Halloween is riding high right now.
The horror sequel/reboot has taken a whopping $ 110million in less than a week on a tiny $ 10million budget and the critics have propelled it to a 79% aggregate score on Rotten Tomatoes.
But the director has revealed there is one thing he wished he could go back and change. Returning star Jamie Lee Curtis delivers a fantastic line right at the climax of the movie, it’s destined to become a classic, but audiences can’t hear it.
WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE ENDING
Part of the problem is that audiences are enjoying the film almost too much.
They are making so much noise, whether screaming or cheering, that this particular classic line gets completely lost.
It shouldn’t normally happen, but Green revealed that the line was put back in at the last moment and so they didn’t have a chance to check how it would play. The problem is that what comes just before is such a crowd-pleasing moment, the audience itself drowns out the response.
It happens when Judie Greer’s Karen is in the basement, blasts the villain with a rifle and says “Gotcha.” Predictably, audiences have been cheering and Curtis’s follow-up line can’t be heard.
Curtis’ Laurie Stode drily adds: “Happy Halloween, Michael.”
It’s a wonderful, potentially iconic moment, that gets lost.
Green told the LA Times: “I’ll tell you an interesting thing … it’s about editing and test screenings. Test screenings are beautiful because you can know how to move things around for those types of audience responses. But I’d never tested that line because I thought it was like, ‘Oh, is that too much?’ And then the last change we made in our picture cutting was to add that line back in. Then the result is that you don’t hear it because we put it in the wrong place. It’s got its own charm as obviously people will watch the movie in different environments without necessarily a ruckus. It’s in there.”
The film is sure to becoem a horror classica nd audiences will have teh chenace to revisit the scene and savour the moment in the comfort (and quiet) of their own homes…
HALLOWEEN IS OUT NOW.
FULL ARTICLE IN THE LOS ANGELES TIMES
