Tommy Lee Wallace
Tommy Lee Wallace is a director, born 1949.
The credits here list Tommy Lee Wallace mostly as a performer, which undersells him badly. He is one of the people who built John Carpenter's early films from the inside: art director on Carpenter's debut Dark Star, editor alongside Charles Bornstein on both Halloween and The Fog, and the uncredited body inside the mask in Halloween itself.
He moved into directing with Halloween III: Season of the Witch in 1982, the sequel that threw out Michael Myers in favour of a story about novelty masks, an Irish manufacturer and a television commercial you should not watch. It was despised on release and has spent decades being reappraised, largely because it is the only entry in that series with an actual idea inside it. The rest of his directing stayed in horror and often on television: Fright Night Part 2 in 1988, and the 1990 miniseries of Stephen King's It, not among the credits listed here, which is single-handedly responsible for a generation's distrust of clowns.
What ties the work together is a craftsman's temperament rather than an auteur's. Wallace came up in the cutting room and the art department, and the films show it: efficiently built, alert to what a genre audience is waiting for, rarely showing off. He also keeps turning up on screen for his collaborators, as a ghost in The Fog, as the band the Coupe de Villes in The Boy Who Could Fly, and as the voice on that Silver Shamrock commercial in his own picture.
Movies (9)
Where to start with Tommy Lee Wallace
Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the one to watch, and the one to argue about. Approach it as a standalone horror film about advertising and mass media rather than as a Halloween sequel and it moves from disappointing to genuinely nasty, with one of the great pieces of earworm sound design in the genre.
Then work backwards to the films he shaped without directing: Halloween, which he cut and where he briefly wore the mask, and The Fog, which he also cut and where he appears as a ghost. Both are better guides to his taste than most of what he later directed alone.
Fright Night Part 2 is a sequel job done professionally and funnier than it needed to be. The Boy Who Could Fly is the gentle outlier with his band in it. Completists can finish on Pennywise: The Story of ‘It’, where he discusses the miniseries, and Vampires: Los Muertos if truly determined.