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

The intro works in the fashion of a solid rock biopic; it works in the same way that Zombie's characters' outbursts of profanity are at once grotesquely humorous and uncomfortable. We are entertained by this intimate and complete portrait of a Young Michael Myers, and more shocked and pleased by how sudden and rightly disturbing it is when Zombie first reintroduces him: Of course he'd be killing his pet rat awaiting his mom's omelette, he's Michael Myers! That's kinda sick. At a time when the horror genre is ruled by the trite playboy gore of Eli Roth, the buffoonish director of the Hostel series, audiences need to get uncomfortable again with a truer strain of uncomfortable.

This analysis would not be complete without noting Zombie’s background in hard rock. As the founder of the defunct horror rock group White Zombie and an even more successful, more cartoonish solo artist, his deft, enjoyable weaving of rock ‘n’ roll into the first act of Halloween should be noted. But thus far, it hasn’t.

His new film is loaded with classic rock standards like Rush’s “Tom Sawyer” and Peter Frampton’s “Baby, I Love Your Way”; and while this music should be moderately expected after the delirious rush hour score that fills The Devil’s Rejects, how Zombie expertly sets the first act of Halloween in a very specific, late 1970s, when America was on the cusp of hard rock like the first shiver to a cool evening, and with Columbine still years away, is striking.

The actor who plays 10 year old Michael Myers, Daeg Faerch, wears an original KISS T-shirt throughout his early scenes, and his long blonde hair sets him apart from other kids in the film. He looks like a tiny J. Mascis from Dinosaur Jr. Many of today’s quack psychologists would pounce on linking KISS and hard rock to Michael’s first murder—in which he kills a smartass schoolmate who taunts him while wearing a clown mask similar to KISS’s face paint—but Zombie plants this detail without forcing it. The mask in this scene is also an homage to one originally chosen for The Shape in 1978 that lost out, of course, to the canonized bluish-white mask of William Shatner’s face.

A more complex use of rock ‘n’ roll in the film, one that keenly exemplifies Zombie’s awareness for minutiae in the original and his need to personalize it, involves the use of the infamously creepy hit by Blue Öyster Cult, “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” In the original, the song is played from a car stereo as a comely Jamie Lee Curtis and Nancy Loomis aimlessly cruise around their neighborhood smoking a joint (windows up). Unbeknownst to them, Michael Myers is following. How the fuck he learned to drive while being locked up from the age of six is not explained, but pot smoke, hot stoned girls, “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” and a masked psycho make for the sexiest scene in a film, one with its fair share of prized ‘78 tits.

In Zombie's film, “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is playing inside the large, ‘70s-era headphones worn by Michael’s foxy, eldest sister (nicely play by Hannah Hall), as she lies naked on her bed, having just screwed her ‘70s-era burnout boyfriend. When young Michael enters her bedroom to kill her, aloofly wearing his famed, bluish-white mask for the first time, the scene calmly strikes the same cord of taboo sexy-freakiness. That the Blue Öyster Cult hit is now recognized by generations of listeners, just like Michael Myers, creates a communal viewing experience of that decade. Zombie purposely places the song in the decade it was originally released, as opposed to the third act’s present day. Such careful consideration for music is not exhibited very often in today’s horror films—remakes or otherwise. His shrewd ear and eye for a prior decade's music and look is reminiscent of David Fincher’s in Zodiac, and Zombie deserves similar kudos.

Chapter Two: Dr. Samuel Loomis, Wrestlers, Smith’s Grove, Transformation, Psychosis, Mortal-slash-Supernatural

What is essentially chapter two in the film should, theoretically, be the easiest for critics and fans to dismiss—comparable to kicking field goals with candy corn across a kitchen table. Instead, this middle section makes the case for Rob Zombie as the foremost horror director working today. After young Michael’s murderous familial rampage in act one, he is, as in the original, transferred to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium for years of close evaluation under the care of psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis. The scenes at Smith's Grove are where the most drastic differentiations between John Carpenter’s original and Zombie’s remake occur and clash.

Carpenter chose to bypass Michael’s years at Smith’s Grove, quickly segueing into his escape from the ward. Zombie, as you might guess, chooses to examine the missing gap, documenting Michael’s entry at age 10 up until his escape in his mid-20s. We are witness to several clinical interviews between Michael and Dr. Loomis, and in the first, Daeg Farch is a particularly convincing ripple of eerie despondence and regressive infantilism: Young Michael's demeanor suggests that he has no recollection of brutally slaying four people, and yet we sense that the murderer-slash-evil inside him is completing its depersonalization beneath this child's disinterested, glassy exterior. When Farch says, “Hi, I am Michael Myers,” into a tape recorder with prepubescent inundation, the scene is a truly memorable and haunting moment of wack-job realism that seals itself in the mind like a time capsule.

Inside Smith's Grove, we come to see that actor Malcolm McDowell’s Dr. Loomis is a far weaker, less confident psychiatrist than the one played, notably, by Donald Pleasance. Pleasance portrayed Dr. Loomis as a serious, intelligent, bald harbinger of doom and his continued presence throughout much of the series was similar to Charles Bronson's in the Death Wish films, with Pleasance replacing the latter's dependency on ammo with his great, reflective meanderings about evil.

Malcom McDowell never really gels with the material here—it’s easily one of his rare subpar performances—but part of that may be due to the writing, which expresses a surprising borderline contempt and disinterest in his character, one that was formerly the franchise’s cornerstone protagonist. Here, Dr. Loomis seems caught in personal crisis and dissonance. He even admits to Michael that he is nearly friendless. Breaking from the original, Dr. Loomis ceases seeing his most famous, murderous patient, now a six-foot-eight mute, prior to his escape. After saying a peniultimate goodbye, Dr. Loomis is soon shown speakling to a room filled with clinical and literary types. He is shilling a book that he has written, entitled The Devil’s Eyes, about his encounters with what he labels Michael’s incurable evil. Apparently, it's already a bestseller.

This scene with Dr. Loomis serves as light, cynical commentary on the triviality of modern day psychiatry, but McDowell didn’t seem to get, or fully grasp, its purpose. Perhaps, test audiences didn't either. While Dr. Loomis survives in the work print of the film that was leaked onto the Internet, the character is mortally wounded by Michael in the theatrical release. Perhaps Zombie decided to cut his losses or had a change of heart about his own shrink. Nevertheless, casting the actor who famously played the mascaraed psychopath Alex de Large in A Clockwork Orange in the role of Halloween's psychopath-tracking psychiatrist did not live up to its potential.

Inside his cell at Smith’s Grove, as aforementioned, Michael has grown to an inexplicable six-foot-eight. He is played from here on by the actor Tyler Mane, a former wrestler best known for playing Sabretooth in the first X-Men film. The audience never sees Michael lifting weights, ordering seconds or thankfully shooting steroids in a montage set to Black Sabbath’s “Changes.” Nor is the viewer lead to believe that similar acts are responsible for this new adult Michael. Without seeing the film, the phrase “Wrestler plays Michael Myers” is admittedly ridiculous, conveying a maximum of low-brow creative ineptitude. But, wisely, Zombie never shows Mane speaking. Nor do we his face—Michael makes and wears paper masks in the asylum, arrested development to the nth degree—and this preserves and even builds on Michael Myers’ mystery as a human being who at some point turns into an undead entity of pure dread.

This adult Michael is curtained with such a heavy and well-paced psychosis that his inexplicable, bizarre and nightmarish transformation from child into hulk has more in common with Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis than hyper-musculature taken from the pages of a modern comic book. With no place to go and no outlet to channel death, the inherent evil inside Michael manifests itself as abnormal physical growth. Prior to his film's release, negative press was abound that Zombie would anchor his Halloween in realism—a “Michael Myers as American serial killer” if you will—in the stylistic vein of the latest incarnation of Batman or the Jason Bourne trilogy.

Instead, Zombie asks the viewer to comprehend a notorious source of horror that is chained on-screen ala Frankenstein. Michael Myers' signature mystique and spookiness are not lessened even as Zombie forgoes the vanishings and eerie dream logic that birthed these traits in the original. At a time when many of us cannot explain massive historical happenings that we’ve watched and studied for years now in the news, this type of fresh, spotlit horror proves original and relevant. The question at the heart of the original: When and how much of Michael Myers is mortal and how much is supernatural, is not only intact in Zombie's remake, but more disturbing and challenging.

Chapter Three: The Town of Haddonfield, Boogeyman Amuck, Laurie Strode, Suburban Houses, Horror Marathons, Halloween Night

Once Michael escapes from Smith’s Grove—violently snapping during a transfer in the theatrical version; vacating after asylum guards rape a female inmate in the work print—he makes his way toward Haddonfield, the middle-upper class Illinois town where a teen-age Laurie Strode resides, just in time for Halloween.

Looking back, it was in 1981's Halloween 2, which John Carpenter co-wrote and to some extent oversaw but vocally refrained from directing, in which audiences learned that Laurie Strode, the main protagonist in the original, was actually the baby sister of Michael Myers. This conceit, a clear excuse to milk the original's $47 million box office take, is now commonly mistaken for a beloved plot point in the original. Thus, Zombie has incorporated it here in his film's climax and conclusion.

The last act of Halloween is harrowing, brisk and most faithful to the original. It is essentially the cool "payoff" to the fitting but categorically cornball line appearing on the remake's posters: “Evil has a Destiny.” As in the original, Laurie is teased by girlfriends for being dateless and she begins to see Michael looming outside from her classroom window. Later, as Laurie and her friends walk down a neighborhood sidewalk, she notices Michael again standing silently a few yards away. Unsure of his presence the girls become an explosion of insecure, bubbly giggles. That their reaction to this bizarre threat in the shape of a man is a hiccupping of adolescent taunts, nicely illustrates the comfort-zone suburbia that encapsulates their lives.

When Michael disappears and the girls continue to walk down the sidewalk, we take in Haddonfield as a not-unpleasant modern-day suburbia: the trees lightly snow dead leaves and the neighborhood's two-story houses, while cozy, seem a little too nestled off the street in nooks of green and shadow. The filmmakers have nicely update Haddonfield from the WASPy quietness that inhabited the original; its teen-age female residents no longer carry their textbooks-to-breasts while walking home from school, while their sex lives remain as active as they were in 1978.

Before all the stabbing restarts, Dr. Loomis warns Haddonfield’s sheriff with a classic line from the original: “Death has come to your little town." But this time the existential ugliness that is Michael is not making a return, its arriving for the first time. This is in line with Zombie’s thematic nudging at class in America; this time Michael, a child of dysfunctional upbringing, has come from across the fence to shatter this perfect town and find its adopted resident, his baby sister.

On Halloween, the young babysitters of Haddonfield, including Laurie, fight the boredom and annoyance of looking after costumed kids by watching mini-marathons of horror movies, including 1932’s White Zombie. With one of the most iconic modern monsters of American horror at his disposal and nearing his remake's conclusion to a horror classic, it's here that Zombie displays his passion for the traditions of the genre and the holiday. For instance, Danielle Harris, a 30 year old character actress who appeared in Halloween 4 and 5 as a child (and, memorably, in The Last Boy Scout), is cast as one of the main teen babysitters. In a meta-flourish worthy of Brian De Palma, Harris's character is given the worst, most thrilling, most detailed and most naked death in the film at the hands of Michael.

The way Myers lunges and punches his way through decayed walls and windows in the remake to kill distraught babysitters has been unfavorably compared to the brutish methods of Jason Voorhees. But the execution and style is in line with the director’s preference for brutal action; Zombie wants his murders to feel less clean and more heavy with death. After countless Halloween sequels where Michael is as an elusive boogeyman that appears in dark corners, after years of copycat horror movies that depict teen kills like festively macabre party poppers or worse, like frat-boy surgery in so-called “torture porn” like Hostel and Saw, that Zombie makes viewers earn and sacrifice for their thrills via on-screen murders is commendable.

These days, when audiences have seen it all, including the '00s ironic-horror Scream trilogy, the complex structure, style, tone and themes of 2007’s Halloween offer a great and rare feeling. After viewing the film, it feels like you watched an honest to god movie (not "just" a horror movie), and there is surprise soon after at how far your mind traveled in so little time. You take numerous, memorable, highly visceral scenes from the theater with you, instead of an emptier wallet, differing levels of disappointment and the requisite trope cliffhanger that will be continued in an even poorer sequel. Yes, these days a boogeyman has to work harder to deliver scares and inventiveness, and right now, no boogeymen are working harder than Michael Myers and Rob Zombie.

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

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