Directed by: Rob Zombie
Premise: A remake of John
Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic. In this re-imagining, Michael Myers grows
up in a dysfunctional suburban household and is committed to an asylum after
murdering members of his own family. Fifteen years later, the adult Myers
escapes and returns to his hometown to hunt down his surviving sister (Scout
Taylor-Compton).
What Works: The first act of the film is very good
and successfully reinvents the franchise by exploring the background of Michael
Myers. Zombie’s screenplay creates a credible psychopathology for Michael
Myers. The disintegration of Michael’s personality while he is incarcerated is
very interesting and very grounded in reality, which makes it much creepier. The
young Michael Myers is played by Daeg Faerch and the actor does a good job of
portraying a burgeoning psychopath, selling the madness by playing the role
calmly and using the horror of his actions and the situations to create the
madness. The relationship between Michael and Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) is
portrayed a bit differently in this version and fleshing out their relationship
helps to illustrate Michael’s growing threat and aids the ending of the film.
McDowell brings a sensitivity to his role as a failed nurturer that differs from
Donald Pleasence’s Captain Ahab-like take on the character in the original
film. Sherri Moon Zombie stars as Michael Myers’ mother and she really sells
the tragedy of Michael’s descent in monstrosity.
What Doesn’t: After Michael Myers escapes from
the asylum, the film abandons a lot of its innovative ideas and ends up
repeating a lot of the original film but in a faster, watered down, and far less
suspenseful imitation. In House
of 1000 Corpses and The
Devil’s Rejects, Rob Zombie demonstrated his ability to stage violence
in savage and brutal ways, but he comes up short in this film. Many scenes of
violence are poorly staged and edited so that it is difficult to tell what is
happening. On top of that, Zombie still hasn’t mastered the ability to create
dread and tension, which this Halloween severely lacks. The three female
leads are obnoxious, overly hormonal, one-dimensional characters whose life or
death is ultimately inconsequential and that kills audience investment in the
conclusion. While the remake appears to be trying to separate itself from the
cliché of the virginal Final Girl by making the victims and the heroine
sexually savvy, the result is that the sexuality comes off as redundant and
superfluous. In the third act, this Halloween plays more like the sequels
to the original film than a reinvention and rehashes a lot of sequences seen
before in this franchise and the slasher genre in general. This is most apparent
when Michael becomes an indestructible killing machine, impervious to bullets
and other damage, even though the whole point of this version’s new approach
was to get away from this pseudo-supernatural and ground Michael Myers in
reality.
Bottom Line: The remake of Halloween is a
disappointment, more so because it is a product of Rob Zombie, whose sophomore
film, The Devil’s Rejects, was a brilliant piece of film. This remake
falters because it jettisons the novelty of reinvention in favor of
recapitulating what has been seen before.
Update:
In preparation for the release of Halloween
II, I took another look at Rob Zombie’s Halloween and I found my
analysis of the film had changed. Looking at the film initially, I held it
against John
Carpenter’s original Halloween rather than judging Zombie’s film on its own merits. This was a mistake of
methodology on my part, which ultimately led to a review that missed the point.
More
than anything, I criticized the remake for adding a radically new back-story to
the first half of Halloween but
then recapitulating the events of the original film in the second half. On
closer inspection, and given the events of the sequel, Zombie’s reasons for
this are fairly obvious. Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers is more than a mask;
he’s a boy, and then a man, who is abandoned by everyone in his life and for
him murder and violence are his only means of expressing himself. In the remake,
Michael’s rage stems from his desire to experience familial love and all of
this is quite clear from the back-story of Zombie’s film. By buttressing this
opening up against the original story, Zombie created a commentary on the
original film and on the slasher genre as a whole. His film challenges the
“bad seed” take on evil and the film shows how the desire for love may be
perverted into acts of violence.
The
other major criticism I made on Zombie’s Halloween was
directed towards the female characters, who I found obnoxious, overly hormonal,
and one-dimensional and I felt that the overt sexuality of their story was
superfluous and redundant. In retrospect, I can only stand by the former
argument but not the latter. I still find them rather obnoxious but there is
also a very earnest attempt by Zombie to distance himself from the conservative
conception of punishing sexual liberation and create a contrast between the
healthy and normal sexuality of the teenage women and the way Michael’s own
desires have been twisted. How sexuality plays into Michael’s boyhood murders
and the way it resurfaces in his attacks as an adult shows a great degree of
forethought on Zombie’s part.
Rob Zombie’s Halloween is not perfect but it is one of the gutsiest and most psychologically sophisticated slasher films ever made. Whatever its faults, the film does fulfill its duty as a remake to bring a fresh perspective to the material and reinvent the franchise for contemporary audiences.