Fifteen years ago he was a popular shock rocker, touring the country with the likes of Ozzy Osbourne and occasionally directing award-winning music videos. So given his predilection for stepping behind the lens it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Rob Zombie announced his foray into feature moviemaking with 2003’s House of 1000 Corpses. But Zombie remaking John Carpenter’s hallowed horror classic, Halloween? That announcement last year by Dimension Films did shock some people… including Zombie himself. Having a hand in bringing that black magic to a new generation was beyond his wildest dreams (nightmares?).
“It’s almost hard to track how influential Halloween was to the horror genre,” notes Zombie. “It’s like the influence of Star Wars on science fiction. Not since Psycho had there been a [horror] movie that powerful. John basically reinvented the wheel.”
The idea, says Zombie, began with the standard innocuous Hollywood meeting. “A little over a year ago someone said, ‘Bob Weinstein would like to have a meeting with you about stuff.’ It was nothing specific, so I just went in and started talking to him. He kind of threw Halloween out there in a general sense to see if I was interested in any way. The Weinsteins wanted to do something [with the franchise] but they didn’t know what—they didn’t know if they wanted to do another sequel or a prequel or God knows what.
“My initial thought was ‘No!’ I didn’t want to do it, so I just said, ‘Oh, well, I’ll think about it and get back to you guys.’ I went off and thought about it for a long time and as I thought about it more and more, I kind of came up with an angle that I thought would be fresh and worth doing.
“What was originally scary about Michael Myers seems like a cliché now, but at the time, the idea of a silent, unstoppable, faceless killer was terrifying. By now it’s been beaten to death so much and copied and imitated and ripped off—even by itself. Seven sequels clearly diluted whatever power it had, so for me part of the challenge and fun was that Michael Myers as a character is one of the few really iconic horror characters that has come along in a long, long time. You can say ‘Frankenstein’ or ‘Michael Myers’ and people know them—they’re equally well-known—and that’s what was attractive to me. I could dust him off and find a new angle that would make him scary again.
“I think that [in the last Halloween films], Michael Myers was just played by a stuntman who fit the suit, but I needed someone who could really act and bring something to it. I didn’t want to just do a bunch of gags with a guy in a suit falling off things, getting lit on fire and blowing up. This time, you really get inside the head of this guy. That’s what I find scary in real life and I tried to base my version on real-life scenarios. Picture anybody—picture Jeffrey Dahmer. If you just see a picture of the guy sitting there, you say, ‘Well, he’s not scary.’ Then you feed all the backstory into it and suddenly you see that kind of mild-mannered guy with the glasses in a completely different light. Now he seems completely terrifying.
“In John’s movie, the origin of Michael Myers is very vague. They show him as a little kid for about five minutes and then you sort of hear a little bit of backstory that’s told to you by Dr. Loomis. But you don’t see any of it and you don’t experience any of it, so I started from the beginning. You can watch the first hour of my movie and if you didn’t know it was Halloween, you wouldn’t know. It really delves deep into the whole creation of this monster before he becomes the icon everybody knows today.”
Although it’s too stylistic and well-crafted to be considered a “slasher movie,” the original Halloween spawned an entire generation of copycats that fall into that category. If his fresh take generates a similar response, nobody who knows Rob Zombie will be shocked. MM
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