Halloween (2007)

“His eyes will deceive you; they will destroy you. They will take from you your innocence, your pride, and eventually your soul. These eyes do not see what you and I see. Behind these eyes one finds only blackness, the absence of light. These are the eyes of a psychopath.” – Dr Samuel Loomis

It’s Halloween – but not as we know it.

There were a few ideas kicking around after the conclusion of Halloween: Resurrection. One of them was a film exploring Myers’s time in the Sanitorium. Dimension Films, headed by Bob Weinstein ultimately decided on a new direction. They would scrap everything that had gone before, and remake the original and start all over again. Okay, let’s put the sheer audacity of that notion to the side for a second, who could possibly take the reins of such a project?

Enter rock star Rob Zombie, who was riding high on his successes with several platinum albums and two well received movies, House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects. Back in the day, I interviewed Zombie for GoreZone Magazine and I asked him the big, burning question;

RP: So, after reaching a huge level of success with “House of 1000 Corpses” and “The Devil’s Rejects”, what made you go the route of a remake for your third feature? Particularly when you’d worked with original scripts which you’d written yourself.

RZ: It wasn’t the first thing I did. After “Rejects”, I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t have a movie in mind, necessarily. A couple of other projects kind of came and went that I worked on for a little while and then just didn’t pan out to be what I wanted them to be.

The problem is, it’s really hard to get movies made at any level. Even big directors that have huge successes, they always have projects that they struggle to get made. “Halloween” was just one of those meetings that I took with Bob Weinstein.

You get these calls all the time about “having meetings” with people. You’re never even sure why you’re having them but you figure well, eventually one of these meetings has to lead to something. And at that point, I wanted to work with somebody different because I thought that truthfully as much as I loved the people I had made “Rejects” with at Lionsgate, I really thought that when it came to releasing the movie, they really fucked it up.

I was pretty bummed. The marketing department wanted to market it as though it was a “Saw” type movie - and it just wasn’t. Now, years later, people are always coming up to me saying “Oh my God, I loved that movie. I didn’t go and see it because I thought it was something else. Like...great (laughs)

I knew that was going to happen and that’s exactly what happened.

Even since, Lionsgate has apologised, saying “we fucked that movie up so bad”. So, I was looking to go somewhere else to do a movie and when I met with Bob Weinstein from Dimension, he started talking about “Halloween” and at first it didn’t interest me in the least. And then I kind of thought about it for a while, for a month or so, and then I started getting interested in the idea of it. And since they were letting me basically do whatever I wanted, that’s what sold it and sealed the deal.

RP: In any way they you can consider; it was a calculated risk for you because it’s such a treasured picture for horror fans. The film was slated by fans on internet message boards before you shot even a scene. Did that affect you in any way? Did it piss you off?

RZ: I basically just ignored all of it because it was all pretty meaningless. I mean everyone has an opinion, but when you have an opinion based on something you haven’t seen, you sort of DON’T have an opinion.

And there you have it, from the mouth of Zombie himself.

Now, I’m not against remakes per se – some have elevated the concept introduced in the original films and brought something new that had enhanced the story. But okay, mostly they’re creatively stifled. I can’t fathom the current Disney trend of shot for shot remakes of their original animated classics for this very reason. But there are huge exceptions that stand alongside the originals. Take the 1979 Invasion of the Body Snatchers for example, or The Thing, King Kong (the 2005 version).

But Halloween? Done in Zombie’s own style?

Basically, it’s the same story as told by John Carpenter 31 years earlier, with a few additional twists. For example, the first third of the film is focused entirely on filling in Michael Myers’s background. We try to figure out exactly what triggers him. We see he had a truly abysmal childhood. His mother Deborah Myers (Sheri Moon Zombie) was a pole dancer, stuck with an abusive slob of a man. His sister Judith had little to do with him, but he seemed to have a connection with his baby sister.

He exhibited psychopathic tendencies early on, killing his pets and other small animals and keeping photographs of his kills. This comes to light when bullied at school, he retaliates and the photographs are discovered and shown to his mother who clearly has no idea what her son has been doing. Later that same day, Michael corners his bully and beats him to death, before later that same day (October 31), killing the drunken slob, his sister and her boyfriend. Deborah discovers him sitting on the steps to the house, cradling his baby sister.

After a long trial, Michael is found guilty of first-degree murder – at the age of ten, and is committed to Smith’s Grove Sanitorium under the care of Dr Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) – his only other contact with the outside world being his weekly visits from Deborah.

Deborah brings him a photo taken some time earlier of him with his baby sister, in an attempt to snap him out of his increasing withdrawal from everybody. He’s becoming completely isolated and unresponsive, hiding behind papier-mâché masks which he makes obsessively. As Deborah is leaving at the end of her visit, Michael snaps and murders his nurse before finally shutting down and becoming 100% dissociative. Deborah can’t take any more and in despair takes her own life, leaving the baby to be adopted by the Strode family.

Fifteen years pass, Loomis make any headway and decides to retire and write a book about his infamous patient. During this fifteen-year stretch, Michael has grown to a height of around 6’8 and is now played by Tyler Mane. One night a couple of redneck orderlies decide to have some fun and take a female inmate from her cell, put her in Michael’s cell and rape her there, goading him to do the same. He flips and kills everyone he sees. Guards, orderlies… they all die. (But I’m not sure about the female patient. We don’t see her in any further scenes)

Then, he makes his way back to Haddonfield, with Loomis now out of retirement, in hot pursuit. He starts stalking babysitters on Halloween, having found his adopted baby sister Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) he relentlessly tries to kill her, having already murdered her two friends Lynda (Kristina Klebe) and Annie (Danielle Harris – yes, last seen as Jamie Harris in Halloweens 4&5. Evidently, she grew up.)

The most interesting piece of casting is Malcolm McDowell as Loomis, who seems to perfectly manage the hysterical pitch of the late Donald Pleasance while simultaneously making the role uniquely his own. This came up during my conversation with Zombie;

RP: Malcolm McDowell really nailed the part of Sam Loomis. What was he like to work with? I didn’t think anybody could really outdo Donald Pleasence, to be honest with you.

RZ: Yeah, the great thing with Malcolm was that he knew Donald Pleasence and was friends with him, but Malcolm had never even seen “Halloween”.

RP: Really?

RZ: Yeah, he STILL hasn’t seen it. So, which I thought was great, there was no chance of him imitating Donald Pleasence on any level because he’d never seen it. And I didn’t want him to. That was the tricky thing with “Halloween” truthfully, was trying to find that balance between making it new and retaining enough elements that I thought should be there. And it’s still a struggle in my mind, whether I should’ve taken it further away from the original or what, you know. You never know. That’s the trouble with remakes. So, I love Malcolm and he was wonderful to work with and I knew he would just become a totally different character.

The final scene has Laurie go off the veranda with Michael who has already been shot three times by Loomis, she has a gun in her hand as she lands on top of him, he’s motionless. She aims the gun - he grabs her hand and…blank screen.

It’s not a bad version of the story, but the question remains, was it a necessary remake? Did it add anything that was lacking in the original? The scenes showing Myers’s childhood are harrowing, making him out to be kind of like Damien from The Omen, and with the exception of his mother Deborah, none of them seem particularly likeable She more than anybody else seems to have been handed a raw deal in life and is doing whatever she can to keep the family afloat. Michael himself seems to just have been born bad with the exception of his connection to Laurie, who he genuinely seems to care for, but then wants to slaughter. If the extended sequences dealing with him at the age of ten had the intention of eliciting audience sympathy, then they pretty much failed because the child actor (Daeg Faerch) playing Michael, even before the killing, looks like a heartless thug with no concept of remorse.

The only other real additions were a lot of gore and a ton of gratuitous nudity that wasn’t really needed. The original Halloween COULD have gone that route in ’78, but wisely chose not to, becoming a textbook exercise in building tension and unease.

As with all remakes, it’s all down to audience taste. This version is longer, it’s more overt, far less subtle and maybe it suits modern audiences and really, who am I to judge?

My personal opinion is that Rob Zombie does better with his own original material than when he’s trying to remake something that already exists.