With director Dwight H. Little’s 1988 film Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (the first appearance of the iconic slasher since 1981’s Halloween II) proving itself to be a critical and box office hit, excitement ran high and speculation rampant the following year for its sequel, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.
But would the fifth film bring? With Little’s predecessor having introduced compelling new characters in the forms of both Jamie Lloyd (actress Danielle Harris, portraying Myer’s stalked niece) and Rachel Carruthers (the series’ new ‘final girl’) as well as delivering one hell of a cliff hanger of a finale, anticipation was palpable, and fans buzzed. Had little Jamie truly become evil? Had Mrs. Carruthers died? How had Myers survived that hail of bullets?
The film which moviegoers received however on October 13th of 1989 seemed to ask more questions than which it answered. From the introduction of the character of the Man in Black and the early beginnings of the Cult of Thorn mythos to a psychic connection between uncle and niece, Halloween 5 remains to this day one of the more polarizing entries in the entire franchise, as does the role inhabited by one of the film’s stars, actress Wendy Kaplan.
Wendy Kaplan as ‘Tina Williams’ in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
Directed by Swiss director Dominique Othenin-Girard from an ever-changing and unfinished script by Michael Jacobs (with reshoots by series producer Moustapha Akkad), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers introduces Kaplan’s teenage character of “Tina Williams” to the fold. Friend to both Halloween 4 characters Rachel and Jamie (although never previously referenced), Kaplan’s Tina as written falls somewhere between that of stock slasher victim and noble final girl, with the added fashion sense and rebelliousness of an early 80’s Madonna thrown in for good measure.
And it’s perhaps this very deviation from the scripted norm of wall flower as ‘final girl’ why Halloween fans remain divided to this day.
On the 30th anniversary of Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, we sat down with Kaplan (now Foxworth) to discuss in-depth her experience and thoughts on the production, and her outlook on the film three decades later.
“I didn’t know this at the time, like how different Tina was I guess from your typical Halloween ‘final girl,’” offered Kaplan of her role. “Like, I really knew nothing about any of that, or even of the term. It’s just been in the last few years that people have come and said, ‘You’re kinda’ like the final girl’ in the film.’ Which I don’t know if that’s even correct, because the movie’s so strangely structured. But I know that there was all that controversy, because the character’s not particularly a good girl. Like, that was a big thing, and it was a certain aspect of my personality and my performance, too.”
With commercial and soap work and a couple of television credits to her name in 1987 (an episode of “My Two Dads” and the TV movie “Police Story: Monster Manor”), the then 23 year old Kaplan, who had transplanted from New York to Los Angeles in order to pursue acting, found herself offered an audition for Halloween 5, of which she remembers at the time her management being rather underwhelmed.
Recalls the actress of the 80’s mainstream stigma attached to the horror genre, “My management had a certain attitude about it, and I think then too that horror was not as celebrated as it is today. Now there are amazing directors and actors doing all these films, but you know, back in 1989 it was still, ‘Oh, it’s a slasher film.’ So, I think that there was a little bit of that conversation, but I went in for the audition anyway, and the role was so much fun to read for. Tina as a character was written so differently, and I don’t think at that point really that there was any reason why I wouldn’t do it. It was a really good opportunity, and it (eventually) came down to me and one other actor.”
According to Kaplan, that other actor was none other than Lori Petty, who later that year would land a reoccurring role on the “21 Jump Street” spin-off television series “Booker,” before securing the titular lead in Rachel Talalay’s cult-classic Tank Girl four years later.
“She was a very different kind of actress. You know, very different,” recalled Kaplan, “and I think that we were each bringing very different things to it.”
As for the audition process itself, “They brought me back couple of times, and (Halloween series executive producer) Moustapha (Akkad) was there for at least the last audition or two, and so was Dominique,” she offered. “The last audition was in this big office where we had to run around and scream and do things from the script, but it was pretty fun. You just put yourself into it. And I remember I was surprised by Dominique, because I just didn’t expect this arty European man to be the director. He had a very different approach.”
With principal photography of Halloween 5 kicking off in Salt Lake City, Utah in May of 1989, a mere five months before the film’s scheduled release, and script changes occurring consistently throughout production, we asked Kaplan of her memories of the shoot.
Wendy Kaplan in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
“You know, I was so young. I was in my early 20s and was like, ‘I’m in a movie!’” she said. “So, I was not paying a lot of attention to some of the things that now would probably perk my ears up, like, ‘Oh, something’s happening here, the director and the producer aren’t getting along!’ But back then? I mean, there’s aspects of Tina, especially at that time of the life, that were representative of me (as a person), so much so.”
“And I think that the happy part of me that just wanted to enjoy making this movie and be able to play this incredibly vibrant and fun, daring and snappy character, that was what I was focused on the most,” she continued. “Tina took me over a little, and I took her over a little, so I wasn’t paying a lot of attention to some of the other things. I wish I had. But in retrospect, I can see how fast that Halloween 5 was put into production, and I can see why there was so much disappointment about how different Halloween 5 was from Halloween 4. Like with the death of Ellie Cornell’s character of Rachel. That’s an intense thing for her as an actress, leading in Halloween 4, and then all of a sudden her character is killed off (in Halloween 5)? That doesn’t really make a lot of sense, and it’s kind of disappointing for the fans. I know that she was really loved.”
Don Shanks & Ellie Cornell in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
With the character of Rachel meeting her unceremonious demise in the first act of Halloween 5 (and the character of Jamie losing her surrogate mother figure and protector in the process), the ‘final girl’ baton was passed in narrative to Kaplan’s freewheeling Tina, which causes for her character not only a moral crisis, but also leads to one of the more selfless acts demonstrated in the series.
“Well, I was sort of oblivious to the slasher genre in general at the time,” offered Kaplan of the trope, and of her approach to her performance. “So, I really was just approaching it from the perspective of a person who clearly isn’t strong at parenting, and I think that Dominique had something to do with this too. I vaguely remember these conversations about Tina being hard on the outside, in the sense that she was a wild person, I guess, but also that she was vulnerable and had love to give, and that the one thing she did that was good and positive was to be there for Jamie.”
“You know, there’s that scene where I’m up in the clinic with Jamie, and I’m telling her, ‘I can’t stay with you, I have to go see my boyfriend,’ which makes Tina kind of look like a shit, but when I come downstairs and run into Loomis, I’m fully crying, and there was definitely direction from Dominique there to push Tina into more of a sympathetic realm.”
Kaplan expounded, “And I think that, if you look at that moment of sacrifice, when Tina shields Jamie with her own body and is stabbed, as some form of redemption for maybe some of the things she had done as a teen that were not so great, you can see it that way. I like to think of Tina as a whole person. I mean, most teenagers are everything. They’re troubled, they’re loving, they’re rebellious, they’re afraid. They’re such complex beings. And I think that Tina has all these qualities.”
Don Shanks & Wendy Kaplan in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
“I have had people come up to me since the film,” she continued, “sometimes at horror conventions, and they have told me that in ways that they relate to Tina, or that if they were having trouble in life, that she served as a little bit of inspiration for them, and that to me is amazing because they are finding something in this kind of wild, conflicted character. I mean, I don’t think that sacrificing her life was Tina’s plan, but she did it instinctually, and it was a noble act.”
As for her interaction with series star Donald Pleasance, in which Kaplan shares the screen briefly in Halloween 5, Kaplan recalls of working with the English actor, “He was really professional, and he was really kind. It never felt like he was behaving like the sort of icon that he was. He was very present with us, in the sense that it didn’t feel like he put himself above us, but I didn’t have a lot of direct interaction with him outside of when we were shooting. I think I was a little intimidated by him, frankly. Like I didn’t feel particularly comfortable going, ‘Hey! Whatcha’ been doing here in Salt Lake City for the last few days in your down time?’ It’s not to say that he was unapproachable. It’s just that I was young and new and he was this big deal. He was this icon of film and theatre.”
Donald Pleasence as ‘Sam Loomis’ in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
In our upcoming Part 2, Kaplan talks her near attachment to an already gestating Halloween 6, the rather infamous party scene at the production’s hotel during principal photography of Halloween 5, her confusion over the introduction and identity of the Man in Black, her surprise at the truncated Haddonfield police station massacre as it was released theatrically, and her thoughts on the film thirty years later.
