Tyra Banks regrets Halloween: Resurrection role

Tyra Banks did not soften the answer. When Entertainment Weekly asked whether she looks back fondly on Halloween: Resurrection, the refusal landed in three short strokes.

“No. Not even a little bit. Like, not even a tiny bit.”

She was 52, and the 2002 film sat nearly twenty-five years behind her. The supermodel-turned-actress had taken the part while still working to stretch a modeling career into acting. The credit remained, and so did the sourness. No nostalgia, no silver lining, nothing to reclaim.

What she had been sold on the way in was something else entirely. An unnamed agent brought the offer while she was still measuring every credit against the acting career she wanted. She had already logged Higher Learning in 1995, Love Stinks in 1999, then Love & Basketball and Coyote Ugly both in 2000. A mainstream slasher sequel did not look like the kind of different move she believed she needed.

“I was like, ‘I’m not going to do that.’ What is it going to do for my career? I’m a model, and I need to do things that are kind of different to get this acting career that I want.”

The agent answered with a name. Josh Hartnett had played John Tate in 1998’s Halloween H20, and the agent held that single appearance up as living proof the franchise could mint a real film career.

“He was like, ‘No, Josh Hartnett did Halloween, and look what he’s doing now!’”

He sweetened it further with the guarantee of an iconic death scene that would last forever. That was enough.

“So I was like, yeah, OK, this is going to do it for me.”

The part was Nora Winston, producer of the livestreamed show Dangertainment. Banks filmed the death that had been held out as the lasting image. In the finished movie the sequence is gone. Audiences receive only a brief glimpse of her body.

“Not only did it not do anything for me, they cut the damn death scene.”

Halloween: Resurrection reached theaters in 2002 as the eighth installment of the franchise. Rick Rosenthal directed from a screenplay by Larry Brand and Sean Hood. The cast returned Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, placed Brad Loree behind the mask as Michael Myers, and gave Busta Rhymes the role of Freddie Harris. The film was made for $15 million. It grossed $37.6 million worldwide. Those figures cleared the budget on paper. Critics still panned the picture, and it settled into wide ranking as one of the franchise’s worst entries.

The path into the movie had already been laid by a modeling career that few actors could match. Banks had started booking runway work at fifteen, become a Victoria’s Secret Angel in 1997, and remained one through 2005. She was among the small group of Black models who reached true supermodel rank, the first African American woman on the cover of GQ and the first on the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. By the early 2000s she ranked among the world’s top-earning models. Acting credits had begun earlier still: seven episodes of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air in 1993, then the 2000 Disney film Life-Size, in which she played a doll brought to life opposite Lindsay Lohan.

Halloween: Resurrection opened on July 12, 2002, released by Dimension Films. It closed the H20 timeline that had been rebooted only four years earlier. Rick Rosenthal, who had already directed Halloween II, returned to the series. The story picks up three years after the Hillcrest Academy killings. Laurie Strode is confined to a sanitarium; Michael Myers reaches her on the roof and finishes the pursuit that began in 1978. A year after that death, the plot shifts to an internet reality program called Dangertainment. College students win a contest to spend Halloween night inside Myers’s abandoned childhood house in Haddonfield while cameras stream every room. The concept came from screenwriter Larry Brand, who had watched the rise of reality television and imagined a killer walking through a house already wired with cameras, leaving viewers uncertain whether the murders were staged or real. Brand first titled the script Halloween: MichaelMyers.com, then Halloween: Homecoming; the producers settled on Resurrection to signal that Myers was alive again. Sean Hood reworked the screenplay from Brand’s draft.

The finished film carried a wider young cast—Bianca Kajlich, Sean Patrick Thomas, Thomas Ian Nicholas, Ryan Merriman—around the established names. Production notes later recorded that both Busta Rhymes and Banks had been brought in partly to widen the audience. Principal photography ran in Vancouver, British Columbia, beginning in May 2001. The predecessor, Halloween H20, had grossed roughly $75 million worldwide. Resurrection’s $37.6 million return, though it covered its cost, registered as an underperformance beside that figure and drew broad critical dismissal as an unnecessary sequel.

Ripped versions of the deleted footage still circulate online, separate from the theatrical cut that reduced Nora Winston to a passing shot of a body. One year later Banks created and began hosting America’s Next Top Model. The series started in 2003. She built it after the eighth Halloween installment left her with neither the career jump nor the death scene she had been sold. The show placed her as creator and host and became the path she took instead.

Nearly twenty-five years after the film, the account remained open.

“So, I have beef with Halloween 8!”