New Versus Old: "Halloween"

Halloween (1978)

In what was perhaps one of the most revolutionary acts of filmmaking in horror movie history, John Carpenter released his masterpiece Halloween in 1978. Halloween paved the way for the slasher genre, with beautiful and carefully arranged camera angles (that allow the film to even hold up to today's standards rather than feeling aged like so many other horror classics), an eerie soundtrack which was simple enough to become stuck in audience members heads, and a mysterious villain who can strike terror into the hearts of audience members without ever saying a word. It's, without a doubt, a landmark of cinema, and like all other classics someone set out to remake it.

Rob Zombie's 2007's version of Halloween opens in a much different manner from the classic. Rather than providing the slow and eerie point of view shot of a home late one night it starts with loud rock music in the middle of the day, where we find young Michael Myers playing with a pet rat. From the start the film is obnoxious, setting its stage with characters who shriek and speak in a manner which is far more profane than even the trashiest of families would exhibit. While I'm not opposed to profane language in art, particularly in instances where that's the best way to communicate a feeling or message, the film begins to twist itself into something immature and obnoxious as its overuse of profanity makes it seem more and more like a high schooler's edgy fanfiction of a horror classic. 

Rob Zombie's Halloween reduces the fear of Michael Myers to pity as we watch him struggle through a family and school unrealistically vile and profane, which uses foul language and sexually explicit dialogue to such an extent that the f-bomb will no longer even sound like a real word anymore. The mystery of Michael Myers evil and cruel behavior is reduced to the sob story of a boy growing up listening to heavy metal music while being chased down by bullies and abusive family members who are incapable of saying anything to him which isn't a threat to beat him, effectively removing the fear of a child who simply began killing just because he could.

Once the lengthy childhood sequence of Halloween finally ends (one which was just a single terrifying scene in the original film) we are treated to seeing adult Michael Myers, who would look right at home among the members of a heavy metal band with his tattered homemade mask and long stringy hair. The eerie nature of his silence as an adult has already been tainted by his numerous scenes of dialogue as a child, which already took away all of the mystery of why he became a killer in the first place. From that point onward the film finally spirals into the gory splatter-fest which is to be expected from anything Rob Zombie attaches his name to.

Restraint was what made John Carpenter's Halloween so phenomenal. His ability to know when to explicitly show Michael Myers lingering in the background versus when to let the audience gasp when they notice him themselves was remarkable, he knew when to include music, when to show blood, and how to truly make audience members uncomfortable by holding back. Rob Zombie does the exact opposite, he wants to show the audience the most loud, bloody, and profane mess which he can think of, and it is a mess. Rob Zombie's Halloween reduces a classic to another graphic and disgusting mess which is too loud and over-the-top to ever be considered even remotely frightening. 

If you still haven't seen the original Halloween for some reason, then I urge you to see John Carpenter's masterpiece, but to stay far away from the hideous disaster Rob Zombie coughed up to try and cash in on the franchise's popularity.