Jimmy Fallon welcomed an especially scary guest to The Tonight Show on Halloween (Oct. 31) recently.
As a special treat, The Roots reworked the iconic theme music from John Carpenter's 1978 film Halloween. The hip-hop version, as Fallon says in the video below, features the same eerie notes from the original score, which Carpenter did himself, surrounded by pure Roots swagger led by bandleader Questlove. Just as Tariq "Black Thought" Trotter gets into a groove with the lyrics, someone dressed as the movie's villain, Michael Myers, walks out and stares the MC down.
"The killer Michael Myers ain't the one from SNL," Black Thought sings as he begins to laugh. The rapper makes it through the rest of the tune, but barely. Fallon gets his chance to riff on the masked madman, and the two even take a selfie together.
According to Box Office Mojo, the movie grossed $47 million in the U.S. alone. Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence starred in the film, while Nick Castle put on the mask as Myers for most of the original movie. The franchise as a whole includes 10 movies, with Carpenter staying onboard as a producer for the second and third films. In 2007, Rob Zombie revived the franchise with a reimagining of the original film. He directed a sequel in 2009 as well.
"We see movies for a lot of reasons," Roger Ebert wrote in his four-star review of the original film. "Sometimes we want to be amused. Sometimes we want to escape. Sometimes we want to laugh, or cry, or see sunsets. And sometimes we want to be scared. I'd like to be clear about this. If you don't want to have a really terrifying experience, don't see Halloween.
