LOS ANGELES – David Gordon Green, director of the new Halloween, confirmed a detail in an interview this week that fans have long wondered: will the new Michael Myers film finally unite the cinematic worlds of Halloween and Activia yogurt ads?
“When Jason Blum originally pitched us Halloween, he said, ‘If you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?’” Green said. “And for myself and co-writer Danny McBride, there was really only one answer we could give: Center the entire thing around a probiotic yogurt.”
“A number of Activia commercials take place in the kitchen,” said McBride. “So it made sense to make sure plenty of the scenes in our film were set in kitchens. Of course, our kitchen includes a trap door leading to a basement full of guns, but you can imagine that if Laurie Strode weren’t being pursued by a killer, she might just as well take a quick break and grab an Activia from the fridge. Perhaps something with mango.”
Green noted: “A bout of tummy trouble is nothing to mess around with. If you’re worried about your digestive tract you won’t have the appetite to try and take down one of the most evil horror villains of all time.”
The script for Halloween went through a reported eighty drafts and McBride admits that at least seventy included Activia’s tagline: Put a Smile Back in Your Day. “Eventually we decided, around draft seventy-three, that we’d just have Michael Myers carve a smile into a babysitter’s stomach,” McBride said. “That’s the best way to respectfully connect these two classics.”
McBride and Green plan on using the catalog of Activia commercials for more inspiration if they’re able to make a sequel. “There’s an ad that features Jamie Lee Curtis on roller skates and that’s one thing there just hasn’t been enough of in the Halloween films.”
“We’ve envisioned a wild chase featuring Laurie Strode chasing after Michael and they’re both on roller skates,” McBride said. “Except Michael has stolen a spoon out of an empty Activia container that Laurie was eating and is now trying to scoop out her eyeballs.”
