Jamie Lee Curtis didn’t know she was about to take on three more “Halloween” movies when she said yes to David Gordon Green’s 2018 film, the sequel to her 1978 film.
During a SXSW panel titled, “If Not Now, When, if Not Me, Who? Pivoting and Manifesting,” Curtis opened up about filmmaking and her career as an actress and producer. She first named her appreciation for Jason Blum.
“The only reason I am sitting in this chair today is because of Jason. Jason Blum, who runs Blumhouse, is the one who brought back the ‘Halloween’ movies,” she said. However, when she got the call, she thought it was one movie and didn’t hear until way later that they were planning to do more..
On Friday, August 21, 2026, I’ll be screening “H4” right next to the former Vincent Drug building featured in the film – at The Bambino restaurant on their outdoor patio, located directly beside Vincent Drug. The restaurant will be serving pizza and desserts all evening and as the sun goes down over Midvale, Halloween music will echo through the night… and The Shape returns!
This is the hottest nostalgic Halloween ticket of thr summer!
And you can be a part of it! You just need to dress like the slasher..They only need 250.. We all know we see more than that number on a typical Halloween night. You can do this Halloweens fans!
Fro the press release:
IllFonic is bringing the HALLOWEEN Video Game to PAX East, and they want to create the largest gathering of people dressed up as Michael Myers EVER, in an official Guinness World Records attempt in Boston on Saturday, March 28! Read on for full details.
From the official announcement: “On Saturday March 28th at 3:30 PM ET, IllFonic will be in Boston, MA attempting the GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS title for the ‘Largest gathering of people dressed as Michael Myers (Halloween franchise).’
“Whether you’re local to the area, flying in for PAX East, or just want to share in this special moment, we’re calling on you to show up dressed in your best Michael Myers costumes. But like any other world record attempt, there are official rules we need to follow in order to qualify. So, here’s what we’re looking for from Halloween fans eager to bust out their favorite pair of coveralls.
“First, we need at least 250 people fully dressed as Michael Myers to claim this record as our own. Ideally, we want to set this bar much higher, but this is our minimum threshold. Next, we need to discuss what qualifies as a person dressed as Michael Myers for the sake of this title attempt.
“Requirements
• A white mask with eye holes
Something that captures the essence of The Boogeyman
• Blue coveralls
• Brown, slicked back hair
This can be a hair built in to a mask, a separate wig, or natural hair that is styled accordingly
• And a prop knife
Emphasis on PROP here. Let’s keep this event safe and fun for everyone!
“Ultimately, you need to be instantly recognizable as Michael Myers and following these guidelines and the example set by our stunning Michael models here, will ensure participants aren’t disqualified and we secure our title on behalf of IllFonic, Compass International Pictures, Gun Interactive, and the amazing Halloween fans around the world. If you forget your coveralls, we’ll also have additional Michael Myers costumes standing by for anyone in the Boston area interested in taking part in the attempt.”
Halloween is over. The Spirit Halloween stores are packing up, lights going off, signs disappearing, and those empty retail shells will sit silent again… at least until next August when they reawaken like they always do.
But — you might notice something different this year. A few of those locations aren’t going dark. They’re turning into Spirit Christmas. And honestly? That’s kind of amazing.
We’re completely on board with Spirit Halloween existing. It has become a tradition. A yearly pilgrimage. A seasonal personality trait. And if Spirit Christmas wants to step into the game and bring some of that same energy into December, we welcome it. Why not? Let weirdness continue all year long.
We love horror. We love creepy. We love a little darkness mixed into the tinsel and eggnog. But Art the Clown is… let’s just say… a strong choice for holiday cheer. There are plenty of horror icons that blend nicely with Christmas themes — Krampus, Black Christmas, Gremlins, Jack Skellington — but a child-murdering clown who blows up shopping malls might be a bit of a leap for the family fireplace mantel. But hey — to each their own. If you want to deck the halls with decapitation, no one is stopping you.
The reality is that Spirit Christmas will not be nearly as widespread as Spirit Halloween — at least not yet. It’s more of a test run. Only select stores. Only certain markets. But if people show up, if the ugly sweaters sell, if the creepy ornaments fly off shelves… expect this to grow.
And honestly, we’ve always had a soft spot for keeping a little creepy in Christmas. There’s something fun about breaking the overly-sanitized Hallmark version of the holiday and letting the weird spirits in.
So we say:
The more the merrier. Deck the halls. Light your balls. Wear your Terrifier sweater if you dare. Let Christmas get a little strange.
Well, here we go again. Another year, another urban legend. Another Halloween, another hoax.
If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you know we’ve talked about this for years. The idea that someone, somewhere, is lurking in the shadows with a razor blade, a needle, or a vial of poison just waiting to sabotage Halloween candy has been one of the biggest folk panics in America since the 1950s.
And yes—there are two real historical incidents people always point to a dentist in the 1950s really did tamper with candy and was caught. And then there was that infamous case of a father who murdered his own child by poisoning candy on Halloween. That tragedy didn’t just spark panic—it cemented it.
But here’s the important part: Outside of those isolated, personal crimes, the idea of random strangers poisoning or rigging candy for mass harm has never been supported by evidence. Yet every October, news headlines warn parents to “check your candy,” police departments post caution notices, and viral Facebook posts spread like wildfire.
This year was no different.
In Maryland, police shared an image of a razor blade and warned families to inspect their candy. Panic flickered across social media like clockwork. But then—also like clockwork—just days later came the follow-up:
It was a hoax.
A 9-year-old admitted to placing sewing needles into their own candy. No shadowy candy saboteur. No Halloween horror villain. Just a kid doing what kids sometimes do—testing boundaries, trying to create a moment, maybe wanting attention, maybe just not understanding the consequences.
And the cycle continues.
This is arguably the longest-running American urban legend. It has outlived generations, presidents, and every other seasonal news scare. It’s a story we want to believe, because Halloween already sits on that uneasy line between childhood innocence and the spooky unknown.
But here we are, one more year in, one more scare disproven.
So once again, we can officially say:
Your candy is safe. (Well… safe from strangers. Not safe from someone in your house raiding the stash.)
And I can confirm that personally, because I’ve been secretly eating my son’s Halloween candy since Halloween night.
A tale of two costumes. One amazing.. the other … tacky?
Heidi Klum donned green scales and squirming snakes to transform herself into Medusa for Halloween on Friday.
Klum said she loves the Greek myth of Medusa, in which a goddess turns a beautiful woman into a monster with serpents for hair.
“So I wanted to be really, really like a really ugly, ugly Medusa. And I feel like we nailed it – to the teeth,” Klum said before pointing to fangs in her mouth.
But meanwhile.. tacky has been brought back in ’25..
For an Oct. 30 Halloween party in New York City, Julia Fox dressed up as Jackie Kennedy in a blood-soaked pink ensemble, re-creating what the former first lady wore the day her husband, President John F. Kennedy, was assassinated.
The look elicited many strong reactions online, with some social media users calling it “disrespectful.”
On Instagram, Fox revealed why she chose the look for Halloween.
“I’m dressed as Jackie Kennedy in the pink suit. Not as a costume, but as a statement,” she said. “When her husband was assassinated, she refused to change out of her blood-stained clothes, saying, ‘I want them to see what they’ve done.’ The image of the delicate pink suit splattered with blood is one of the most haunting juxtapositions in modern history.”
“Beauty and horror. Poise and devastation. Her decision not to change clothes, even after being encouraged to, was an act of extraordinary bravery,” Fox continued. “It was performance, protest, and mourning all at once. A woman weaponizing image and grace to expose brutality. It’s about trauma, power, and how femininity itself is a form of resistance. Long live Jackie O ♥️.”
A Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman offered a two-word reply Friday in response to a local news report that said immigration agents were seen wearing Halloween masks in the Los Angeles area.
“Happy Halloween!” DHS assistant secretary for public affairs Tricia McLaughlin wrote to NBC News when asked about the report.
The story by the local news site LA Taco featured images posted to social media showing what the outlet says were agents in unmarked cars donning Chucky and Momo masks. It said a member of the Harbor Area Peace Patrol, which monitors federal activity in the area, spotted the vehicle with the Momo mask-wearing driver at an immigration raid on Tuesday.
Have Halloween Decorations Gone Too Far? The New York Times Thinks So.
With just a few more days until Halloween at the time this post is being written, the signs of the season are everywhere. Streets are lined with orange lights. Skeletons lean against porch railings. Witches hang from gutters. Ghosts sway from the slightest breeze. Leaves fall like confetti over graves, pumpkins, and plastic bones.
The article points toward the new trend of hyper-realistic gore — bloody clowns, mangled “bodies,” dismembered limbs, and of course, the now-iconic 12-foot-tall Home Depot skeleton (which, let’s be honest, many of us tried to buy the moment it went on sale in July.)
From their opening:
On a recent Sunday evening, Melanie Parker took her 2-year-old to the Ditmas Park section of Brooklyn to see a house in the area known for its elaborate Halloween displays. “He loves classic Halloween imagery — pumpkins, witches, ghosts, spiders and skeletons,” Ms. Parker, 38, a full-time caregiver who lives with her partner in Crown Heights, said of her son.
Adorning the home, though, was “a ton of blood” as well as “dismembered bodies, like a child’s head,” she said. “They were all moving and speaking and gesturing and making noises.” The decorations were illuminated in a way that made many of the figures — and wounds — appear more lifelike, she added.
Since then, her son “keeps talking about the guy who broke his head and the people who were hurt. Our kid was both riveted and disturbed.”
Being a little spooked is part of the delight of Halloween. But lately, some say genuine jump scares are abundant — on stoops and front lawns, looming in doorways and hanging from rafters — as household decorations seem to have become more gory, more violent and unsettlingly realistic.
The piece quotes Tom Hardy, a finance professor at the University of Richmond, who notes that Halloween decorations have become far more realistic due to improved manufacturing and cheaper production. And the numbers back that up.
The National Retail Federation estimates that Americans will spend $4.2 billion on Halloween decorations this year — up from $1.6 billion just a few years ago in 2019.
That’s not a small shift but more like a cultural transformation.
Halloween Used to Be for Kids… Now It’s for Adults
Once upon a time, Halloween meant cardboard Frankenstein cutouts taped to doors, pillowcase trick-or-treating. Silly pranks. Sure eggs made people really mad, as did toilet paper.. Mischief that barely counted as mischief.
Now?
Trunk-or-Treat handles the kids on some random Thursday night..
Halloween night — and Halloween décor — now belongs to adults. With that adults have developed different tastes in how they celebrate..
Here are two images pushed by the TIMES piece to show how gruesome the holiday has come to look recently..
But before we clutch pearls too quickly, history reminds us something important: Let’s keep in mind, you can go back in history and realize that every era has thought the next one “went too far.”
We May Have Forgotten What Halloween Originally Was
When people today think “Halloween,” they think:
Michael Myers
Serial killers
Horror movies
Murder and gore
But Halloween didn’t start there.
In Pagan tradition — the roots of what became Halloween — this time of year was seen as the season of darkness. The sun was weakening. The world was cooling. The harvest was ending. Life was preparing for sleep.
The rituals weren’t created to celebrate darkness. They were created to ward it off.
Pagans lit fires to chase away spirits, wore masks to blend in and hide from the dead.. they left offerings at doorsteps for roaming souls.. and they carved jack-o-laterns to eventually scare of demons and Jack himself.
The point wasn’t to revel in horror but instead to acknowledge the darkness and survive it — until the light returned in winter festivals that later became Christmas.
So even if Halloween is darker now, gorier now, more theatrical now — the deepest roots of it actually weren’t about blood and brutality.
They were about respecting the season of death while waiting for rebirth.
So Have We Gone Too Far?
Eh.. maybe sometimes, right? We can see those types of decorations that do. We know it when we see it.. There’s a difference between celebrating spooky fun and staging a simulated fatal car accident on your lawn.
There’s a difference between a ghost in the window and a mangled corpse hanging from the gutters. Even the most dedicated ancient pagan, who believed the veil was thinning and spirits walked among us, probably would not have created a full-on gore display in their front yard.
The point was never shock value but instead it was remembrance and respect–and yes a little fear of what was unknown.
Maybe the Real Question Is This… is it for us or for the kids?
Are we decorating for fear or are we decorating for ritual? Something meaningful seems to have become lost in the shuffle of cheap decorations..
Are we trying to scare the neighborhood kids or are we unconsciously reenacting the oldest seasonal story humans ever told?
The world is dark.. so we face it with light.. Halloween is not about mayhem or murder .. and actually it never was about either of those things. It is a mirror on who we are–we are looking at ourselves in a mirror behind the gore and blood dripping from the reflection…
There have been so many times over the years that we’ve felt nostalgic when we see old Halloween decorations — you know, those cardboard cutouts that were orange and green. Frankenstein’s head taped onto the door. There was something practical about those decorations, but also simple. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe we get that nostalgia not just because we remember the cardboard or the artwork, but because things today have gotten too gory, too over the top. Maybe we’ve become desensitized from how much gore and shock we’re immersed in, even in comedy.
You scroll online now and there are AI videos of chiropractors throwing old women out windows or jumping on people’s backs. The shock might make you laugh the first time, but at some point it just becomes tiring. Gore is the same way. Movies try to go for the big shock, the big moment — but they don’t really shock anymore. They just leave us bored. We’ve been so inundated with intensity that all we want now is the cardboard cutout of Frankenstein. It feels like that’s all we want.
The world gets dark. We face it. We wait for the light.
Halloween isn’t just murder and mayhem. It never was.
But it is a mirror — and maybe right now, we’re looking into a mirror that just happens to have a little more blood on it.
Halloween II picks up right where John Carpenter’s 1978 classic left off .. literally seconds after Michael Myers disappears into the darkness. The sequel takes us deeper into the same October 31st night, only now the screams echo through Haddonfield Memorial Hospital instead of quiet suburban streets.
The movie doesn’t wastes little time with new setups or character introductions; it just drops you right back into that same world, that same panic, that same cold air that hung over the end of the first film. You feel the chaos in the cold night.. even Mrs. Elrod screams as she makes a sandwich and finds blood–to this day we don’t know if her husband wanted mayo or mustard.
There a few interesting back stories to Halloween II almost .. one major point is that it almost didn’t happen the way we know it.
Carpenter himself didn’t originally plan a direct sequel and he envisioned the Halloween name turning into an anthology of different scary stories. He was YEARS ahead of his time on that thought process.
Moustapha Akkad sensed a hit… and it was time to capitalize ..
After the studio pushed for more Michael Myers Carpenter grudgingly agreed to write it. He’s even said he wrote the script with a six-pack of beer by his side, just trying to make sense of what would happen next. That might explain the surreal, dream-like pacing the film has. The movie is admittedly a little sloppy, but hazier, and far more violent than the first.
The mask was back. It was still the same Shatner face, but this time yellowed by chain smoking that Debra Hill subjected it to. Also the new inhabitant with a different face shape. Dick Warlock’s mug was rounder while Nick Castle was longer, hence the difference in appearance.
The new film also had more blood–Carpenter did that on purpose to match what audiences were then wanting. Akkad wasn’t overly happy with that because the TV broadcasts had to be tamed down ..
Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode became the face of the “final girl” trope. But in the sequel, she spends much of the movie confined to a hospital bed, drugged and traumatized, yet still somehow finds the strength to fight back. Donald Pleasence returns as Dr. Loomis, more unhinged than ever, shouting his famous lines about evil and destiny as he hunts Michael through sterile hallways. It is the hospital scenes that give the most feeling of the film. The fluorescent lights, the empty corridors, beeping heart monitors, all building to that fiery ending.
There were several points of Halloween 2 that feel like a docu-drama. You can feel the chaos and panic of the police in the movie–this is exactly how small town America police faced with a gory bloody scene of teenagers being killed would actually react. Now poor Ben Tramer got the brunt. Was it Loomis’ fault by the way? We never really get the chance to flesh that out..
To us, not only scarier but quite frankly better. Halloween II seems to get better with each passing year despite Carpenter still unwilling to embrace the face that he and Hill either accidentally or unwittingly created a classic.
Perhaps the only pet peeve is that this movie could have been renamed ALL SAINTS DAY since it mostly took place after Halloween, mostly on November 1 if you think about the continuity.
It’s often overshadowed by the original, but Halloween II deserves more credit. It’s the movie that closed the story of Laurie and Michael (at least until later recreations), expanded the mythology, and gave us the twist that Laurie was his sister .. love it or hate it, it was a plot line that shaped the franchise for decades.
When Halloween ENDS came out, fans watched.. and never watched again. But they loved the opening 7 minutes that herald back to the original night he came home. There is lure in a way to what Michael Myers did in the immediate aftermath to Loomis’ six shots.
While ENDS gives us a perspective of a movie that Carpenter never made, we still love the one he did: Halloween II is better than Halloween 1.
