Halloween (2007)
Posted by Gary Sundt on March 27, 2008
By Gary Sundt
As Printed in The Lumberjack on September 6, 2007
Roger Ebert suggested in his review of the original 1978 Halloween that John Carpenter, much like Alfred Hitchcock, wanted to play the audience like a piano.
Director Rob Zombie wants to play his audience like an electric guitar that he smashes to pieces at the end of the show. While his 2007 Halloween is a violent, macabre, redneck retelling of an old story, he does something that will polarize audiences: he made it his own.
In the retelling of Carpenter’s classic, Zombie does something special by taking the first 10 minutes of the original and stretching it out to about half an hour. The desired result is to have the answer to the question everyone asked after they saw the original, “Why is he a monster?” Michael Myers lives in Whitetrash County, America: he likes to cut up animals, his mother is a stripper, his sister is a slut, he gets picked on by the other kids and his only father figure is convinced that he is a homosexual.
It is at this point when critics need to put the 1978 classic to bed. The original was not a white trash weekend, but was instead simply a trip into hick town, middle class suburbia. Zombie makes his a different Halloween by adding a touch of deep Southern Comfort.
Beyond the necessary plot elements and some lines of dialogue, the film is not a Carpenter-inspired Halloween movie, but a true Rob Zombie film. It was made clear in the impressive if not exceptionally vicious 2005 horror road trip The Devil’s Rejects that this filmmaker was going to be bringing a high level of violence to his horror films. And he delivers in full with his Halloween.
Halloween is utterly brutal, and never pretends to be anything different. From the gut-wrenching first kill, Zombie wants to paint Michael Myers as a violent killer of circumstance, using the Laurie-Strode-is-Michael-Myers’-baby-sister storyline created in the original film’s sequel. He attempts, and succeeds, in turning a ridiculous plot element into a coherent story, giving his Myers the “all about the family” feel that Halloween II failed to pull off.
Zombie’s usual cast of C and B-List horror icons show up for Halloween, along with the director’s wife, Sheri Moon Zombie, who gives a particularly impressive performance as young Michael’s tortured mother. Daeg Faerch makes his theatrical debut as the young Michael, and does an incredible job with his task. And our new Laurie Strode is the cute Scout Taylor-Compton, who gives a solid performance as a young, ripe teenage girl, and who definitely has the pipes for the necessary screams.
The truth is, however, that Zombie’s Halloween suffers quite a bit from the very same factor that caused the other sequels so much grief. With the baby sister plot, this film wants you to be afraid of Michael Myers the man instead of “The Shape” of the original. The situation of being stalked and, for lack of a better word, hunted by an unknown force is what struck a chord in 1978. Zombie’s goal is to put an identity into a mask that, for all intents and purposes, was never supposed to have a true identity.
Regardless, Zombie’s film is a success. It provides scares and horror, which is something we haven’t gotten from Halloween films in a long time. No matter what you think of the 2007 Halloween next to the 1978 original, it can’t be ignored that somebody finally put some energy and fear into that old Bill Shatner mask again.
Note: There is currently a director’s cut available. I implore you not to watch it. It’s a very different, very bad movie.
