Rhian Rees

By now you’ve probably witnessed the first trailer for director David Gordon Green’s hotly-anticipated feature film Halloween (and if you haven’t, we’ve included it below), which showcases series icon Michael Myers renewing his killing spree after being awoken from four decades of catatonia by two misguided British documentarians. This past February during principal photography of the film in Charleston, South Carolina, HalloweenMovies sat down with the two actors, Jefferson Hall and Rhian Rees, in order to discuss their characters, what they felt makes Myers tick, and what fans can expect from Laurie Strode’s final showdown with The Shape.

“We are probably the closest thing to the audience, as far as characters are concerned, because we are coming in as two people who have followed the case of Michael Myers almost since childhood,” said British actor Hall of his character of Martin in the film, who along with fellow Brit actress Rees (as Dana Hanes) prove responsible for the killer’s return to Haddonfield.

The eleventh film in the franchise and co-written by director Green, Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, Halloween is intended as a direct sequel to John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 film of the same name, and disregards all of the series subsequent entries. Trancas International Films’ Malek Akkad, Blumhouse’s Jason Blum and Bill Block produce, with McBride, Green and star Jamie Lee Curtis serving as executive producers, along with Ryan Freimann and series originator Carpenter, who also serves as the film’s composer. In it, series star Curtis returns to her role of embattled final girl Laurie Strode, as does Nick Castle to his role of Michael Myers. They are joined by Judy Greer as Karen Strode, Laurie’s daughter, and Andi Matichak as Allyson Strode, Laurie’s granddaughter. The cast additionally includes Virginia “Ginny” Gardener, Dylan Arnold, Drew Scheid and Miles Robbins.

Perhaps wisely riffing on audiences’ recent trending interest in true crime programming (“Mindhunters,” “Making a Murderer,” etc.), Hall and Rees’ characters, two investigative journalists who’ve arrived from overseas to Haddonfield, Illinois in order to dig into the case of the Halloween Killer, serve as an entry point into this retelling of the universe.

“As we are pretty close to the audience, we have exposition for those who have never seen the (original) film,” offered Hall, whose previous roles include turns on the series “Game of Thrones” and “Vikings.” “So we are the guys that are saying, ‘He did this. This happened. We are looking for him.’ So we provide the background for the audience. As an actor, you never want to do any exposition, but here I think it’s written quite gracefully and well done.”  

Pertaining to their character’s journalistic angle, “We are looking at the whole idea of the incarceration of mentally ill people, and juxtaposing that to real life serial killers,” he continued. “It’s difficult to mention all of that stuff in the film, but in doing our own (preparatory) research we looked at Ed Kemper, who is this huge guy who walked around breaking people’s necks and decapitating people, and Herb Mullin who went from door to door just stabbing people because of the voices in his head. There are so many serial killers from that time, the 1970s and 1980s, when it was post-Vietnam and pre-FBI analysis. Jeffery Dahmer started killing in 1978 as well, the same year Carpenter’s Halloween came out, so it’s quite interesting.”

We asked, “In that this film ignores any sequels to the original, it also lowers Myers’ onscreen body count considerably. Given that, do your characters view Myers as being lower on the serial killer totem pole than the ones you’ve referenced?”

“Definitely,” stated Rees. “I think we find Michael to be a little more empathetic, and we’re obsessed with the idea of getting him and Laurie Strode into the same room together, so that they may face their fears. So that’s a whole angle, in that our characters are approaching it a bit sensationally and exploitatively, and also we don’t think he’s the world’s worst serial killer, as we are coming at it from a different perspective.”

Hall expounds, “Peter Woodcock, the Canadian serial killer, raped and murdered three little boys when he was fifteen, and he was sentenced to forty years in prison. The first time he gets a day release, he goes to a hardware store, buys an axe, a carving knife and a piece of rope and places them in the woods. Then he immediately lures a guy into the very same woods where he stabs him like fifty times and then fucks him. Peter then goes straight back to the facility covered in blood and says, ‘You shouldn’t have let me out.’ The crimes are very Myers’esque (in that) there’s a dormant period.”

Speaking to the scripted triggering of Myers’ homicidal tendencies as witnessed in the film’s trailer, “There are also some other influences, but I think that (displaying) the mask (to him) is a huge provocation,” offered Hall. “He wants his face back, as you would. Speaking psychologically, he can’t kill without it. He has to hide his face. Ed Kemper (for one) had these weird glasses that he wore, and he couldn’t kill anyone without wearing them.”

As for the filming location in which that scene takes place, “It was a military institution, and it had this huge courtyard surrounded by buildings, with barbed wire around the top and dudes with machine guns,” said Hall. “The courtyard was a huge checkerboard, red and white. In the middle, we got your man (Michael) and around him were a whole bunch of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest nutcases chained to bits of concrete, and they all start losing their shit, while Myers just sits there, still. And we start asking him rote questions while his back is to us, and he starts to rise, and everyone starts to scream.”

“What’s interesting,” he continued, “is that you have the established world of Haddonfield that everyone knows about, and then you have these two characters who are fucking fiddling with the bars on the lion’s cage, and people go, ‘But lions kill people,’ but these characters don’t just want to see a lion sitting in the zoo. They want to see it bite. They want to see it eat meat. And that’s essentially what we are doing is rattling Michael’s cage.”

“And horribly naively as well,” added Rees. “Our idea is that Michael can be rehabilitated as they do in Scandinavia, and given a job.”

And what of Laurie Strode?

“For our characters, Laurie is as interesting as Michael, and we think Laurie and Michael complete each other in a way,” Hall stated. “Like Jaws and Quint.”

Rees extrapolated, “Laurie isn’t overly receptive to us, but our characters are very interested in her, because we’ve been researching the victim mentality for years leading up to this, and it’s so entertaining, because we are potentially going to get an interview with the victim, and with Michael Myers coming together, and this could be the first conversation they’ve ever had. I mean, he doesn’t talk to anyone, and she could be the key.”

Universal Pictures will release Halloween worldwide on October 19, 2018.