Michael — called “The Shape” — was played by Nick Castle.. As a small boy, Michael Myers was played, in one scene, by an actor named Will Sandin in his first and last role on screen. In POV shots, the hands of young Michael were provided by co-writer and producer Debra Hill, while the unmasked Michael — who appears only briefly at the very end of the movie — was played by Tony Moran.
Vanity Fair adjusted Castle’s paycheck for inflation, saying that $525 in 1978 would be about $2,509 in 2018. By 2023, that inflation only equals $2,583.43. According to Rent.com, the average price of a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles is about $2,853..
In Castle’s own words:
“I was paid $25 per day for ‘Halloween.’ That was a lot at the time! You have to remember: my interest in doing the film was being on set, so I could demystify the experience of filmmaking and directing. I expected to hang around the set for no money. But hey, $25 per day, and all I had to do was wear a rubber mask. It’s a mystery what [John Carpenter] saw in me and the way I moved. I asked John, ‘What is this character going to do?’ And he said, ‘Just walk across the street.’ I knew Michael’s movements weren’t going to be robotic. He was a real guy. He’s not rushing.”
After seeing a ‘best of Halloween’ Youtube OFFICE themed video, one particular scene was foreign. That is because it was rarely seen–cut by NBC and not on Netflix when it appeared there or Peacock now in its current home.
The scene was originally featured in the episode, “Koi Pond,” the eighth installment of season 6. You will not find it now.
“Koi Pond” was one of the most memorable episodes from The Office season 6. Jim had a meeting with an important client but it was requested that Michael come along. When the duo returned, Michael was soaking wet and it was revealed that he fell into a koi pond. After a lesson about mocking fellow employees, the office learned that Jim could have stopped Michael from falling into the pond but he purposely stepped aside to let it happen.
The episode is famous in OFFICE lore for the plot. But also famous for what vanished.
The episode aired on October 29, 2009, and opened by showing the employees of Dunder Mifflin Scranton putting together a haunted warehouse for the local kids. Darryl , who Michael referred to as “gangster pumpkin”, pushed the kids around as the rest of the employees put on less than inspired horror scenes.
The cold open-ended with Michael simulating a suicide, horrifying the children while turning it into a life lesson and referencing that Christmas is not the only season with a message and that suicide is not the answer..
It appears NBC had a backlash to the episode. Some thought it was too offensive and inappropriate causing NBC to remove the scene. Michael was dressed as Saturday Night Live‘s character, D*ck in a Box during his hanging.
You an see it here, still, in all its cut and edited glory:
We were busy recollecting some nostalgia by watching this glorious VHS copy of when Halloween 4 appeared on television .. commercials galore. Edited for your TV viewing pleasure.. But when we get to the mark, we noticed something interesting. An advertisement for Halloween 5–and a 900 number.
https://youtu.be/lfcOz4epj1E?t=2890
Now 900 numbers were quite a thing when I still in single digits. If you were alive then you may recall the 900 Freddy Krueger numbers. The sex lines. The psychics.. It was a different time and era. But this number, 1-900-860-0700, produced an interesting response:
Dialing 1-900-860-0700 prompted you to guide a potential victim of Michael Myers to safety.. Michael most likely always won. The hotline itself aired directly after the end of television promos for the film. The hotline itself aired directly after the end of television promos for the film. The voice on the other end would give you a variety of places that could be found in said film, like the Tower Farm or the Children’s Clinic, to send Michael’s prey for safety.
Undoubtedly people who were alive at the time recall being in big trouble from their parents by racking up huge 900 phone bills. It was easy to do, you paid by the minute.
Too bad no one recorded the actual audio from the call–we have tried our best but cannot find anything proving someone did.
If you call it now, it is disconnected.. Which is good since in today’s dollars the call would be 5 bucks a minute..
Samhain was a celebration of the harvest and is closely associated with the concept of autumn symbolically representing the end of life and the start of the winter cycle.
The bonfire is therefore a symbolic means of ushering in the process of rebirth.
It seem that Halloween 4 makes the socials on an annual basis.. Why?
The 1988 sequel suffered horrendous criticism in the year was released. Through the 1990s, people who were fans of the original almost were offended by the Return of Michael Myers. It was just about as bad as the feels of Halloween 3. So why are people celebrating it annually?
For horror fans, this meme may make the most sense. Michael Myers was back. But he was really different:
So why does the movie trend this time of year?
It is not because of its acting or script, but instead the imagery. And not just the nostalgia for those who felt it. But even more, the silent and quiet nostalgia for those who never experienced it and never will.
Halloween 4 is set as though 3 never happened, ten years after a hospital exploded in Haddenfield and Mikey and Dr. Loomis survived the blaze. Myers grabs a new mask off a discount drug store rack and the rest is history. Of course multiple further sequels goofs up the timeline as much as a Marvel Spider-Man movie. Seriously.. it can be confusing for the non horror fans.
But this film sparks some other melancholy of the infinite sadness.
It began without the famous pumpkin and piano theme.. but instead a series of autumnal images .. what it is about the imagery which makes the film this special?
The fall feeling? That is what social media streams seem to suggest. All of those images sure present that aura..
The other thing presented is not just pictures of the loneliest parts of fall, but also a somber haunting musical background to the scenery.
This is something those who lived in 1988 can feel. I can almost taste and smell the pictures. I had moments with friends and family in the heyday of the decade that look the same in the memories. Out late at night before a curfew when the rural landscape was dancing with a fiery sunset.
I recall vividly a moment when friends of mine and cousins were out too late, well beyond the time when we should have been home earlier. We were lost somewhere deep in farm lands. At sunset, we thought we saw someone with an axe. Or a machine. Or farm equipment. Heck we were 7 and 8 years-old and had no clue what we were seeing. So we ran home.. When we got back to my cousin’s house, we were in a bit of trouble (but it was the 80s, parents were okay with this stuff) and –seriously–Halloween was playing on TV. The theme song greeted us walking through the front door.
For people reading this, the 80s and 90s really were different. No doubt.. not saying better.
But sure as hell not saying worse.
Those who were born soon or well after the appearance of Halloween 4’s intro in ’88 be viscerally in tune to the opening scene. Perhaps, maybe, these feelings in innate. The deep and profound feeling is within us.. the nostalgia is passed down. The feeling of sunsets arriving earlier perhaps are somehow so humanly frightening that the nostalgia of that moment never goes away. No matter the generational or technological advance. We feel the feeling.
We are all immersed in the advance of autumn. The festival of Samhaim. The solemn rituals of the early fall and the eventual darkness that takes hold.. deep in our souls.
Miramax’s Head of Global TV Marc Helwig will be overseeing the franchise creatively in close collaboration with producer and CEO of Trancas Malek Akkad, who has worked on Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers,Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, Halloween: Resurrection, Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009).
According to Deadline, “The new Halloween series is envisioned to potentially launch a cinematic universe spanning film and television. Miramax’s Head of Global TV Marc Helwig will be overseeing the franchise creatively in close collaboration with Akkad”as well as reminding that “Jointly controlling both the film and TV rights would allow Miramax and Trancas to map out an integrated film-TV universe.”
As much as some fans seem to hate HALLOWEEN ENDS, it has made money..
As per The Numbers, with the money it earned on Thursday, November 3, the final entry in director David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy has earned $100.1 million at the global box office.
That includes $62 million domestically and $38 million from overseas ticket sales. Historically, this series has always done better on the domestic side of things.
Regardless, against a reported $20 million budget, that makes this a winner for Universal Pictures and Blumhouse.
If you have been paying attention to pop culture and the Internet(s) lately, you’ll understand that there has been a flourishing new series of weird content .. There are various sources out there providing us some amazing artificial intelligence artwork. The type of art that enters your brain and is so vivid you wince, you look perplexed.. you get creeped out.
So let’s explain..
It is everywhere!! AI art! It is abundant.. it is booming fast. And so often it is dark, creepy.. obscure and weird..
People have embraced the weirdness..
John Oliver got fun and self-deprecating about AI art on his show..
We also got into the act several weeks ago and made our own AI art by asking a computer to create “Coal Speaker.” It was pretty odd, as evidenced by our favorite picture:
YOU HAVE OPTIONS..
Starryai.. Wombo.. Dall-E.. DreamStudio.. Midjourney.. You have options. AI is creating art for people on multiple platforms. As we have seen, the art normally gets dark and macabre quickly.. It is changing the world of art as well. Big time..
Think of it.. your imagination is contained to what it can conjure, what your brain can create.. but AI art can take it all in.. create something from nothing, or collect images and thoughts from various ‘Internets’ to bring a strange and bizarre sentence to life.
Search for “lima beans hunting aliens on the planet Poptart” .. and AI art will create it for you. Just for fun, we did that exact thing, and we came up with this (DreamStudio didn’t know quite what to do with it)
It all started with DALL·E … it made major waves since it was first revealed back in April 2022 because it was the most advanced AI art generator that we has been introduced..
Some artists are concerned. Other artists are just going hog wild creating images that are made in rapid fire by computers, based on random sentences.. random thoughts..
There is a huge new trend on TikTok of people search for each line of song lyrics to create an array of beautiful videos to famous songs..
All created in seconds.. All created with AI–no humans painting or drawing.. just artificial intelligence quickly changing our world…
BUT AI GETS CREEPY
So often, it appears that AI art goes down a rabbit hole of high strangeness.. For example, we asked for a series of images of “Pope Francis” and eventually AI art created what appears to be the Pope fighting off a double-demon version of himself..
Thought AI art was weird? Here is where things get … really strange.
Meet Loab. The woman, or creation from AI art, of your nightmare..
Let’s try to unpack ..
It all started back in September as we entered into the autumnal season.
An artist on Twitter under the handle @supercomposite used a technique called “negative prompt weights.” That means the user attempts to force an artificial intelligence system to generate the opposite of what they enter in the prompt.
Different terms can be “weighted” in a data set to determine how likely they are to appear in the results. You are simply telling AI to “Generate what you think is the opposite of this prompt.”
There is actually some coding that goes into this procedure..
So using this negative-weight prompt on the word Brando–with supercomposite referring to Marlon Brando–it created a logo image with a city panorama and the words “DIGITA PNTICS”.
At this point, supercomposite figured using using negative weights for the words DIGITA PNTICS it may see Marlon Brando..
No. Wrong. Instead, Loab was born.
MEET LOAB
The AI generator has not been named, but some have speculated that due to its quality it MidJourney or Stable Diffusion.
From the Tweet back in September:
I'll explain negative prompt weights, in case you don't know. With these, instead of creating an image of the text prompt, the AI tries to make the image look as different from the prompt as possible. This logo was the result of the negatively weighted prompt "Brando::-1". pic.twitter.com/c1XfkN23hu
This is what supercomposite went on to say about Loab, in a series of Tweets:
Since Loab was discovered using negative prompt weights, her gestalt is made from a collection of traits that are equally far away from something. But her combined traits are still a cohesive concept for the AI, and almost all descendent images contain a recognizable Loab.
…
The angel hallway + Loab also produced art with such copious gore that probably very few people want to see them, but here are two. I don’t feel comfortable posting the most disturbing ones, borderline snuff images of dismembered, screaming children.
..
There is something moving to me about these grotesque scenes and the desperation, panic, and sadness that they convey. Again, these are produced with other images as inputs, and no text. They are the result of “cross-breeding” images of Loab with images of other things.
…
The images that result from crossing Loab with other images can in turn be crossbred with other images. The AI can latch onto the idea of Loab so well that she can persist through generations of this type of crossbreeding, without using the original image.
..
Even when her red cheeks or other important features disappear, the “Loabness” of the images she has a hand in making is undeniable. She haunts the images, persists through generations, and overpowers other bits of the prompt because the AI so easily optimizes toward her face.
AND MUCH MORE..
So it can go from Loab:
To these other versions:
And this..
At this point, as she gets more famous, Loab could be potentially new “creepypasta” of the internet, but in the other side it could be a grotesque source of inspiration for making horror movies..
One of our favorite YouTube accounts, NEXPO, featured Loab in a recent video, and it is worth the viewing:
Matthew Skala, a computer scientist, tried to explain how Loab was created..
Okay: yes the pictures are freaky but the phenomenon is not really as surprising as it may first seem. When you think of it in high-dimensional geometric terms it's understandable why there would be *some* image that tends to soak up negative-prompt queries. https://t.co/dr2VA8uoNT
But why so dark.. Why does AI keep taking us to the abyss?
The AI generated images, derived from the original Loab image, go straight away into the realm of horror, graphic violence, and gore. But no matter how many variations have been made, the images all seem to depict the same horrifying woman.
They don’t change.. Loab stays.. She continues persisting through that weird and dark tunnel of AI art..
In the end, AI programs generate images using models that are trained on billions of images and are too complex to understand why a certain result is achieved.. So you will not really know why or how Loab, or any other oddity, was created. It just was..
Loab is haunting.
Will she replace Momo and Huggy Wuggy? She sure could..
….yes….AI art continues to be just be glum and dire.. distraught and dark.
Until you ask AI itself to create “Happy AI creating AI Art” … and we get this:
But before you get overjoyed by the colorful and happy image of AI showcasing itself, don’t forget what else it creates. Images of the vast unknown.. the sad. The tired. The horror.
And Loab…
Yes indeed… remember that before you embrace AI art..
Halloween ENDS has become even more controversial that Busta Rhyme’s cameo.. But could it have been even MORE controversial with an alternate ending that some speculate was possible?
Now that we have all witnessed this weekend’s atrocity (sure many of you may still like it) of a HALLOWEEN ENDS, we need to refocus..
The original ending MAY have been different–and quite frankly would have even been MORE divisive than what HALLOWEEN ENDS already did..
From the YouTuber CRITICAL OVERLORD, this video talks about how the potential ending could have been–Laurie would have looked at ‘the Shape’ SHE would have become the new evil.. Much more controversial, no?
At least it would have been interesting!
What we got was.. certainly not what many expected. Wanted.. or deserved?
But really.. what movie since Halloween 1 and 2 were what we expected or deserved, right?
