THE MAN BEHIND ‘HALLOWEEN’
Brooklyn native Irwin Yablans on making a cult slasher flick about the the scariest night of the year and why Michael Myers just won’t die
IRWIN Yablans was sweating bullets. He had set up a test screening for the very first movie he was producing, inviting a college-student audience to a sneak preview in the Westwood neighborhood of Los Angeles, and their reactions weren’t quite what he’d anticipated. “When Jamie Lee [Curtis] keeps dropping the knife, and this monster keeps coming back — she drops the knife a bunch of times — someone in the back of the audience yells, ‘You dummy, you deserve to die!’ And everyone laughs. I’m really disheartened. I’m thinking, this isn’t gonna work.” But he soon changed his tune. “The audience was invested,” he realized. “This was a release of tension. They were into it.” That movie, of course, was 1978’s “Halloween.” It would go on to become one of the most iconic horror movies of all time, but not before making Yablans squirm some more. “I had invited all the studios to send a representative to that screening, with the hope that one would distribute the movie and I’d make my money back,” he
says. “And they sent no one.”
Undeterred, Yablans decided to distribute the film himself — first to small, and cheap, test markets. A screening in Kansas City, Mo., got “respectable numbers, not outstanding.” The key was the next night. “The numbers were double. The third night, they quadrupled. This means everybody who saw this picture felt compelled to go home and tell somebody else to go see it.”
And why not? It was a perfectly honed, perfectly simple tale of terror: On the scariest night of the year, Michael Myers, a maskwearing, knife-wielding madman, escapes a mental hospital and stalks, then traps, an innocent baby sitter (Curtis).
“I’ve always loved horror films,” Yablans, a native of Williamsburg, tells The Post. “I’m the last of the radio generation. Shows like ‘Lights Out’ and ‘Inner Sanctum,’ which opened with a creaking door. was scary. What you conjured in your mind was scarier than anything you could see onscreen.”
The son of a New York cab driver, Yablans, now 84, graduated from Boys HS in Bedford-Stuyvesant and enlisted in the Army at 19 along with his brother, Frank. Later, they both moved to Hollywood, Yablans making his way into a managerial position at Paramount. But what he really wanted to do was produce his own movies.
At 43, on a trip to London in 1977, he crossed paths with a scrappy young director, John Carpenter, whose second movie, “Assault on Precinct 13,” was earning acclaim at the London Film Festival.
“I’m thinking to myself, I must find a picture for this young man. It’s got to be a horror film. If possible, one we can shoot all in one night [an ideal scenario for a lowbudget flick].”
Out of the blue, Yablans says, he came up with the idea on the flight home: “The whole plot is starting to unfold in my head. The scariest night of the year. Surely somebody has used this idea before?”
He met with Carpenter the next day at Hamburger Hamlet on the Sunset Strip. “I said, ‘I have this idea to do a movie about a bunch of baby sitters being terrified on Halloween. But I want it to be theater of the mind. Think ‘Psycho’ and ‘The Exorcist.’ We won’t show any blood and gore. I said it was like a radio show. You set the audience up and let them scream.
“John and I, we connected immediately. He said, ‘I know exactly what you want to do.’ ” Carpenter co-wrote the screenplay with Debra Hill (“Escape From L.A.”).
They started casting, Yablans says, and with their meager budget, “We weren’t gonna get Meryl Streep.” John came to him with the 18-year-old Curtis. When Yablans made the connection between the actress and her mom — Janet Leigh of “Psycho” — “I said, I can take a photograph of her screaming and one of her mother scream- ing and put them side by side. We can get publicity all over the world. And who knew [Jamie Lee] would be such a fine actress as well?”
The movie shot quickly. Not overnight, but in a mere four weeks, with established British actor Donald Pleasence, as Myers’ therapist, eating up a good portion of the $300,000 budget with his $25,000 salary.
Carpenter was a hungry young director eager to make the biggest movie he could on a shoestring, says Yablans.
“It was like Robin Hood and his band of Merry Men. The average age on set was about 25. Nobody was watching us. Nobody cared,” Yablans says. “It was great, independent filmmaking. It was all shot right off Sunset Boulevard,” which stood in for a typical American suburb. “We had to make sure palm trees didn’t get in the shots.”
When Yablans saw the finished footage, he was unsure whether they’d really captured the kind of psychological horror he’d been dreaming of. “John said, ‘We’re not finished yet.’ And when I saw it with that music, I jumped out of my chair. I knew we had something very special.”
Decades on — after a raft of sequels and the latest spin, directed by David Gordon Green, out Friday — it’s still something special to Yablans, who’s been married for 52 years and has a son and a daughter and two grandchildren. His son Mickey appears briefly as one of the neigh- borhood kids in the original movie.
“The excitement of seeing an audience react, screaming and hollering, it was all just the way we had talked about,” says Yablans. “Here we are, 40 years later — and it’s still exciting.”
As for celebrating Halloween in his own family, Yablans says, “My kids will tell you that I loved to scare them, but we did not trick-ortreat in Brooklyn, where I grew up. Tenements and brownstones do not lend themselves to the practice.”