Boogeydom: Class of '07
After 30 Years of Being the Horace Grant of Boogeymen, Michael Myers Finally Gets His Due. Fuck!

By Hunter Stephenson

If you asked the average man on the street who would win in a fight between Jason, Freddy and Michael Myers, one in 10, at most, would proclaim Michael Myers the victor. And, yes, most guys of any age would answer this question, however arrested in development. For 20 plus years, Michael Myers has needed his surname included in that pop-culture hypothetical, while Jason Voorhees—who is two years Michael’s junior and possesses an equally common birth name—has not. It’s no wonder that inside the perennially roamed halls of American Horror, a doll called Chucky has achieved stature matching Michael Myers’, the psychopathic killer that beget the modern slasher film.

The original Halloween was released in 1978 and helmed by a young director named John Carpenter, who would go on to make a string of highly cultish genre pictures, like They Live and Escape from New York, that solidified him as a punkish, pulpier Stanley Kubrick. Though Carpenter’s films remain genre non grata to most American film societies and critics, to this day Halloween, for which he was paid $10,000, is one of the more successful independent pictures ever made.

At Halloween’s dusky center is a young boy. One Halloween, he murders his elder sister and is sent to a sanitarium called Smith’s Grove. Years later, he escapes to resume his Halloween killing spree, thus becoming the Boogeyman of urban legend. In the original, this all happens in such quick procession that it mirrors a repressed afterthought. The film’s original title was The Babysitter Murders, and it abides, without demeaning the film’s memory, by that conceit. There is but one glimpse of a young Michael Myers, costumed at age six with a bloody knife in hand, and its purpose is to shed a mysterious suburban and human light on The Shape—the famous title given to the fully-grown Michael Myers in the end credits.

In this year’s remake—or what is being oft-referred to as a “reimagining”—of 1978's Halloween, Michael Myers, a character that has appeared in nine of the 10 (count ‘em, 10) Halloween films released over the last four decades—finally sees his past tended to. Rob Zombie, serving as both director and principle screenwriter on the film, his third directorial feature in the horror genre, is responsible for Michael’s new and bold origins.

The idea of a more traditional “prequel” has been pitched for Michael Myers on numerous occasions over the years, as have similar cinematic coups for Jason Voorhees and Freddy Krueger. Background-illuminating films for grisly American horror characters like Hannibal Lecter and Leatherface, the antagonist in 1974’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and its numerous follow-ups, were released this decade and met with lukewarm box-office (critical response was predictably grave, and, in these cases, deservedly so).

This trend of going “back” to the well that birthed canon for popular horror franchises reeks of Hollywood’s desperation for smash-and-grab hits. But Rob Zombie’s Halloween, from the same guilty Weinsetin studio that brought us Young Lecter, is an unlikely exception. In many ways Zombie's version, a visceral mixture of prequel, “reimagining” and faithful remake, is a more dynamic, fulfilling and interesting viewing experience than Carpenter’s original, and certainly stands above all eight Halloween sequels.

Zombie's Halloween will , and should, never be seen as a more important film than Carpenter's; but for a Halloween audience conditioned through the years to give the faintest of praise like, “At least that one didn’t star Busta Rhymes”—a reference to the prior installment, 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection—Zombie’s film is a big fucking deal. And not just for the audience; Zombie and the film’s success—it had the highest grossing Labor Day weekend on record, with $33 million—are seen as glimmers of hope for the fledgling Weinstein Company, which signed the director to a two-picture deal days before the film opened and is now tauting him alongside its championed auteurs like Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith.

The basic notion of a prequel-slash-reinvention is arguably justified for Michael Myers. Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees were introduced in their debut films as supernatural villains—the already undead. Michael Myers was curiously introduced as a child, albeit briefly. And ostensibly, Michael Myers is a deranged but mortal killer throughout the entirety of his first film; much less so in the money-hungry sequel—a linear continuation of the first—but that remains debated, erm, elsewhere. The third Halloween installment, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, was a failed attempt to turn the franchise into an anthology series a la Creepshow. The fact that Michael Myers did not appear, or seemingly ever exist, in this third film further scrambled his mythology with audiences, new and old. Future films halfheartedly attempted to make up for Michael’s false start at immortality, introducing comas (the fourth and fifth films), druidism (hey there Paul Rudd in number six) and a nostalgic anniversary (H20, number seven). Yet, Michael's lack of a good backstory for so many years makes the character a bit too much like an overextended novelty; he probably has much in common in the complaint department with Bernie from Weekend at Bernie's.

Basically, the ravishing of time and progressively worse screenwriting and films have reduced Michael Myers to just another interchangeable boogeyman for hire. He’s having an identity crisis. Looking back, he’s arguably always had one. His weapon of choice is the common butcher knife, not the sporty machete or leathery, knife-accessorized glove used by his contemporaries. Even his famous theme music when compared to Freddy’s (an eerie, elementary jump-rope sing-song) and Jason’s (a quiet, subliminal chant of “kill”) is tailored to merely announce his presence rather than subtly encourage it. Yet, Michael Myers’ theme-by-default is by far more well known. It's legendary.

Composed by John Carpenter—one of the director’s signature and typically great synthesizer compositions—the Halloween theme is an unforgettably hypnotic ambulance ride creeping along a keyboard. Today, the track has a lucrative second life as a continually best-selling ringtone across all ages, races, and classes. For better or worse, Michael Myers will always be entering your life, just like Halloween itself. He is an American icon of cinema. It's best for all of us that he have a proper foundation from which to project his never-ending boogeydom. And now, he does.

Halloween 2007: Rednecks, the ‘70s, Teens, “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and a Young Michael Myers

Rob Zombie’s Halloween crackles with the same raw, still-blossoming style—one ingrained with ‘70s dirt-bag chic—on display in his prior films The House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil’s Rejects; but with his latest effort it’s obvious Zombie labored obsessively over structure, pace, and subtext. One of the major differences here compared to Carpenter’s original is Zombie's institution of a three act structure; it resembles three chapters to a grim fable: childhood, asylum, the start of mythical boogeydom.

In the remake’s first act we meet Michael’s family. So far, this introduction has been a major point of contention with critics, fans and general audiences. Zombie opens on a sunny morning inside Michael’s childhood home—a post-hippie, two-story house in moderate disarray boxed in by a chain-link fence—as his mother is making the family breakfast. It is clear from the profanity being spewed as these characters await a daily meal that they are mid-grade rednecks. Michael’s stepfather, played by William Forsythe, is a cheaper line of fuel. His name is, of course, Ronnie and he uses the phrase “skullfuck” with sloshed mirth.

This type of richly vile character populates the interwoven universe of Zombie's prior two films, and critical sentiment holds that if he boldly inserts it into a remake of a John Carpenter classic, social dysfunction should be sited as the director's trademark. Moreover, the first two actors we see in the film are Forsythe and Sheri Moon Zombie, Zombie’s real life wife, playing Michael’s mother. Both are staples in the director’s movies, natch. Such an aggressive cleaning of the Halloween fridge so early in the remake is a ballsy, blatant and welcome attempt by Zombie to get comfortable with the material and irk any viewers blindly stepping out on the path of nostalgia.

That said, it’s hard to gage in the first minutes whether Halloween as a whole is headed in the same direction of redneck caricature. It isn’t. The first fifteen minutes seem to be a psyche-out; an attempt by Zombie to play with expectations. When he cuts to Michael, the audience is shown only a pair of young hands. These hands are washing blood from a scalpel in the privacy of an upstairs bathroom. For the first seconds, there is no face, just the act. It’s clear with this introduction that Zombie is not interested in giving an overloaded explanation for the inherent evil simmering inside Michael Myers. Instead he is showing its earliest incarnation. He is showing us a future icon of horror during what is essentially recreation or playtime.

This discourse of Rob Zombie's Halloween is written by Hunter Stephenson for ignore Magazine, copyright 2007.

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