The Reporter Death Scene Cut From 1981’s Halloween 2

Halloween 2 wasn’t the scariest installment in the franchise, but one of Michael Myers’ victims was spared because their death scene proved insufficiently spooky. Released in 1978, John Carpenter’s Halloween quickly became a sleeper hit whose massive impact at the box office paved the way for the early ’80s slasher craze.

The original Halloween remains the quintessential slasher (alongside Bob Clark’s earlier Black Christmas), from its plucky final girl heroine, Jamie Lee Curtis’ resourceful babysitter Laurie Strode, to its mute, masked murdering madman Michael Myers, to its many synth-scored suspenseful sequences of stalking and slashing. An instant hit with audiences, Halloween was quickly given a sequel in the form of 1981’s Halloween 2, a cobbled-together follow-up that hoped to capitalize on the original movie’s success. Although Carpenter returned to reshoot some of Halloween 2‘s scenes, critics and fans at large agreed that the second movie failed to offer the same thrills as the original Halloween.

However, this was not for any lack of trying on the part of Halloween 2. While Carpenter himself may have dismissed the sequel’s first cut, Halloween 2 did offer more gore than its predecessor to compete with the slew of increasingly dark, ambitiously gruesome slashers that were rushed into production in the wake of the original Halloween’s success. Forced to contend with the likes of The New York Ripper‘s mutilated victims and Maniac‘s exploding heads filling multiplexes, as a result, Halloween 2 featured far more death scenes than the original film. It may not be the Halloween movie with the highest body count, but Halloween 2 did take its number of victims up to 10 as opposed to the first film’s 7, and this number was originally higher as it included the death of a news reporter. However, this scene ended up being reshot by Carpenter, with the reporter’s death destined for the cutting room floor due to the sequence not proving scary enough.

The original explanation for how Michael Myers managed to make it to the hospital where Laurie is being treated was that the murderer was hitching a ride inside the trunk of a news reporter’s car. When she stopped the car due to a flat tire, Michael was originally going to leap from the trunk and cut her throat before driving himself the rest of the way (how exactly he learned to drive while in an asylum remains a Halloween franchise plot hole, actually).

However, as Dread Central revealed, this Halloween 2 scene was cut because it wasn’t scary enough, and Carpenter’s reshoots gave a new explanation for Michael heading to the hospital. Interestingly, Carpenter’s reshot version of the scene also offered a cameo role for the son of Dick Warlock, the actor playing Michael Myers. After Carpenter’s tracking shot switches from focusing on a nurse listening to the radio and hearing where Laurie is to focusing on Michael, the small child that the franchise villain walks into in the hallway is Warlock’s real-life son, providing a sweet cameo as well as a more suspenseful version of the original Halloween 2 death scene.