Trivia: After the guests leave and Randy is alone on the couch watching Halloween, right as the ghost-face walks in, the Halloween theme begins. In Halloween the beginning of the theme means the shape is near.
Trivia: When the movie was first shown in theaters, the marquee read, "From the director of Animal House...A Different Kind of Animal." This lead many movie patrons to believe that it was another comedy film. People ran out of theaters in terror when they realised it was a horror movie.
Trivia: Bill Skarsgård was purposely kept separated from the child-actors during filming, and outside of some early publicity photos, the kids never saw him until the first scene they filmed together in order to get their genuine reactions. The kids were both genuinely scared of him, but also incredibly excited after filming their first scene.
Trivia: Have a close look at the Predator's trophy collection on his spaceship. Taking pride of place is a skull from the creature in the Alien movies. (01:33:05)
Trivia: While filming the toy clown attacking Robbie, the clown's arms were wrapped tightly around Oliver's neck. He immediately said he couldn't breathe but Steven Spielberg and Tobe Hooper both thought that he was ad-libbing. When Spielberg saw Oliver's face turning purple, he realised that he really was being asphyxiated and ran over to remove the arms from his neck.
Trivia: While giving a lecture at the Hollywood Scriptwriting Institute, director Joe Dante trash talked the novel "The Howling" on which the movie is based. One person in the audience raised his hand and asked, "So, you don't like the book, huh?" with Joe stating, "No, not really." The man responded that he was the one who wrote the novel. To Joe's surprise, the man in the audience was Gray Brandner, the author of "The Howling."
Trivia: Paul Reiser's character Carter Burke was so immediately hated that during the movie's premiere his sister hit him, and when Burke's death occurred, his mom's response was simply "good."
Trivia: This was Johnny Depp's first movie.
Trivia: When James Brolin was offered the role of George Lutz, he was informed that they didn't have a script to give him. James bought a copy of the novel and began to read it. At two o'clock in the morning, while reading a very intense part of the book, a pair of pants that he had hung up earlier fell to the ground causing him to jump in fright. After that, James agreed to do the film.
Trivia: In the film, the two transfer students are Kiriyama, the silent killer, and Kawada, the winner of a previous Battle Royale. In the original novel, only Kawada was the transfer student; Kiriyama was in the same class selected for this game of death. He was the main antagonist.
Trivia: The picture on the computer of the hive looks like an upside down umbrella and the name of the corporation who own the hive is ... the Umbrella corporation.
Trivia: Michael Myers' mask is a Captain Kirk mask painted white with ruffled hair and a few other tweaks.
Trivia: Director Jason Reitman is the son of Ivan Reitman, director of the original "Ghostbusters" and "Ghostbusters II." As a child, Jason actually had a cameo in "Ghostbusters II" during the birthday party in the beginning. (He's the kid who tells Ray he heard the Ghostbusters were "full of crap").
Trivia: Although it lasts for only 45 seconds on screen, the stabbing scene in the shower took seven days to shoot and used 70 different camera angles.
Trivia: As is often the case with micro-budget films, the movie was not shot widescreen, but rather was shot on cheaper 4:3 full-frame film stock and cropped for the widescreen theatrical release. Thus director James Wan filmed the movie ahead of time with the knowledge that the tops and bottoms of the frame would be missing from the theatrical cut, and he made sure to compose the shots accordingly. Unfortunately, instead of panning-and-scanning the cropped widescreen release for the full-frame home-video release, the distributors merely uncropped the image. This causes some rather strange and subtle blunders in some full-frame home-video releases, as portions of the frame were visible that shouldn't have been.