he turned to the AD, and he said, I’m cutting the scene. And I looked at the AD, and I go, where’s the behind the scenes you need them.
There’s a scene in Halloween where it’s supposed to be in a basement, and it’s all dirty. And there’s the Meyer’s cross in the background, and there’s a pumpkin. And Michael Myers gets Scout down in there, and he’s trying to show her the picture of him as a boy and her as a baby. And she’s trying to be caring, but at the same time, she wants his knife. And she finally gets it, and she stabs him with it. Now that’s a retractable knife. The problem is when you put fresh blood on these retractables, and you’re in a room with the sawdust, if one, you got to be careful where you put the blood because you can’t jam up the retractable. And two, you cannot drop it into the sawdust because it won’t retract.
The scene was very emotional, and Rob didn’t want to cut. So the first take, Laurie stabs Michael drops the knife, very emotional, very cinematic. And Rob goes, okay, let’s do it again. Go on again, go on again. And I was looking at the knife, and I didn’t know what to say. I saw that there was sawdust on it and I’m thinking, well maybe she realizes it, or I should have said cut. I should have said cut. I should’ve said cut, but I didn’t. And sure enough, the knife did not retract. I mean, it didn’t retract at all. So when she stabs Tyler Mane, Michael Myers, even though he’s a stunt man and I’m sure he’s been lit on fires and did high falls and everything else, he took the brunt of that knife.
Now it’s dull obviously, but still to be jabbed with any type of a spike-like that had to hurt. And I remember Rob loving the scene and that’s the scene in the movie, and Rob said, cut. And I’m looking at Tyler, and the first thing you could see his eyes in that mask panning through the crowd of crew members and catching mine and just giving me the dirtiest look. Do you know how frightening it is to see the real Michael Myers wanting to actually kill you? I tried to explain this to him. I should have said cut.