[Interview] Daisy McCrackin Talks ‘Halloween: Resurrection’ and Michael Myers
As Donna in Halloween: Resurrection, Daisy McCrackin suffered a grisly and very creepy death at the hands of Michael Myers, but the actress tells us that her experiences on the set of the eighth entry in the franchise were nothing but positive, leaving her with fond memories of her feature film debut.
Click here for Part 1 of our interview, where Daisy tells us about her deleted shower scene and what it’s like to be killed by Michael Myers, and then read on for Part 2 of our interview, where we discuss the legacy of Michael Myers, working with Busta Rhymes, and the perfect parting gift to the cast from Jamie Lee Curtis!
When Halloween: Resurrection opened in the summer of 2002, it marked the final appearance of scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis in the franchise that made her famous, as well as the end of the original series of films, but few could have predicted how ahead of its time it was in terms of its online streaming reality TV plot.
While it may have been hard to grasp 12 years ago, the idea of watching the newest reality TV show as it streams live over the internet is all too normal to today’s audiences. And here was Resurrection, the eighth entry in the franchise, featuring a room full of Halloween costumed partiers watching and commenting on an internet reality show.
Say what you want about the movie, but it’s undeniable how prophetic the cyber aspect of the story has become.
“We were all really excited by it,” Daisy remembers. “It felt like really an update to the franchise and to the story. It was about as cutting edge as it could be, and we as young cast members were pretty proud of that. We thought ‘what a cool script’. We admired the writers for making it like that, because reality TV was just starting.”
She said filming scenes while each actor was wearing a working “web cam” camera that was recording the actual first person POV footage used throughout the movie presented all kinds of extra challenges while trying give a believable performance.
“You kind of had to keep track of your camera on your head and the backpack that we were all wearing for the filming of the reality show,” she explains. “You had to like relax completely, but without anything falling off you.
“You wanted to be careful of your scene partner, and you also had to shine light on the scene with your own flashlight, so there was just extra things you had to be aware of. You better know your lines, because once you’re there you also have to remember where to stand and point your head and shine your light, and still act. It just made things more interesting.”
Whether you love or hate his trash talking character, Busta Rhymes is an integral part of Resurrection, so we asked Daisy what it was like being around the energetic rapper on set.
“He was great,” Daisy said. “He was always high energy and friendly, and always joking. We were all there living together, and a lot of us had days when we weren’t shooting and we would go to lunch or just hang out in downtown Vancouver. Every time I would see him, I would sing to him that little piece of his song, ‘Busta, what it is right now’. That was like how to say ‘what’s up’ to him was to start singing his song or rapping to him, and he would always crack up and join in.
“Everybody was friendly.”
Daisy said she didn’t get to work on screen with Jamie Lee Curtis, making her fourth and final appearance as Laurie Strode in Resurrection, but she has a special souvenir from her co-star that is especially fitting.
“She was really sweet,” she said of Curtis. “At the completion of shooting, she sent a little gift to the cast members. It was a little knife. I still have it somewhere.”
McCrackin told us she was first exposed to John Carpenter’s original Halloween at an age far too young to fully appreciate it, but she quickly did her homework prior to her own time in Haddonfield.
“I think my cousins were watching it at my grandmother’s house when I was visiting in Sacramento,” she remembers. “I was totally too little to watch it and probably not really paying too much attention, but I was aware of it though. Then actually when I started having the auditions for the movie I watched them all.
“I had to just go by the script I had in front of me. I guess it helped add to the scariness that this guy is back and seeing how many people he had killed and how many years he had been hunting Laurie that added to the seriousness of it all. In Resurrection, that’s what they’re going there to document. The house that we’re in is like the history of Michael Myers.”
After three and a half decades, the legacy of Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise has proven every bit as unkillable as its iconic masked stalker, and Daisy believes the reasons for its never-ending appeal are somewhere deeply rooted within the human psyche.
“I recently did the 35th anniversary convention, my only one, and this guy was there all the time dressed as Michael Myers walking around really slowly, and it was actually scary. Even though I knew he was there for hours, I’d see him out the corner of my eye and it would still catch me off guard. Maybe it’s because he killed me.
“He’s a great villain. He’s very scary. Maybe it’s how he walks.
“I guess it’s just really archetypal. It must be really primal. People love being scared. They love good bad guys and roller coasters and all sorts of thrills, and people go parachuting and all sorts of extreme things, so I guess it’s like that.
“Maybe even it’s like a family tradition for some people.”
Read Part 1 of our interview with Daisy McCrackin here!
Halloween: Resurrection is currently available in the killer Halloween: The Complete Collection 15-disc Deluxe Edition Blu-ray box set (read our review).
You can order yours here!
