When Rob Zombie Killed Michael Myers:
With Halloween fast approaching, I’ve noticed a lot of people mentioning Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween remake with warm fondness and it just hasn’t sat well with me…
I hadn’t seen the film in several years but I certainly didn’t have any fond memories of it. Thinking perhaps there was something I’d missed, I decided to go back and give it another try.
I now regret that decision.
Let me preface this by saying that I grew up a Rob Zombie fan. At one time I owned all of his albums, even the remix ones. When he made his first movie, “House of 1,000 Corpses", I loved it. I still do. It’s a Halloween tradition in my house.
Another Halloween tradition in my house is John Carpenter’s “Halloween" from 1978. In my opinion, it’s the greatest Halloween movie ever made. You’re free to disagree, but just know that you’re wrong.
This is why I was so excited to learn that metal-vocalist-turned- movie-director Rob Zombie himself would be directing a reboot of the Halloween series. I thought he was the perfect choice to bring Michael Myers, the most iconic horror villain of all-time, into the new generation. I figured, if anyone respected the legacy of Halloween and the iconography of Michael Myers, it had to be Rob Zombie.
Boy, was I fucking wrong.
Before I get too far into this, if you haven’t seen the original Halloween, go watch it. And even if you have, watch it again.
The whole film is a masterclass in creating tension and atmosphere. Rather than relying on cheap jump-scares, Carpenter manipulates the audience with sleight-of-hand filmmaking and a handful of other brilliant techniques that are sorely missing from today’s horror films…
Is it a perfect film? Absolutely not. None of John Carpenter’s movies are, and he’ll be the first to tell you that. But it feels like a perfect film because of all the things it does right.
Rob Zombie’s Halloween takes all of that, throws it into a trashcan, sets it on fire, and takes a shit on it just for good measure.
Rob displays very little (if any) respect for the original, instead choosing to spend over an hour forcing the audience to endure the antics of an annoying kid who lives in a shitty home with a shitty family.
Instead of watching Michael Myers stalk his prey as the suspenseful music stalks the audience, we get to watch a child scream at his stepdad, scream at his sister, get into fights at school, murder hamsters, murder a bully, murder his stepdad, murder his sister, and scream at his therapist.
All of this might’ve worked with a character not named Michael Myers, in a movie that isn’t called Halloween…but alas, this is not the case.
Compare this to the 1978 original, where the focus isn’t on Michael but rather on everyone around him and how they react to the horror he causes. Michael is more menacing and intimidating because we aren’t forced to sit through child therapy sessions with him for an entire hour of screentime.
Back to Roberto Zombie’s version, once the first hour drifts by, the film suddenly shifts into flat remake mode, taking us through all the same beats as the original movie, only without any of the suspense and mystery that John Carpenter artfully builds in his Halloween, because Rob crams all of it into a rushed 40 minutes that feels tacked on out of legal obligation...
And it’s at this point, over halfway through the movie, where we’re finally introduced to what is supposed to be our protagonist, Laurie Strode.
In John Carpenter’s movie, Jamie Lee Curtis played Laurie Strode as the Ultimate Girl Scout. While all of her friends are distracted by beer and sex, Laurie devotes herself to her guardianship duties and thoughtfully keeps young Tommy Doyle occupied with pumpkin carvings and horror movie marathons, even taking on the babysitting duties of her friends as they go have sex in someone else’s house. In the end, it’s Laurie’s smart thinking and brave heroism that saves her and the kids she’s babysitting from the proverbial “Boogeyman” lurking outside their house.
In Rob Zombie’s Halloween, Laurie is the most annoying fucking teenager you’d never want to meet. When she’s not having mock-orgasms with her slightly-less annoying friends, in her shrill, nails-on-chalkboard voice (I’d explain further, but I’m not going to), she’s being a total dick to the kid she’s supposed to be babysitting. There is no depth to her character at all, she’s an empty shell of a person, a caricature of a teenage girl, and it’s here that Rob’s lack of interest in the original movie becomes painfully obvious.
Yeah, I’m just gonna come right out and say it: Rob Zombie doesn’t like the original Halloween movies. He’ll never admit this himself, of course, because he would piss off a lot of fans (though his die-hards would no doubt find some excuse to justify it) but there is pretty strong evidence for my argument.
Let’s look back at what Roberto had to say about remakes themselves in 2002, a whole five years before he remade Halloween…
And then again in 2004…
Now with all that in mind, consider that when Dimension Studios first pitched him the idea of doing a Halloween movie the very next year, in Roberto’s own words, “the word ‘remake' wasn’t even on the table". Dimension wanted a sequel. Roberto claims it was actually he himself who came up with the idea of doing a remake…
Kind of weird for a guy who “doesn’t really like remakes" and thinks that you should only “remake something that’s a piece of shit"…
When you watch the behind-the-scenes stuff on his Halloween movie, Roberto frequently talks about things from the original that “always bothered" him…Michael Myers driving a car “always bothered" him, Michael getting his mask from a hardware store in the middle of the day “always bothered" him, Dr. Loomis waiting in the old Myers house all night for Michael to come home “always bothered” him.
In fact, there are more clips of Roberto mentioning things that bother him about the original film than there are of him mentioning things he likes about the original film…
So what is all this meant to say? Does Roberto think the original Halloween is a “piece of shit"? Does he actually think his version is better?
I would argue yes. He does. Without a doubt.
For more evidence, I need only point toward the sequel to his Halloween, which is widely regarded by fans as the worst Halloween movie ever made, and for good reason: Roberto took everything that wasn’t awful about the first movie and replaced it with more of what was awful about the first movie…
His Laurie Strode is even more unbearable to be around than last time, especially if you watch the abysmal Director’s Cut. Roberto made her so atrociously unlikable in his sequel, the studio actually forced him to go back and reshoot most of her scenes so that audiences wouldn’t be completely disgusted by every second of her screen presence.
I should mention that none of this is the fault of actress Scout Taylor-Compton, by the way. She was just doing what her director told her to. She is blameless here.
As for Michael Myers, he is no longer the iconic slasher in the blue mechanic jumpsuit and white mask that audiences have been going to see for decades. Instead, he’s a dirty, swarthy drifter who looks more like Super Hobo than Michael Myers. Oh and now he has random hallucinations of his mom leading a white horse around everywhere, but the movie wants you to think that he’s had these visions the whole time. For…reasons.
Roberto swerves us in the beginning by making us think this is going to be a remake of the original Halloween II from 1981, which continues where the first film leaves off and has Michael stalking Laurie through Haddonfield Hospital. But he lets us know early on that he doesn’t give a single shit about that movie (or this one, for that matter) when he reveals that the first ten minutes of his remake is actually just a dream that Laurie is having…
That’s right, Roberto pulled the ol' clichéd, overused, done-to-death “It was all a dream!” bullshit that had already long-since become hackneyed and corny by 2009. I must say, that is some ballsy filmmaking right there. Well done, Mr. Zombie.
The rest of Roberto Zombie’s All Hallow’s Eve Deux is just an absolute chore to get through. The plot contains more holes than a brothel, as Rob was clearly not interested in making this movie at all, much less making it good.
The entire film is a near 2-hour long attempt to take the Halloween franchise away from its roots and shape it into Roberto Zombie’s preferred vision of what he thinks a Halloween movie should be. And apparently he thinks it should be nothing like the originals. And there should be white horses in it. And his wife, obviously.
I would be perfectly fine with Roberto making his own Halloween movie (the holiday, not the franchise), with his own original characters and mythos. In fact, he already did. It was called House of 1,000 Corpses. And it was way better than either of his “Halloween" movies.
But when he set out to make his Halloween movies, he decided to strip away any of the things that made the original Halloween movies so good, including the mystique of Michael Myers. The end result is a set of films that indirectly says “Fuck John Carpenter" and the endings of both of Roberto’s Halloween movies are a blatant attempt to kill off Michael Myers forever, both literally and figuratively. Don’t take my word for it, go back and watch them (if you dare).
Roberto’s sycophants have tried to tell me that I’m wrong, that he does love Michael Myers, that he just wanted to do something different than what had been done before. Well, it certainly was “different”, I’ll give it that…
Different, however, doesn’t equal “good".
Every aspect of Roberto’s remakes displays a fundamental lack of understanding for the original material. Michael Myers is a force of nature. He’s not supposed to be explained. He’s the embodiment of evil.
What Roberto did with Michael Myers would be like if George Lucas were to make a whole movie where Darth Vader is an annoying little kid (oh, wait…)
His Halloweens don’t even work as horror films because there’s no atmosphere or suspense, nor are there really any scares. Michael just kind of shows up and starts killing and we’re basically just left to sit there and watch what we already saw coming. Doesn’t that sound exciting…
So having said all that, I hope Roberto’s fans will forgive me for not getting all warm and fuzzy when talking about his Halloween remakes. They are just as awful as I remembered them being before I set out to write this, and if I sat here long enough, I could probably find an entirely new set of reasons that they suck so much.
If you like them, fine. I can’t stop you. But just know that you’re wrong.
