I’m sure I’m not the only one on here whose first exposure to John Carpenter’s Halloween was on TV. In fact, growing up, I saw the network TV version of the movie a whole bunch of times, as it was in pretty regular circulation on syndicated TV in the late eighties and early nineties. Yet, when I finally saw the uncut version of Halloween as a teen on pay-TV, I thought scenes were missing. Where were the scenes of Donald Pleasance as Dr. Loomis trying to convince a hospital review board that six-year-old Michael Myers wasn’t just a sick child? Well, as everyone reading this likely knows, no such scene exists in the legit version of the film.
What happened was that in 1981, when Halloween II was being prepped for release, John Carpenter was convinced by NBC to shoot some additional footage for the film to pad out the time slot, as the movie had to be cut A LOT to be acceptable on Network TV at the time. In all, Carpenter shot twelve minutes of new material, managing to get both Donald Pleasence and Jamie Lee Curtis to return (Curtis had to wrap a towel around her head for her scene, as she was shooting another movie with short hair). Notably, it tied into a plot element from the second film, that Myers was actually Laurie Strode’s brother. This aspect of the franchise would become part of the standard franchise before David Gordon Green’s “requels”, which ignored every other movie besides the first Halloween.
The TV cut remains a curiosity for fans, and although it will never be reintegrated into the legitimate version of the movie, you can still view all the scenes on YouTube, as many disc releases include them as a bonus feature. One interesting aspect of them is that, even though they were only ever intended for the TV cut, Carpenter still shot them in his 2:35:1 scope aspect ratio and panned and scanned them for TV, making them more uniform with the rest of the film.
Does anyone else have any fond memories of the Halloween TV cut? Let us know in the comments.
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