John Carpenter and Debra Hill were enlisted to create one of the first slasher sequels. After first approaching Tommy Lee Wallace to direct, they enlisted Rick Rosenthal to take the helm on the picture. "I think that people will imagine more in their own minds than any filmmaker will ever show them," Hill said in a Fangoria interview in 1981. Hill also stated that there were no circum- stances under which John Carpenter would direct the sequel, although it has been confirmed that Carpenter came in and directed a few sequences to clean up some of Rosenthal's work. "I had made that film once and I really didn't want to do it again," Carpenter told Famous Monsters magazine. Rosenthal and Carpenter seemed to have clicked..."We seemed pretty philosophically compatible regarding suspense and horror," Rosenthal said in the same interview.

"On HALLOWEEN II," Debra Hill told Fangoria, "we have total, 100% control. The only way they could do the deal was to grant us that control." Hill continued to say that an interesting possibility for HALLOWEEN II was thought about, although not used. "We investigated a number of 3-D processes for HALLOWEEN, but they were far too expensive for this particular project. Also, most of the projects we do involve a lot of night shooting - evil lurks at night. It's hard to do that in 3-D."

Originally, the plot of the film centered on Laurie Strode, who lived in a high-rise apartment building. Much of the film was shot in a wing of the Morningside Hospital in Inglewood, CA, with other scenes filmed at the Pasadena Community Hospital. Perhaps one of the most difficult scenes to shoot was the final explosion. Dick Warlock, who played Michael Myers, remembered, "There was a lot of preparation for that scene, and then the fire did not turn out like the director wanted, so we had to shoot it again."

A small controversy surrounded the film after its release. Richard Delmer Boyer, of Fullerton, CA, murdered an elderly couple while on drugs. In court, he claimed that the drugs caused him to flashback to HALLOWEEN II, and thus commit the murder. It became known around Fullerton as the "HALLOWEEN II" murders, according to TNT Monstervision host Joe Bob Briggs.