“That’s the devil’s house!”
A lot has been written – including on this very site – about the slick effectiveness of John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween, but not enough ink has been spilled describing the crushing awfulness of Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake. This is a top-to-bottom disaster, although it does have a few bright spots, lost though they might be in the void of Zombie’s antipathy and the sturm und drang of his film’s pervasive ugliness. This is one of the most misanthropic films I have ever seen, including The Mist. I can think of very few films that are possessed of such open contempt for their characters. Watching Halloween is watching hatred put to celluloid.
Case in point: the way Zombie portrays Michael Myers’s childhood. This opening prologue is the film’s biggest misstep, and also the only original thing that Zombie brings to Halloween. The Myers family – Michael, sister Judith, baby Laurie, mother Deborah, and step-father Ronnie – are awful caricatures who seem like leftover sketches from Zombie’s previous films The Devil’s Rejects and House of 1,000 Corpses. A typical family breakfast starts with Ronnie telling Deborah, “I will skull-fuck the shit out of you!” before commenting on his step-daughter’s body (“That bitch got herself a nice little dumper”) and questioning young Michael’s sexuality while, yes, bullying him relentlessly.
Deborah is supposed to be a loving, supportive mother, which is why Michael doesn’t kill her, but that reasoning falls apart through the very character of Ronnie. If Deborah loves her kids so much, why would she marry someone who hates her, hates her children, and threatens both with physical violence on a routine basis (Ronnie tells Michael that as soon as his broken arm is healed he’s going to break it again, on Michael’s head)? These early scenes are played at a deafening pitch, and they inform the strange approach Zombie takes to the material.
Michael Myers is just misunderstood, you guys. This is the point Zombie wants to get across, and he’ll take 108 minutes to get it through the viewer’s thick skull, but in trying so hard to understand what makes Michael Myers tick, Zombie fundamentally misunderstands what makes Halloween tick: the unknowability of its monster. Zombie wants us to know that Michael turned out the way he did because of a horrific home life and the bullies at school. Why, one might ask, does Zombie want us to identify with the man who kills sixteen people over the course of the film? One might draw the conclusion that Zombie just hates people. Everyone – every single person, without exaggeration – in Halloween would be the worst character in another movie. Take every human monster cut from any film for lack of believability or redeeming traits, put them in one film, and you have Halloween. It’s hard to watch, although certainly not for the reasons Zombie intended. It doesn’t help his approach that Zombie cast Daeg Faerch as the young Michael; beyond being incredibly unlikable, Faerch isn’t that great of an actor.
Perhaps the strangest thing about Halloween is how stupid and evil everyone is. Michael is housed in an asylum (with seemingly no other patients, guards, nurses, or doctors), and spends his time making masks. I’m no psychiatric professional (and neither is anyone in Halloween), but I don’t need a doctorate to know that if a kid is in your institution for killing three people while wearing a mask, don’t let him make more masks. And certainly don’t give him scissors with which to do it. At the hospital, Michael is antagonized by orderlies (who have thick Southern accents akin to Ronnie’s; Zombie must really hate the south). Their disregard for his reputation and colossal figure is absurd to the point that I imagined myself living in a reverse Shallow Hal situation – was I the only one seeing 6’9″ Tyler Mane while everyone else saw young Daeg Faerch? It should come as no surprise that two of these orderlies drag a female patient into Michael’s room so he can watch them rape her, because what Carpenter’s film was always missing was a rape scene (and don’t worry about content warnings; the scene is so poorly shot that it’s more annoying than disturbing). When Michael kills the rapists, the film is clearly on his side.
For more evidence, look no further than Laurie Strode and her coterie of awful friends. The plot of Halloween is likely familiar to anyone reading this, but in a nutshell: Michael returns to his home in Haddonfield, IL, and kills the people living in his childhood home. Carpenter cast a young Jamie Lee Curtis, who garnered sympathy for her guilelessness and likability. Zombie casts Scout Taylor-Compton, whose performance, to be fair, improves throughout the film. But when we first meet Laurie, Taylor-Compton plays her at (nearly) the same level as the rest of the cast plays their monstrous roles. Put simply, Laurie comes off like a jerk, and when she teases young Tommy, it seems like she’s making fun of him right to his face.
The second half of Halloween is more of a direct remake of Carpenter’s film, and it’s more effective because of it. Of course, that’s because Zombie just recycles shots and locations from the original film, not to mention Carpenter’s inimitable score (although the original score by Tyler Bates is atmospheric and propulsive; it’s one of the film’s better elements). The hulking Tyler Mane fills out Michael’s worksuit nicely, and the updated mask looks suitably frightening: dirty and seemingly drained of color.
Watching Halloween, one might think that Zombie hates John Carpenter, hates his film, and hates horror in general. But by all accounts, he loves all of those things – I just wonder if he understands them (although I do give him points for casting horror veterans like Dee Wallace, Ken Foree, and Udo Kier). When Zombie approached Carpenter about the remake, Carpenter offered him advice: “Make it your own.” Now Carpenter is on the record calling Rob Zombie a “piece of shit.” Carpenter is maybe the most relaxed person in Hollywood; he encourages remakes of his films, and all he wants to do now in his retirement from filmmaking is smoke weed and play video games with his son. How bad does your movie have to be to earn that man’s ire? This bad, it would seem.
That’s a wrap on 31 Days of Fright. Thanks for joining me for a second year. I’m equally glad and sorry that we finished with the absolute worst film on the list.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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