Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on August 30, 2007, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
Given how ’70s-inflected his previous features House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects were, it was perhaps inevitable that Rob Zombie would become involved in the current trend of reduxing low-budget horror’s golden age. And if Halloween had to be remade—which was sadly inevitable under the circumstances—Zombie was inarguably among the best choices for the job. The good news is that his take on John Carpenter’s 1978 classic demonstrates a far greater affinity for the material than the makers of the clueless Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog remakes. The bad news is that his attempts to simultaneously explore different avenues of the story and stick to the trail forged by Carpenter ultimately cancel each other out.
For about the first 45 minutes or so, the new Halloween engenders a reaction echoing that which greeted Stanley Kubrick’s film of Stephen King’s The Shining: It’s hardly a faithful translation of the source, but is more successful as an expression of the director’s specific concerns. (The fact that fidelity is often demanded of literary adaptations when it’s derided in updates of past movies could be the subject of another essay.) Zombie’s mission statement with his Halloween has been to explore the background of silent stalker Michael Myers, and so the movie opens by plunking us down in the midst of his horrifically dysfunctional childhood. Mom (Sheri Moon Zombie) is nice but works as a stripper, which doesn’t help the boy’s rep with his bullying schoolmates, while his stepdad Ronnie (William Forsythe) is a verbally and physically abusive lout and his older sister Judith (Hanna Hall) is a teenage tart who’d rather fool around with her boyfriend than take little Michael (Daeg Faerch) trick-or-treating.
The seeds of serial-killerdom are clearly being planted, and it’s no surprise when the discovery that Michael has been mutilating animals is followed by his wielding a large knife and a baseball bat against the unpleasant humans around him. Once he’s committed to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, Malcolm McDowell’s Dr. Sam Loomis is given onscreen therapy time with the young killer that Donald Pleasence’s shrink never got in Carpenter’s film. It’s all for naught, of course, and many years after his incarceration, now grown into a hulking monster of a man (Tyler Mane), Michael violently escapes from Smith’s Grove and heads back to his hometown of Haddonfield. His chief target: high-schooler Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), with whom he shares a connection that anyone familiar with Halloween II will already be well aware of.
And anyone who’s seen The Devil’s Rejects will recognize that we’re not in Carpenter’s Illinois anymore. We’re smack in Rob Zombieland, with the white-trash aesthetics of his previous movie firmly in place for the film’s opening third. The movie switches visual gears once Michael lands in Smith’s Grove, and again when he hits the shadowy nighttime streets of Haddonfield, and cinematographer Phil Parmet (encoring from Rejects) is proving to be as crucial a collaborator for Zombie as Dean Cundey was to Carpenter. But where Carpenter put a premium on subtlety and suggestion, Zombie is blunt about his horrors, and from Michael’s very first murder, the director doesn’t flinch from the brutal and sanguinary aspects of the killer’s acts. Yet he avoids wallowing in the bloodshed to the point where a viewer just wants to withdraw from the screen; Zombie knows how to film murder in a way that creeps you out rather than simply grossing you out.
His work with the characters while they’re alive isn’t as sure-handed. This Halloween’s most successful trope is to give Dr. Loomis a more expanded role, to correspond with its increased focus on his patient. Where Pleasence’s Loomis refers to Michael as “it” from the first time we meet him, McDowell’s is seen trying to get through to the boy, to reach him and pull him back from the abyss. Later, at the time of adult Michael’s breakout, Loomis acquires a more cynical side, having sold out and written a book about the youthful murder and cashing in on public fascination with the crimes on the personal-appearance circuit. Performed with the right shadings by McDowell, it’s the movie’s most effective characterization.
More problematic is the film’s Laurie, which points up the problems with this Halloween as a whole. By condensing the events of the original 93-minute movie down to about half that time, Zombie gives short shrift to what was, as performed then by Jamie Lee Curtis, one of horror’s most memorable and trendsetting protagonists—a smart, sensible “good girl” who wasn’t preoccupied by the typical teen concerns of her friends, was thus the only one to notice someone stalking them and later had both the intelligence and inner strength to fight back. Here, there’s neither the time nor, apparently, the inclination to create such an indelible heroine, and Laurie isn’t terribly distinguishable from her pals Annie (Danielle Harris) and Lynda (Kristina Klebe)—beyond the fact that the latter swears like a truck driver, making her harsher company than P.J. Soles’ endearingly flighty ’78 incarnation. (Though it is a good, creepy touch that she and her boyfriend decide to get it on in the old Myers house.) Without the grounding of Curtis’ Laurie, the fact that Taylor-Compton is the only young woman in this film not to have a nude scene seems motivated less by a moral statement and more by the fact that the actress was just 17 when she was cast.
As such, Zombie’s Halloween suffers from the lack of a solid audience identification figure as Michael undertakes his Haddonfield rampage. Loomis, who isn’t the most sympathetic guy anyway, fades a bit into the background, and however much we understand where Michael comes from, there’s certainly no way to relate to him. Mane projects a solid sense of physical menace, and his mask (a bone of contention with fans throughout the sequels) looks the best it has since the night he first came home, thanks to makeup FX creator Wayne Toth. What’s lacking here is the greater sense of evil that surrounded Carpenter’s Michael, the sense that the killer is an extension of the All Hallow’s atmosphere that Zombie and Parmet have so richly created. Giving Michael such a specifically human backstory renders all the discussion of “the bogeyman” superfluous, since he’s not a malefic specter of darkness, just a very strong guy with a very damaged mind and a very big knife.
That dialogue isn’t the only element directly carried over from the original movie; beyond assorted music cues and The Thing and Forbidden Planet seen on TVs, several key scenes are directly recreated, some more effectively than others. Particularly awkward is the moment when the three girlfriends spot Michael watching them as they walk home from school, which plays as if there wasn’t time to film the necessary reverse shots; more fun is the revisited cemetery scene that casts Zombie regular Sid Haig as the groundskeeper. He’s one of a slew of recognizable genre faces in supporting roles, and here again, the dividends are mixed. The standout is Danny Trejo, who reveals a core of deep feeling behind his fearsome appearance as a Smith’s Grove orderly who tries to befriend Michael. Forsythe is redneck malice personified, but his dialogue is such an encyclopedia of white-trash invective that it borders on parody, and Ken Foree is so ingratiating as an ill-fated trucker that it’s a shame most of his lines involve his excretory activities. Brad Dourif as Annie’s sheriff dad and Dee Wallace as Laurie’s mom simply have too little to do, and a few of the cameos (like Udo Kier as one of Loomis’ Smith’s Grove superiors) are so quick that they only call undue attention to the well-known personalities in these eyeblink parts.
In the end, Halloween feels frustratingly torn between Zombie’s desires to make this property his own and to honor what worked so well in Carpenter’s film. His desire to give Michael’s story his own distinctive spin is admirable, and the result possesses more imagination and ambition than the largely lamentable string of sequels to Carpenter’s movie. Just like those follow-ups, however, the end result only reminds of just how singular an achievement the ’78 film was, and the stuff that works in Zombie’s Halloween makes one look forward to his getting back to creating his own original, twisted projects.
