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Production Designer Explains How Halloween Opening Credits Were Done
Masked killer Michael Myers (Jim Courtney) in "Halloween." Jamie Lee Curtis returns to her iconic role as Laurie Strode, who comes to her final confrontation with Michael Myers, the masked figure who has haunted her since she narrowly escaped his killing spree on Halloween night four decades ago.
In an interview with Filmmaker Magazine, Halloween production designer Richard Wright revealed how he and Greenhaus GFX pulled off the opening credits sequence in the sequel. After a cold open, the film cuts to the credits, which are styled similarly to the 1978 original. The difference is that the pumpkin is flattened and destroyed, before coming back to life.
Wright said: “When the idea came up I was immediately like, ‘Let me do it.’ I think it’s the coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to film. I abandoned my hopes of being a director of photography a while ago and just decided to focus on [being a production designer], but it’s kind of awesome that I got to shoot a tiny little part of the number one movie in the country. We had purchased [the pumpkins] in November from a farmers’ market that had a couple pallets full left over from Halloween 2017. My art department arranged to have them stored in a walk-in fridge for a few months and I think they had to soak them in a vinegar bath to keep them from discoloring. When the idea to shoot the time lapse developed, we put aside all of the good enough looking pumpkins that were left over to use for that purpose. [We] lit the pumpkins mostly with Home Depot lights like the kind you’d put under your kitchen cabinets. It was super low-tech. It was literally done for a couple hundred dollars. It wasn’t originally conceived to run in reverse, but I think it works nicely. It gives this sense of the rebirth [of the franchise], 40 years after the original.“
