Halloween 2018 was a huge hit, bringing back the iconic murderer Michael Myers and iconic badass Laurie Strode. Without a series of sequels that worked to ruin the creepy, never-ending brutality of the silent slasher, we got to see Myers as probably the creepiest he’d ever been since Halloween II, and we didn’t even get to see all of it.
According to an interview with Collider last year, there was a scene that was cut called “Jog to a Hanging Dog,” which as the title says, featured Laurie’s granddaughter, Allison, out jogging and then running into a dog that has been hung from a tree. The scene is extremely disturbing and unsettling and it has now been released. i09 has the clip up if you really want to see it, but I didn’t embed it here because a) it is really disturbing and b) it fundamentally doesn’t add anything to the movie, besides making every human being upset.
“We had a few scenes that were cool in their own right, but just didn’t work with the pacing of the movie. And so his first presence, even before his first human kill in the first cut of the movie, which was way too long and had pacing problems—we had to try to massage and figure that out—it was actually a pretty interesting scene of Allison on a jog and sees this dog hung upside down in a tree.”
It’s really gross and as director David Gordon Green points out, the scene just doesn’t make sense and would mess up the tight pacing the movie has overall. Of course, it is very jarring that this scene disturbs me more than watching Myers kill children for 106 minutes and not just teenagers—we see him snap the neck of a small kid. We have desensitized ourselves to the death of other human beings.
The interview is filled with other interesting tidbits, with Green explaining why certain death shots were longer than others:
“If I really like the person, I don’t want to see it. If I find them questionable, then they’re out. [Laughs] Honestly, it was the connection I had with an audience. If it’s a young person that I think exudes warmth, I want it to be a sound effect and a quick exit; I don’t want to linger on it. If it’s somebody that I think is a little dastardly and I’m suspect of their intentions, let’s watch it hurt a little more. […] Oh, yeah. There’s a couple of innocent victims as well. “
Having watched the movie, the interview is really compelling because it adds a lot of insight into what the director was thinking and makes it a perfect refresher before revisiting the movie again. That (terrible) scene and all the other ones that were axed will be available on the home versions of Halloween, that’ll be on Blu-ray, 4K, etc. tomorrow, January 15. You can skip this deleted scene.
(via i09, image: Screengrab)
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Published: Jan 14, 2019 05:34 pm