USA TODAY International Edition
‘Halloween’ filmmakers wrestle with killer’s ethics
Spoiler alert! This story contains a mild spoiler for the new “Halloween” movie. Beware if you haven’t seen it yet. Slasher-movie favorite Michael Myers is back on the big screen and, to no one’s surprise, his body count is as impressive as usual. However, as masked Michael goes door-to-door during his bloody path of carnage in the new sequel “Halloween” (in theaters now), one of the fascinating aspects is whom he doesn’t kill. In one scene, Michael enters the back door of a home, sees a woman in the kitchen and takes a hammer to her head. He picks up a large knife – his signature weapon – and walks to the front door. He passes by a baby crying in a crib, but instead of murdering the infant, he stops and looks down before turning and heading out. Are babies off the board for him? Not exactly. “It was a last-minute art direction detail because it was going to be a man asleep on a couch, and then the man didn’t show up,” director David Gordon Green explains with a laugh. When the extra failed to appear on the set that day, production designer Richard Wright suggested putting a baby crib in the living room as a workaround, “which I thought was a little weird, but let’s see what happens,” Green recalls. “I didn’t give it too much thought, but there’s no way I’m going to watch a movie or support a movie where he kills a baby. “The unfun answer is, I don’t think I was doing it from the authentic perspective of a serial killer. I think I was doing it from the perspective of a father. There’s not any humanity to it.” However, in doing rehearsals and seeing Michael (played by James Jude Courtney) acknowledge the baby and then move on toward his inevitable showdown with Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), Green says he felt the villain’s complexity. “Sure, as a filmmaker and a writer and a director, I might have a morality that’s helping navigate this very bizarre and often unethical journey. That’s a choice I made. And from that choice, I found a more complicated character, and I kind of did enjoy that simple consideration.” For the record, Michael also was going to move past the sleeping guy without stabbing him – a nod to the character’s random brutality. “In the original (’Halloween’), he’ll grab you by the throat, throw you against a wall, throw a knife into you and then study your death . ... ,” Green says of Michael. “It is hard, because so much of the movie, we’re trying to not explain (his choices) . ... (It’s) fun to let the audience’s imagination wonder why and argue why and call baloney on the filmmakers or whatever the conversation inspires. I love doing that as well. But you do see certain little ethical decisions.”