Halloween Ends Used Bananas, Tofu, And Rice Cakes For A Messy, Brutal Kill
This article contains spoilers for "Halloween Ends."
Like all slasher films, David Gordon Green's "Halloween" trilogy will be heavily debated between generations of horror fans until the sun burns out, with people still screaming out "Team Corey!" or "It sucked!" with their last, gasping breaths. Regardless of how anyone personally feels about the trilogy, there's one thing we can all agree on — there are some pretty damn gnarly kills on display. "Halloween Ends" is home to some particularly shocking kill sequences, with the massacre at the salvage yard easily one of the best. During the scene, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) gets revenge on a gang of bullies who torment him, including Terry Tramer (Michael Barbieri), Stacy (Destiny Mone), Margo (Joey Harris), and Billy (Marteen). Terry takes a blowtorch to the face, Stacy gets her head smashed by a wrench, Billy gets a drumstick stabbed through his head, and Margo is run over by Corey's truck while trapped under a barbed wire fence before Corey finishes her off by stomping her head in.
"Halloween: The Official Making of Halloween, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends" by Abbie Bernstein has the behind-the-scenes knowledge of just what went into making one of the goriest kills in the trilogy look so realistic. Special effects maestro Vincent Van Dyke and co-designer Christopher Nelson were in charge of bringing this brutality to life, and in the well-treasured art of DIY practical effects, a lot of the items used to replicate brain matter, blood, and viscera were all items that could be found in the average kitchen. You'll never look at your cabinets the same way again.
Where's your head at?
Margo's death is downright shocking because the film makes you think she's not going to survive being run over by a truck. When she miraculously lives, it's almost as if Corey is forced to double down on the violence as punishment for making him go after her again. "Margo is in this moment of terror right before the truck rolls over her and crushes her," Van Dyke explained. In order to make the fake head for Corey to crush in, they took head and body scans of Joey Harris with a terrified expression.
"We wanted this to be posed in an unnatural way, and have Chris be able to contort the body," said Nelson, who also confirmed that there were several fake Margo heads. Each head was hollowed out, and Nelson would load them up with blood, bananas, tofu, and rice cakes. All of the various textures mixed with the blood gave the impression of brain matter. "It was scored and rigged so that when the head crushes open, all that blood and brains come squishing out," said Nelson.
Practical effects in horror have a long history of manipulating foodstuffs, whether it's the chocolate syrup stand-in for blood in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho" or the porridge with pea soup coloring (not actually split pea soup, despite popular belief) to make the projectile vomit in "The Exorcist." But now we know the secret to brains crushed under the boot of a Michael Myers acolyte: blood and breakfast.