All posts by Patti PaulterGeist

Owner, operator, and fuzzy retro feelers giver at NightmareNostalgia.com. Worshipper of our Lord and savior Boo Berry, Patti is a seasoned pro having written for the top horror websites and magazines over the past few years until she decided to go balls to the wall and make her own focusing on pure feel-good nostalgia. Mom to two humans and three furballs.
Editorials

Here’s The Story Behind That Blonde Michael Myers Mask From “Halloween 4”

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Halloween 4 was released theatrically around the time I was old enough to comprehend that a NEW Halloween film with Michael Myers was within my grasp. Being as how yours truly was 6-years-old at the time, apparently the maternal parental unit didn’t think it was a great idea to take me to the theater for the long-awaited return of The Shape. With the unfortunate flop of Season of the Witch, fans bitched and whined enough to bring back their pale-faced Haddonfield homicidal maniac. Now, again I was six, and none of that shit ran through my head as I had only seen the prior films with my Dad-the biggest Halloween fan in the universe. And I didn’t give two shits about any of that fanboy/girl bullshit. I just really wanted to see this film! Alas, pretty sure the mother didn’t want to deal with the dirty looks from theater patrons and opted for Oliver and Company instead.

BULLSHIT. K, it was an ok movie but it was lacking some serious George P. Wilbur malarkey.

Anyway, I got my fix a few months after the release at a birthday sleepover. My older, and very snotty cousin was turning eleven. Myself, being only six, stuck out and clearly didn’t belong there with the pre-teen crowd. However, because of family politics, she was forced to invite me. Which was fine with me because I was hanging out with the big girls! Upon my arrival, my uncle pulled me to the side and had stated he stopped at the video store for some late-night entertainment for us girls. He pulls out A Nightmare on Elm Street 4: The Dream Master, and: TADA! Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers; stating that he had heard I was really wanting to see this and got it JUST FOR ME!

And I’ve watched it about 600 times since.

Now, let’s get down to business. If you’ve seen Halloween 4 as many times I have, you know of what I speak when it comes to the scene that sticks out like a sore thumb. Ahh yes, the blonde-haired Michael Myers in the schoolhouse that it seemed everyone in the audiences caught immediately yet somehow got past the cast, crew, and everyone in the editing studio. However, just in case you need a refresher, here’s the clip in question:

If you ever wondered what in the bleach-blonde fuck that was about, you’re definitely not alone and have the mystery solved for you. Several stories have made the rounds giving an explanation for the California fun-in- the-sun Myers, however, the one that rings the most truth is that it was simply a mistake from the crew and budget restraints didn’t allow for a reshoot. According to the January 88′ issue of Gorezone magazine and then confirmed via Michael-Myers.net, Don Post Studios was commissioned to make a slew of Myers’ masks for the movie. I’m guessing the people in charge had never seen a Halloween film, which actually sounds really irresponsible if that were the case, because the studios had sent the film a set of “pink masks with white hair”?!

Anywho, the make-up coordinators paint over this pink monstrosity with white paint, (which explains the really PALE version this time around) and the hair brown to get the desired look. In regard to the school-scene, what you’re seeing is the ACTUAL unconverted mask. Why it was just sitting around on set, and no one had noticed that, “hey, this doesn’t look right“, might be the biggest mystery here.

But that, boils and ghouls, is pretty much the sum of it. Just a blunder from the production crew and restricted shoot guidelines. Even so, it still serves as a fun, little laughable moment in what is a truly great sequel in the franchise.


Now that you’ve made it this far, I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for reading and sharing my crap for the past few years, as Nightmare Nostalgia has been honored by gracing Feedspot’s Top 100 Horror Blogs and Websites For Horror Fans on the Internet! What I do is from pure passion and my desire to use the blog scene to spread positivity, fun things to read and reminisce on, and talk about horror film culture is my total pleasure and will be doing it until life says I can’t anymore. Thank you everyone and Happy Halloween Month!

Interviews

Interview: Dwight Little Looks Back on 35 Years of “HALLOWEEN 4: The RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS”

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A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing HALLOWEEN 4 director and Samhain aficionado, Dwight Little on all things horror, the new film NATTY KNOCKS, and duh, of course, HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS; and in case you’re new here, is one of my own personal Kryptonite films. Put that sucker on, and I’m pretty much dead to the world. With the 35th anniversary of the 1988 movie looming over us, I used this opportunity to gain a deeper insight of the film I rented over and over again at my local Mom-and-Pop video store and that has become not only a fan favorite over the years but a beautiful throwback to the nostalgia of Halloween in the 80s.

Which begged Dwight Little to ask me himself,

“Why do YOU think people love this movie so much, right, now?“

To which I gave the obvious answer of-

“Mr. Little, HALLOWEEN 4 is thee perfect seasonal Halloween film. It holds so many memories and nostalgia for us children of the 80s and embodies the look and feel of the holiday with an added bonus of Michael Myers slowly walking around chasing folks.”

Tell me I’m wrong…

DL:

“Those streets of Haddonfield, all the dead leaves, the old drug store, and the shallow fields, the movie on top of it being Michael Myers, just has that nice atmosphere of what it was like to go trick or treating.“

NN: And that opening is a banger as well!

DL: You know we put a LOT of energy into that, and I had asked the writer on set, ya know, how much do we actually KNOW about the origins of Halloween? I looked up some references on it and found out there’s some old Scottish agricultural tradition where the fields have gone bare and everyone has to do their last harvest to get ready for the Winter. And so there’s all this iconic imagery of scarecrows and pumpkin men, and looking back into the roots of it all, is how we came up with that title sequence that seems so beloved. I just didn’t want to do the pumpkin [intro sequence again] and wanted to try something else.

NN: With RETURN turning 35 this year, tell me some of your fondest memories of being on set, or something that sticks out to you looking back on making the film.

DL: “Well, I was such a goofy fan of Donald Pleasence. Growing up, ya know, this was the guy from THE GREAT ESCAPE, and he was a James Bond villain so in my eyes he was English Royality. So, to be able to work with Donald as a young director, it was such a thrill, To be honest, I was intimidated for about the first two hours on the first day of filming with him on set, but we fell into such an easy actor/director relationship and he never made me feel like he didn’t want to be “directed” and so I was able to really dig in with him and not be scared away by his star status and that was something I really enjoyed.”

“I also loved both the girls, Danielle Harries and Ellie Cornell. They found a chemistry on their own, I didn’t even have to do much, and Ellie is just naturally took care of Danielle, and seemed bonded right from the beginning, which gave a real heart to the movie.”

NN: Yeah, it’s a tragedy what they did to her in Part 5. To me personally, I think she’s the greatest final girl of the franchise!

DL: Well, I didn’t have anything to do with 5 and to be quite honest I haven’t even seen all of 5. I think it’s a shame and I think they should have kept her alive in the end. Ellie’s takedown of Myers, is one of the most ferocious Final Girl things ever. The way she drives the truck and the way handles herself is fierce. She was really terrific and such a believable actress. She never tried to overdo it, and she’s sexy without even trying to be.

NN: Yep. She feels really relatable to a lot of us female horror fans.

DL: Yeah, she’s not just a hottie. She’s a lot more than that.

NN: In the community, there has been rumors, that there’s a scene that was filmed that explains how Loomis and Myers survived that fire at the end of HALLOWEEN II. Is that true?

DL: “No that is not true, but here what is true. Alan McElroy, the writer, and I decided we needed to do all the heavy lifting explaining what happened in one elevator ride. So what happened was you see the attendants come into the mental facility and then the guard takes them down the hall and tells them the whole story on the elevator ride. By the time the doors open at the end of that elevator ride, basically we’ve done all the explaining we needed to do there. And then when you see Michael on the gurney, and the camera comes down, you can see that his hand is covered in burn scars and has been in a coma for ten years, face still wrapped… and that felt like we helped the audience make that turn from 2 to 4. By the time they put Michael in the ambulance, you’re not even questioning it.“

“HALLOWEEN 4 was a great experience for me and holds a lot of great memories.”

HALLOWEEN 4: THE RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS has given us 35 years of sweet Halloween nostalgia, a goofy Myers mask blooper, and a final girl that comes correct in her stance against Myers. Upon the news of Miramax picking up the rights to Halloween in plans to make it a series, like the upcoming Friday the 13th: Crystal Lake show, I sincerely propose that this fan-favorite attempt to pick up from the events of after 4 and make an adult Jamie the killer in a clown costume. Myers can be dead and laid to rest for a while, I think. I would be at peace with that. Hell, maybe even make an episode where we finally get some justice for Ted Hollister! I would like to see it go that route OR pursue John Carpenter’s original plans and explore different Halloween urban legends throughout the series.

Either way, we’ll always have Halloween 4 and me, personally, the fact that Dwight Little did tell me I probably know more about that movie than he does. I know it’s Halloween and all, but Christmas came a little early for me this year.

Grab your Nightmare Makeup Kit, if you know a guy named Wade, tell him to fuck off and rewatch Return for its 35th anniversary this year.

Kathleen Kinmont is calling you, now.

News

Nightmare Nostalgia’s 5-Year Celebration Halloween Giveaway!

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Well, here we are nostalgic nuggets! Another year and another nostalgic Halloween giveaway is upon us, However, this one is a little special to me because NN is celebrating five years old on the giant interwebs!

This calls for some bony booty slappin’.

Back in 2014, a friend of mine pitched the idea of me writing for a horror website that was looking for writers, and it wasn’t a tiny website either. It had a rather well-established following and although that was a little intimidating; I said fuck it, why not? Who cares that I had ZERO experience writing a blog or for any website. I was knowledgeable, passionate and said fuck a lot. That’s pretty much all you need to write about horror movies, right? My first piece was of course, about the “Scary Stories To Tell In the Dark” books and the owner loved it so much he took me on as a regular writer, and later one of the three head editors for the site, which had grown from 300,000 followers when I joined, to over 4 million to when I departed.

Why leave a good thing, you may ask? Well, I had already dipped my toes into other horror websites, very well-known ones, written for a couple horror magazines, and staying where I was would just leave me stagnant and unfulfilled. I wasn’t freely able to express myself and rant about the things I wanted to scream and with the toxic environment that is the internet, I wanted to build an escape mechanism for people like me to walk down memory lane, and get those nostalgic fuzzies about the first time they walked the aisles of their Mom and Pop Video Store. Or perhaps the first time they ever watched THE FUNHOUSE. Or hell, that time you actually tried out some of Maurice’s pranks from LITTLE MONSTERS on your parents. These are the little things that we remember that make life a little less shitty, and the community we’ve built here together into an army of nostalgic nuggets makes my pet monster heart melt. So, in return, I’ve gathered up a pretty cool giveaway to readers that have followed me for a decade, and those just discovering this snake pit of utter nostalgic madness!

For a little context, I wanted to make this easy and just post a picture on Facebook, but the Zuck is cracking down on those types of posts and flagging them as spam. But honestly, this kinda works out, so I could write an essay on the gratitude that I have for all of you.

Anyway, let’s get to it! Here’s the haul that is a perfect nostalgic Halloween treat for some lucky person! Rules are posted at the bottom of the page!

First up is a Frankenstein mash-up of a 1993 McDonald’s Halloween Pail with a Carl’s JR handle from their line of Halloween buckets from the same year! It’s one-of-a-kind, and I can almost guarantee probably no one else has sitting in their bedroom right now.

A Jason Voorhees coffee mug since there’s a Friday the 13th in October and a plushy handpicked by me because nothing wakes you up faster than a Leatherface in your cup.

MONSTER CRUNCH! THE BREAKFAST BATTLE GAME featuring our Monster Cereal heroes! If you’re not into board games, the pieces included in the box itself are worth just staring at for hours.

Something old and something new! Next up, we have the Unofficial Horror Movie Coloring Book that is filled with AMAZING pages of drawn art from our favorite horror movies for you to color in! Also, is a copy of a Universal Monsters Frightening Facts Movie Book from 1992! If this doesn’t ring a bell, also how dare you, this is a quiz book essentially where you take the marker, choose a question and pick an answer, and color over it and see if you got it right! Plus it’s got some sick cut-outs of all the Universal Monsters!

And finally, some handpicked NN favorites from my own collection because it ain’t Halloween without some slasher movies! Blu-ray of HALLOWEEN III: SEASON OF THE WITCH, a first pressing copy DVD of HALLOWEEN 666: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS, and the killer cut Blu-ray of 2009’s FRIDAY THE 13TH!

The Rules:

Obviously, I wanted to keep this open to as many people as possible so all you have to do to enter is to do one, or all of the following- if you do all four that means you get four entries!

  1. Comment on this blog post your favorite Halloween memory!
  2. Share this post on Facebook from the original post on NN’s facebook page! (must be public for me to see)
  3. Share the NN’s giveaway post on Instagram! Look for my post regarding the giveaway @nightmarenostalgia
  4. Tweet this out on Twitter. Or X. Or whatever the fuck it’s being called today.

Must be a US resident and the contest will run from Friday, October 13th, 2023 until Monday, October 16th. Good luck nuggets and thanks for sticking around to hear me rant about Halloween 4 500 times!