10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)

10. The Music Is... Off

After five films and several decades, composer Alan Howarth bid adieu to the Halloween franchise, leaving Miramax to find a new composer to fill the position.

They settled on John Ottoman, a talented composer who has gone on to do great work since then on scores for films like The Nice Guys, Superman Returns, and X-Men: Days of Future Past. But Ottoman's score for H20 was... different.

He steered away from the synth-heavy aesthetic that Carpenter and Howarth had crafted in the early days of the franchise, while also mercifully staying away from the guitar-driven atrocity that was Halloween 6's score. Instead, Ottoman went for a fully orchestrated symphonic score that was much more Danny Elfman than it was John Carpenter.

There's something to be said for the way his work is clearly attempting to recapture the magic of Bernard Hermann's work, but it doesn't really work here.

And sadly, the producers thought so as well. Mere days before the film's release, the Weinsteins (*shudder*) completely redid the score. This resulted in Ottoman's work being "bastardized" (his own words) much to his chagrin, with pieces of Marco Beltrami's scores from Scream, Scream 2, and even Mimic being hastily copy-and-pasted into the edit.

The end result is a film whose music feels jarringly disjointed and disconnected from the actual film.