As we get into spooky season, and with Halloween Kills coming out this month, it’s time to address the real black sheep of the Halloween franchise and talk about why Zombie’s Halloween and Halloween 2 are hated by so many horror fans.
Halloween is a franchise that helped spearhead the classic slasher genre and make it so popular. John Carpenter’s original Halloween was a Hitchcock-esque suspenseful film, relying on an unnerving musical score and characters who were likeable and whom the audience were devastated to see killed off by the menacing Shape. Rob Zombie’s remakes take a complete 180 from this suspenseful thriller and makes Halloween a gore-filled slasher.
But are we really all that surprised that this is what Zombie gives us? His Halloweens are classic Rob Zombie films, and he’s done what any other director would do in his stead: he’s made them his own. He gave us more of an insight into the childhood of Michael Myers and how he became The Shape and added to the family dynamic between Michael and Laurie.
The movies don’t come without their own faults (the shared hallucinations between Michael and Laurie were… interesting, to say the least) but they are good movies, and they’re unnecessarily hated by the horror fandom because they deviate too far from John Carpenter’s vision. But who wants a remake that is so similar to the original? To watch a remake that is shot for shot and line for line with the content it is emulating is to waste time watching a cash grab when you might as well watch the original.
Is it a gorefest? Yes. It’s a slasher that fits in with the 00s genre of the movie, giving the audience brutality and carnage. Halloween 07 and 09 were products of their time, and Zombie did an amazing job at giving us much anticipated Michael Myers content while adding to the lore of the well known slasher icon and giving us a better insight into Laurie and her relationships with other characters (don’t get me started on the relationship between Laurie Strode and Annie Brackett).
Fans hate this movie because they claim it doesn’t emulate the themes of Carpenter’s films, and they’re right. It builds on the lore, introducing new themes and characters to the Halloween franchise and creating something new while still remaining faithful to the original. But instead of this being something to be hated about Zombie’s versions, it should be celebrated, and more remakes should be in this similar vein; expanding on the lore of the stories instead of just trying to provide a shot-for-shot soulless copy of the original.
I think we can all agree that the mask in Halloween 2 was pretty bad though.
You can see our list of the 50 greatest horror films of the 21st century here.
Watch the trailer for Rob Zombie’s Halloween here:
