Trivia / Halloween II (1981)

• Acting for Two:
  • Nancy Loomis reappears both to play Annie's corpse, and to supply the voice of Sally (the girl Alice is talking to on the phone before she gets killed).
  • Dick Warlock plays both Michael Myers and Patrolman 3, the cop who accidentally kills Ben Tramer.
• Banned in China: Banned in Iceland and West Germany, due to violence and nudity. The video was banned in Norway.
• Billing Displacement:
  • Jamie Lee Curtis has only twenty-five minutes of screentime in the final film, despite getting top billing. But in the TV cut, she has a few extra scenes.
  • Charles Cyphers is billed third, but his character (Sheriff Brackett) disappears about a third of the way into the film, never to appear in the franchise again...until Halloween Kills, that is.
• B-Team Sequel: John Carpenter left the directing reins to Rick Rosenthal, though he did co-write and score the film, as well as directing reshoot scenes.
• Creator Backlash:
  • John Carpenter feels that this was an inferior script and says that the only thing that got him through the writing process was a six-pack of Budweiser every morning. He later called the plot twist of Laurie being Michael's sister "silly" and "foolish." Carpenter has disowned the plot contrivance of Laurie and Michael being related, calling it stupid and ridiculous. It resulted in a slew of subpar sequels all centering around Michael's obsession with killing his relatives, and Carpenter didn't return to the series until Halloween (2018) partially because it wrote all the sequels out of the official canon, including this film.
  • Director Rick Rosenthal also isn't too pleased with the final film, believing that John Carpenter's reshoots ruined his careful pacing.
  • Mildly with Jamie Lee Curtis, who only did the film because she felt the fans deserved it. She also was a little annoyed at the sequence where Laurie suddenly becomes unable to call out to the police when they arrived. But she has said that it works as a film and is "scary."
• Dawson Casting: This time it's a little more pronounced than its predecessor, as the still 17/18 year old Laurie is played by a now 23 year old Jamie Lee Curtis (thanks to this Immediate Sequel being filmed three years later).
• Deleted Role: Dana Carvey filmed more scenes, but they were cut, and his only appearance is a non-speaking one in which he's getting instructions from a TV reporter.
• Deleted Scene: The screenplay featured a subplot with Michael Myers sneaking a ride in the van of the news producer (whose name is revealed to be "Debra") on her way to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital to interview Laurie. She gets a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, and after being harassed by a local redneck, is killed by Michael, who drives to the hospital. The other news crew later visits the hospital assuming she's there, and Mrs. Alves refuses to let them interview Laurie. It's also where Jimmy learns that Michael Myers has been supposedly killed. All of this was cut before it could be filmed. The shot with the street boy listening to the radio on his boom box was later filmed in reshoots to explain how Michael knew where Laurie had been taken.
• Executive Meddling: John Carpenter didn't want to do a sequel, but the producers said that they were doing one with or without him. He figured that if someone was going to be paid to write the script, it might as well be him. Rick Rosenthal was then brought in to direct, but the producers didn't like his decision to make it more of a thriller than a slasher, so they got Carpenter to shoot some extra scenes, mostly involving killings. As a result, Rosenthal is not a fan of the released version.
• Money, Dear Boy: One of the only reasons John Carpenter and Debra Hill made a sequel, originally feeling that the first was a standalone story. Jamie Lee Curtis even describes the vibe on set as having less passion than the first one, and that it was "just a payday."
• No Stunt Double:
  • Lance Guest did his own stunt when he slips on the blood and falls on the floor. Moreover, this scene was done in a single take.
  • Jamie Lee Curtis did her own stunt when she falls out of the car onto the parking lot asphalt.
• Orphaned Reference:
  • Mrs. Alves says, "Time's up, Jimmy," when she walks in on him flirting with Laurie. In a deleted scene, she tells him he can have two minutes with her.
  • Jimmy flirts with Laurie, asking if she wants a Coke, before Mrs. Alves orders him out of the room. A deleted scene (that's restored in the TV recut) has him actually bringing a Coke for her and telling her it was Michael Myers stalking her.
  • The hospital's lighting becomes quite dim as the film goes on. This is explained in a deleted scene (again restored in the TV recut) where the power goes out, and the back-up generator kicks in.
• The Other Darrin: Dick Warlock replaces Nick Castle as Michael Myers.
• The Other Marty:
  • Charles Napier was originally cast as Marshal Gummell, but had to drop out due to scheduling conflicts.
  • Edward Albert (of Power Rangers Time Force and Galaxy of Terror fame) was reportedly cast as one of the Sheriff's Deputies, but left for unknown reasons.
• Prop Recycling: The mask Michael wears is the exact same mask (a repainted and modified Captain Kirk mask) worn in the original film. It looks different in the sequel because the paint had faded due to a few reasons, first because Nick Castle, the original Michael, kept it in his back pocket during shoots. Also, Debra Hill kept the mask under her bed for several years until the filming, causing it to collect dust and yellow because Hill was a heavy smoker. Also, the mask appears wider because Dick Warlock is shorter and stockier than Nick Castle, so the mask fit his head differently. As the producers thought it would be the final sequel in the series, they let Warlock keep the mask, scalpel, boots, jumpsuit, and knife used in filming. When they decided to revive Michael in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, the producers realized they had made a mistake and never again gave props out to the cast and crew, therefore subsequent sequels used various masks that looked rather different.
• Real-Life Relative: Both of Dick Warlock's (Michael Myers) sons played small roles: his older son Billy plays a teenager named Craig who asks Deputy Hunt about Ben Tramer, while his younger son Lance is a boy wearing a cowboy hat and carrying a large boombox who Michael bumps into while walking around on the streets of Haddonfield.
• Real Life Writes the Hairstyle: Since Jamie Lee Curtis had begun to wear a much shorter hairstyle in the 1980s, she had to wear a wig that matched her original hairstyle for the film.
• Scully Box: Dick Warlock is the shortest Michael Myers in the series. In fact, he wore lifts in order to appear taller.
• Spared by the Cut: The TV Re-Cut does this to a couple of characters. Jill is definitely killed in the theatrical cut, but her stabbing is softened in the TV version, with a few groans dubbed over the shot where she falls to the floor (implying her survival). The girl named Alice that Michael kills in the opening is seemingly spared by re-editing the scene where Mrs. Elrod discovers the bloody knife in her kitchen (implying she dies instead of Alice). Janet's death is removed and replaced with a scene where she says she's leaving the hospital. Jimmy's fate is left open in the theatrical version - he passes out from a concussion in the parking lot - but the TV cut confirms his survival.
• What Could Have Been:
  • An early idea was to have the film take place in a high-rise apartment building. It was later changed to Haddonfield hospital.
  • Debra Hill claimed that they toyed with the idea of shooting for 3-D. However, as the film would take place mainly at night, that idea was abandoned.
  • The executives told John Carpenter that they would make the film with or without him; we can only wonder what the film would be like had he declined.
  • According to the original script, there was a scene depicting the blonde reporter's death. Her car breaks down on the side of the road with her getting assistance from a guy who hits on her, she responds in disgust, the truck driver then leaves her, and after the tire is replaced she opens the trunk to find Myers, who then kills her and takes the car as a nod to what he did in the first film.
  • One idea that was considered was that the film would take place a couple of years after the first one, and that Laurie would be attending college when Michael turns back up.
• Write What You Know: One common criticism is that the hospital is too conveniently dead, even for a night shift, for Michael to be able to walk around unnoticed and kill the hospital staff. Rick Rosenthal said he based this off a personal experience he had with his wife where they once attended a hospital late at night and it was completely deserted, save for a few doctors and nurses and the patients. Additional early dialogue and the script itself refer to it as "Haddonfield clinic," not a fully staffed hospital.

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