Robert Englund helped turn springtime California into Halloween in Illinois by tossing dead leaves past Jamie Lee Curtis. His contribution to John Carpenter’s 1978 film lasted a single day, 6 years before he became Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street.
Englund recalled the job in a 2018 interview while promoting his return as Freddy on The Goldbergs. A roommate had persuaded him to come to Pasadena with garbage bags of leaves.
“And we were working on the set of the original Halloween, throwing the dead leaves around,” Englund said. “So it looked like Autumn… it looked like Fall back in the Midwest.”
In the 2023 documentary Hollywood Dreams & Nightmares: The Robert Englund Story, he added that his downstairs neighbor knew Carpenter and production designer Tommy Lee Wallace, who created the Michael Myers mask. Englund described collecting dead leaves from gutters and tossing them through the camera’s view as Curtis appeared in the scene. He called the experience “kinda cool.”
Halloween was filmed in spring 1978, largely in May, with Southern California locations standing in for fictional Haddonfield, Illinois. With a budget of roughly $300,000 to $325,000, the production used bags of leaves to create the fall setting, then collected them again for use at another location.
Englund was already a working actor, with credits including Stay Hungry, A Star Is Born and Tobe Hooper’s Eaten Alive. His brief Halloween job is listed as an uncredited set-dresser credit on IMDb. In 1984, he took on the role of Freddy in Wes Craven’s A Nightmare on Elm Street.
