‘I Made It As A Cop Thriller:’ A Conversation with Halloween 4 Director Dwight Little

The Halloween franchise found itself in a moment of transition circa 1988.

The two figures driving the series’ creative direction to that point, producer/director/writer/composer John Carpenter and producer/writer Debra Hill, had taken a surprise left turn in 1982. Rather than document the continued shenanigans of hulking insane asylum escapee Michael Myers, Carpenter and Hill wanted to tell another horror story entirely.

Trailers From Hell Fearless Leader Joe Dante was initially handpicked by Carpenter to take over from Halloween II (1981) helmer Rick Rosenthal for the next installment, but left due to a scheduling conflict with his eventual next project, The Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983).

Much like Rod Serling’s original The Twilight Zone television series, Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) was intended to be the first in a new anthology-type series of films, each telling an entire new spooky tale.

Writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace amended an initial script from uncredited Quatermass series scribe Nigel Kneale. Where a mute, masked serial killer was the baddie in the first flicks, Halloween III‘s evil maniac is a warlock factory owner, Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy), with an evil scheme to use Halloween masks to kill the children wearing them, in an effort to appease ancient pagan gods.

A Franchise in Flux

Armed with Dean Cundey’s gorgeous cinematography, Carpenter and Alan Howarth’s eerie new synth score (and even Jamie Lee Curtis and Michael Myers cameos), Season of the Witch does bear some tonal commonalities with the original two Myers flicks. Ultimately, though, it’s very much its own beast — more of a creepy sci-fi thriller with some grisly bursts of gore than anything approaching a slasher movie.

Maybe that was the problem.

Befuddled audiences wanted Myers himself, not a two-second clip of Myers from the first movie seen on a bar television set. Maybe if Halloween III had been Halloween II, the conceit could have worked. We’ll never know.

The unfairly maligned warlock adventure struggled to connect with theatergoing audiences, and the series lay dormant for a half-decade. In its absence, the Friday The 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises blossomed.

Resurrecting Michael Myers

Carpenter and Hill initially tried to cook up a fourth movie with novelist Dennis Etchison that would once again resurrect Myers, who had been blinded in both eyes and seemingly burned to death — along with his former psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) — in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital at the end of Halloween II. Executive producer Moustapha Akkad turned down their pitch, and Carpenter and Hill ultimately sold Akkad their stake in the franchise.

His first flick as sole possessor of the property helped revitalize the brand for decades to come.

1988’s Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers represents a return to the more streamlined approach at the heart of the original two movies, albeit with a new, decidedly late-’80s sheen (courtesy of cinematographer Peter Lyons Collister). Howarth took over solo composing duties. When Curtis opted not to return, Loomis — his face scarred after the fire — became the primary connective thread between the first films and the fresh installment.

New to the franchise was director Dwight H. Little, who had proposed a back-to-basics approach to the series revamp.

I caught up with Little recently about his experience on the project, which marked his horror debut after a trio of action efforts, KGB: The Secret War (1985), Getting Even (1986) and Bloodstone (1988).

Little explained Akkad’s decision to return to Michael Myers.

“He knew after Season of the Witch… if he was going to do this again, he had to bring Michael back, even though Michael was blown up,” Little said of Akkad. “So he was stuck in a way.”

Little confirmed that Akkad wanted to pivot from Hill and Carpenter’s planned anthology approach, which was the seed of their split from the franchise ahead of production on a fourth entry.

“What my knowledge is is that Debra and John wanted to turn it into an anthology series… they wanted to do, every Halloween, maybe it would be something different,” Little explained. “And Moustapha was like, ‘No, it’s got to be Michael Myers. If it’s Halloween, it’s got to be Michael Myers.’ He had his own distributor, his own production company. He bought the rights back.”

So how did a rising young director of straight-to-video action movies get a shot at reviving the most iconic horror franchise in the land?

“So the really short story is, he was a director in his own right. He did Mohammed, Messenger of God [a.k.a. The Message] and he did another big Anthony Quinn saga [Lion of the Desert]. And he wanted to shoot a movie in India. I had just shot a movie in India [Bloodstone], maybe the only person at that moment [active in Hollywood] who had. And he brought me in to pick my brain about that. And I segued into pitching myself for Halloween,” Little revealed. “They gave me a treatment for what they wanted to do, and I didn’t like it. So I came up with a treatment with my partner Alan McElroy.”

The rest is horror history.

To capture more of a barren, rural energy, production was moved from South Pasadena and Hollywood — the original locales behind the fictive Haddonfield, Illinois in the first two Myers films — to Midland, Utah, just outside of Salt Lake City.

Halloween 4 (the series ditched the Roman numerals with this entry) kills Curtis’ Laurie Strode offscreen in a car accident, but gives her a seven-year-old, recently orphaned daughter, Jamie Lloyd (now-horror mainstay Danielle Harris). Jamie now lives with a foster family — parents Richard and Darlene Carruthers (Jeff Olson and Karen Alston) and their teenage daughter Rachel (Ellie Cornell). She is plagued by sleepless nights and visions of her killer uncle wearing his iconic mask.

10 years after the events of the first two movies (which both take place on the same 1978 Halloween night), Myers (now played by stuntmen Tom Morga and George P. Wilbur) breaks out of a Ridgemont Federal Sanitarium ambulance transfer to find and kill his young niece. Myers manages to trash the ambulance in a creek, making it appear that he may have died in the wreckage.

Loomis, invariably, is the only person on Myers’ trail who appreciates the gravity of his escape, and makes the four-hour drive to Haddonfield in pursuit of his longtime patient. They have an explosive reunion duel at an isolated combination gas station/diner.

The action moves at a blistering clip, with a sense of clever, escalating menace, peppered through with tacitly employed bursts of tasteful violence.

As is the case in the original Halloween, the adults quickly extricate themselves from the proceedings, heading out for a party on the titular holiday and leaving Rachel in charge of poor Jamie, who has been relentlessly teased at school over her parents’ death and her murderous uncle (kids can be cruel).

The duo embarks on some classically Midwest trick-or-treating, to tragic results. Little’s Midwest sensibility helped add a realism to this element of the proceedings, too.

“I’m from outside Cleveland, so I trick-or-treated all the time,” Little said. “So I was able to, I think, bring a little special sauce to the trick-or-treating.”

Jamie decks herself out in a clown costume that’s more than a little reminiscent of a six-year-old Michael Myers’ attire when he committed the unforgettable first murders to kick off Halloween.

Casting Was Key

A big reason behind the film’s success, beyond the effective atmosphere and well-conceptualized setpieces, was its economically-but-thoroughly established young characters, from the kindhearted Rachel to the troubled Jamie to the fast-talking hounddog boyfriend Brady (Sasha Jensen) to holier-than-thou sexpot sheriff’s daughter Kelly (Kathleen Kinmont), and some of their more peripheral pals.

The whole house of cards would possibly collapse without a believable kid actor embodying Jamie Lloyd, the tortured young soul of the story who takes a terrifying turn in its bold and provocative final scene.

We know now, of course, that Harris is a terrific actor, but at the time she had yet to act in a feature film, having gotten her start with modeling work and television shows. Little explained what made Harris stand out in a bicoastal talent search.

“Particularly in that movie, I had to get away from all the kids who’d grown up just being trained in commercials. And in L.A. they kept sending me all these commercial kids. And they’d been trained to just be like, ‘Ta-da.’ They’re just selling a product. And I actually couldn’t find Jamie Lloyd in L.A. I went to New York, did a casting session. Danielle was maybe the third one or fourth one,” Little said. “So smart, so sophisticated. She had these big movie eyes. I just thought, ‘Okay, she can play a Midwesterner. This is a whole ‘nother type of child.’ It was that East Coast-California thing. The California kids are great for one kind of movie, but I didn’t feel like they were Haddonfield. I didn’t feel like they belonged in Haddonfield.”

Beyond Myers’ superhuman strength and some bravura action moments, The Return of Michael Myers only dips its toes into the metaphysical at the end of its final reel.

The uninitiated would be advised to read no further until watching the movie — consult JustWatch for all streaming avenues, or just pick up a copy of the Scream Factory Collector’s Edition Blu-ray.

At the end of the flick, Haddonfield’s finest manage to blast Michael Myers down an abandoned mine shaft and to his apparent demise.

Back at home, Jamie stabs her foster mom with a pair of scissors — as if her uncle’s evil has transferred over to her. She wears the same blank, heartless expression that made Will Sandin’s performance as the original child Michael so haunting in the first movie.

Harris’ ability to believably convey both sides of Jamie — this affectless little heir to evil incarnate as well as the more sweet, deeply traumatized pre-transference kid — makes the movie, and gives it the kind of downer ending that only the boldest horror pictures can pull off.

Little and Akkad’s instincts to resurrect the Myers storyline were spot-on: Halloween 4 was a hit at the domestic box office, staying at No. 1 for two weeks.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers essentially reverses course on this clever conclusion, explaining that Jamie suffered a moment of temporary insanity and that her foster mother is fine. Harris once again becomes our sympathetic hero, ultimately not inheriting the mantle of a recurring kid villain fans of 4 might have rightfully anticipated.

After the success of 4, Little went on to helm the 1989 Phantom of the Opera remake starring ’80s horror icon Robert Englund. He then transitioned to mostly big-budget action spectaculars and thrillers in the next decade, including Marked For Death (1990), my personal favorite Rapid Fire (1992), and Murder At 1600 (1997). Little’s action oeuvre is well worth a watch in full. His command of character, pace and choreography, even as the budgets increase, keeps audiences engaged and enthralled even as he hops around genres.

But Halloween 4 seems to occupy a unique standing among fans.

Horror in general has enjoyed a massive resurgence over the last decade-plus, and now occupies a place of cultural prestige and import it maybe hadn’t since the days of Rosemary’s Baby (1968) or The Exorcist (1973).

Halloween 4 in particular has been getting its rightful flowers lately.

Consequence’s exceptional “Halloweenies” podcast series is dedicated to horror franchises, but fundamentally rooted in the Halloween movies. Their Halloween 4 episode is well worth further study. The Ringer’s Bill Simmons, Van Lathan and Chris Ryan enshrined Halloween 4 with its own “Rewatchables” podcast episode last year. Simmons’ new studio prominently features an original poster from the movie’s first theatrical run.

Film YouTuber Layton Eversaul’s Halloween 4 making-of video has been watched by 264,000-plus fans. In his own “The Last Drive-In With Joe Bob Briggs” episode devoted to the movie (this is just a clip, the full episode is viewable by subscribing to Shudder), Shudder’s Joe Bob Briggs has ranked it as his third favorite film in the franchise, behind only the first two. It’s among my favorites, too. The film also has enjoyed a robust presence at horror conventions.

“I think there are three maybe reasons” for Halloween 4‘s staying power over the years, Little suggested. “One is, people do feel like it felt like Halloween. That’s number one. It sounds simple, but it’s really that. They talk about the opening credits, and how those images draw them into that time of year. People say one of the things they used to look forward to was curling up on Halloween night and watching Halloween 4 because it just felt like Halloween.”

Little’s unique emphases on fleshing out performances and building suspense helped set the movie apart from some of the shamelessly gratuitous (but still fun) slashers of the era.

“It’s not really a teen slasher movie in the ’80s sense. It’s not Prom Night or Terror Train or even Friday The 13th,” Little noted. “It’s not kids screwing around and getting killed. It’s got characters, it’s got relationships, it’s got this interesting mood.”

Slasher As Cop Thriller

“I made it as a cop thriller. I have spoken about this before, but I saw Loomis as a detective, and I saw Michael as an escaped convict… going back on a killing spree,” Little revealed.

“I was a ’70s junkie,” Little said. “It was all Friedkin and Sydney Pollack and all interesting ’70s filmmakers, so I was trying to make more a police procedural, but Michael Myers happened to be the escaped convict. And I think that’s why it kind of holds up, because it’s not a throwaway teen slasher. Some people didn’t like it all because [of] that very reason, because it didn’t deliver ‘the kills.'”

This writer would beg to differ with the notion that Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers is lacking for good kills. Little, too, ultimately conceded as much.

“Although we had some fun kills. Bucky being thrown into the power lines is a good one,” Little noted. That doomed technician’s demise remains a fan favorite, per Joe Bob Briggs.

Early on in the film, Myers also kills a medical attendant (David Jansen) in the back of an ambulance with an unforgettably unorthodox method.

“The thumb in the forehead is a timeless classic.” Littled chuckled regarding the moment.

Kelly’s demise via shotgun impalement isn’t too shabby, either.

Horror Origins

So what was the horror movie that made Dwight H. Little, and helped him concoct one of the most beloved entries in one of the genre’s most beloved franchises? Understandably, it’s another iconic franchise installment featuring another terrific child actress.

“It all goes back, to me, to the first Exorcist. It just scared the bejesus out of me. I still have a hard time watching movie,” Little said. “There was something about how Friedkin shot that, and the performance that he got from the girl [a 12-year-old Linda Blair]. You really believe that she’s possessed. It’s not a special effect, it’s not CGI. The makeup effects and the acting were just terrifying. And that music, oh my god, the music.”

Little’s Still Rolling

Recently, Little committed his experiences to a new medium for him: the written word. His well-reviewed 2023 memoir, Still Rolling: Inside The Hollywood Dream Factory, takes stock of his career both on the big and small screens.

“I got asked to give a couple of these evening guest lectures down at UCLA,” Little told me. “And I thought, ‘Okay, there’s gonna be maybe 30 kids here or something.’ And the place was completed packed, a pretty big auditorium. I was like, ‘Wow, ego aside, I don’t think they’re all here for me.’ There’s just so much interest in filmmaking and getting into the business and all that. I went back again and it was also packed — smart, interested kids with lots of good questions, really broadly diverse.”

Still Rolling takes a unique approach to the Hollywood memoir, breaking down Little’s career into two segments.

“I thought, ‘Well, maybe if I write some of this stuff down, I could get in the conversation in a useful way.’ So I started writing and it came pretty easily,” Little noted. “And as I was writing, I realized that I had this very unique POV because I had done [at the time 12] movies, five of them studio movies, most of them wide releases, and then I had also done 25 years of network television, so not every director has had a ringside seat to both worlds. So I thought I had an interesting perspective. I actually divided the book into two sections, the first is movies and the second is television.”

With Little telling the tale, it’s bound to be a gripping read.