In 1977, Mel Brooks directed and starred in High Anxiety, an homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s films. Brooks plays Dr. Richard Thorndyke, who’s framed for murder after he discovers that the institute he works for has been exaggerating the illnesses of their wealthy patients in order to cheat their families out of money.
During one scene, Thorndyke calls up his patient’s daughter (played by Madeline Kahn) and an assassin tries to strangle him in the process. Listening to this on the other end of the line, Kahn’s character mistakenly thinks she’s receiving an obscene phone call:
Less than a year later, John Carpenter’s Halloween premiered in theaters. Toward the end of the movie, Michael Myers strangles Lynda Van Der Klok (P.J. Soles) with a phone cord as she attempts to call Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Laurie, much like Kahn in High Anxiety, initially suspects a dirty prank by a friend.
You can take a look at the sequence for yourself right here:
While we can’t say for sure whether Carpenter was inspired by Brooks’s movie, it’s worth pointing out that Carpenter is a Hitchcock fan and paid homage to the iconic director in Halloween. For example, Dr. Sam Loomis’s name is clearly a reference to John Gavin’s character from Psycho. Oh, and the original Loomis’s girlfriend, Marion Crane? She was, of course, portrayed by Janet Leigh, who was Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother.
Is that proof that Carpenter borrowed the strangulation sequence from Brooks? No, but it’s pretty coincidental. Given Carpenter’s appreciation for Hitchcock, you’d think he would’ve checked out Brooks’s movie prior to beginning production on Halloween. Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill reportedly cranked out the Halloween script in a very short time, and the final shooting draft was dated April 10, 1978; High Anxiety had been released just four months earlier.
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