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Interview: Nick Castle on His Return to Haddonfield in ‘Halloween’ 2018

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Forty years ago Nick Castle stumbled into portraying one of the most iconic killers in horror history when he donned the pale white mask and coveralls of Michael Myers aka The Shape in 1978’s Halloween.

Castle, who would later go on to direct classic films like The Last Starfighter and The Boy Who Could Fly, had attended film school with writer/director John Carpenter, and when he found out his friend was directing a movie near his home, he called Carpenter up and asked if he could visit the set.

“He said, ‘Yeah,’ and then asked if I wanted to put on the mask and hang around the set,” Castle recalled in an interview with iHorror earlier this week. “And I said, ‘Yeah, that’s a good idea.’ That’s how it all started. There wasn’t a lot of direction. I just put on the mask and did it.”

Nick Castle stumbled into the iconic role of Michael Myers aka The Shape in the original Halloween.

It’s one of those Hollywood stories that’s hard to believe, but without much direction, or acting experience for that matter, Castle found a way of moving and embodying the character that made The Shape all too real and terrifying and influenced every actor who donned the mask in the decades that followed.

“I don’t know where that came from,” he admits, “but that idea that he would be very deliberate in his movements, it was very obvious to me, and I didn’t need much more than that. The character was very much a Frankenstein’s monster to me. He moved slowly, deliberately…you couldn’t really see his eyes. All you can see is that horrible, blank mask.”

Flash forward 40 years. Castle had retired from filmmaking when he received a call from David Gordon Green asking if he’d be interested in making some small reprisal of the role in a new Halloween film that retconned back to that original film and Castle’s portrayal.

Castle had started making appearances on the convention circuit, and had been meeting fans, realizing just how much that original film had meant to them over the years, and he suddenly knew this was a project he had to do.

“They brought me out to South Carolina for a week and I got to hang with the cast and crew,” he said. “I got to see Jamie [Lee Curtis] again, and John [Carpenter] came down to hang out. It was like a reunion, and we had a blast.”

He is quick to point out, however, that the lion’s share of The Shape’s portrayal in Halloween 2018 is on actor and stuntman James Jude Courtney.

“If they had asked me to come down and do the whole role,” he said, “it would have been a very different thing to consider. Having to be on set at 2 am, get ‘stabbed’ by this guy, do this, do that. The guy who does all that hard work is James Courtney, and he’s amazing. He was the one getting chairs thrown at him at 2 in the morning.”

Nick Castle with James Jude Courtney both appeared as The Shape in Halloween.

With the film in the can, he was excited to see audience reactions, and it also brought him back to the world of red carpet premieres for the first time in many years.

It was exciting, and even more so that he got to share it with his family.

“It was crazy!” he said. “I got to bring my two sons and their wives. The wives had never experienced going to a big opening and taking them there and to the premiere party was just a lot of fun.”

Halloween is already available on digital streaming services and hits Blu-Ray and DVD this week on Tuesday, January 15, 2019.

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‘Evil Dead’ Film Franchise Getting TWO New Installments

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It was a risk for Fede Alvarez to reboot Sam Raimi’s horror classic The Evil Dead in 2013, but that risk paid off and so did its spiritual sequel Evil Dead Rise in 2023. Now Deadline is reporting that the series is getting, not one, but two fresh entries.

We already knew about the Sébastien Vaniček upcoming film that delves into the Deadite universe and should be a proper sequel to the latest film, but we are broadsided that Francis Galluppi and Ghost House Pictures are doing a one-off project set in Raimi’s universe based off of an idea that Galluppi pitched to Raimi himself. That concept is being kept under wraps.

Evil Dead Rise

“Francis Galluppi is a storyteller who knows when to keep us waiting in simmering tension and when to hit us with explosive violence,” Raimi told Deadline. “He is a director that shows uncommon control in his feature debut.”

That feature is titled The Last Stop In Yuma County which will release theatrically in the United States on May 4. It follows a traveling salesman, “stranded at a rural Arizona rest stop,” and “is thrust into a dire hostage situation by the arrival of two bank robbers with no qualms about using cruelty-or cold, hard steel-to protect their bloodstained fortune.”

Galluppi is an award-winning sci-fi/horror shorts director whose acclaimed works include High Desert Hell and The Gemini Project. You can view the full edit of High Desert Hell and the teaser for Gemini below:

High Desert Hell
The Gemini Project

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‘Invisible Man 2’ Is “Closer Than Its Ever Been” to Happening

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Elisabeth Moss in a very well-thought-out statement said in an interview for Happy Sad Confused that even though there have been some logistical issues for doing Invisible Man 2 there is hope on the horizon.

Podcast host Josh Horowitz asked about the follow-up and if Moss and director Leigh Whannell were any closer to cracking a solution to getting it made. “We are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” said Moss with a huge grin. You can see her reaction at the 35:52 mark in the below video.

Happy Sad Confused

Whannell is currently in New Zealand filming another monster movie for Universal, Wolf Man, which might be the spark that ignites Universal’s troubled Dark Universe concept which hasn’t gained any momentum since Tom Cruise’s failed attempt at resurrecting The Mummy.

Also, in the podcast video, Moss says she is not in the Wolf Man film so any speculation that it’s a crossover project is left in the air.

Meanwhile, Universal Studios is in the middle of constructing a year-round haunt house in Las Vegas which will showcase some of their classic cinematic monsters. Depending on attendance, this could be the boost the studio needs to get audiences interested in their creature IPs once more and to get more films made based on them.

The Las Vegas project is set to open in 2025, coinciding with their new proper theme park in Orlando called Epic Universe.

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Jake Gyllenhaal’s Thriller ‘Presumed Innocent’ Series Gets Early Release Date

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Jake gyllenhaal presumed innocent

Jake Gyllenhaal’s limited series Presumed Innocent is dropping on AppleTV+ on June 12 instead of June 14 as originally planned. The star, whose Road House reboot has brought mixed reviews on Amazon Prime, is embracing the small screen for the first time since his appearance on Homicide: Life on the Street in 1994.

Jake Gyllenhaal’s in ‘Presumed Innocent’

Presumed Innocent is being produced by David E. Kelley, J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot, and Warner Bros. It is an adaptation of Scott Turow’s 1990 film in which Harrison Ford plays a lawyer doing double duty as an investigator looking for the murderer of his colleague.

These types of sexy thrillers were popular in the ’90s and usually contained twist endings. Here’s the trailer for the original:

According to Deadline, Presumed Innocent doesn’t stray far from the source material: “…the Presumed Innocent series will explore obsession, sex, politics and the power and limits of love as the accused fights to hold his family and marriage together.”

Up next for Gyllenhaal is the Guy Ritchie action movie titled In the Grey scheduled for release in January 2025.

Presumed Innocent is an eight-episode limited series set to stream on AppleTV+ starting June 12.

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