If a recent myth-busting tweet from Mark Hamill is anything to go by, A Nightmare on Elm Street star Robert Englund has a habit of exaggerating the role he played in some of the most cherished chapters of 1970s cinema, but his recent anecdote about Halloween seems both interesting and plausible.
In an interview with Access Live, the actor claimed that years before he assumed the role of Freddy Krueger, he had a small part to play in helping create the autumn atmosphere of another franchise-starting slasher flick.
“It’s so funny, I actually had a roommate, back when they did the original Halloween… the John Carpenter one. And he conned me into going to Pasadena one day, with garbage bags full of dead leaves,” Englund told the show’s hosts. “And we were working on the set of the original Halloween, throwing the dead leaves around. So it looked like Autumn… it looked like Fall back in the Midwest.”
It’s sometimes been a source of criticism for the classic 1978 film that the story is supposed to be set in Illinois, but the occasional visible palm tree gives away that this is all being filmed in Southern California. Still, it’s thanks to the efforts of people like Englund that the illusion is mostly a success.
When the eventual film reached theaters, Halloween would prove to be a cultural phenomenon that helped spawn the next decade of teen slasher flicks. It was part of this trend that Englund would step into the spotlight himself, playing a killer with every bit the notoriety of Michael Myers.
In fact, we’re just one day away from Freddy making his long-awaited return to screens, with Englund starring in a new episode of The Goldbergs that airs on October 24th. And while it doesn’t look too probable that the actor will ever come back for a full Elm Street movie, some of his other comments to Access Live at least offer the suggestion that we can’t throw out this possibility quite yet.
Published: Oct 23, 2018 10:31 am