Halloween
Directed by Rob Zombie
Rob Zombie, former lead singer of White Zombie, doesn’t go for sequels and remakes. Yet here he is with Halloween, the ninth installment in John Carpenter’s horror franchise that began in 1978.
“I wouldn’t have thought about doing this in a million years, but I got a call from Bob Weinstein to have a meeting and he talked about Halloween. And, I was going…umm, Halloween. It didn’t interest me at all. I wouldn’t make a sequel because they’re terrible. Each is worse than the last. I don’t know how they did that, but they figured it out.
“I wasn’t interested in a prequel, or any of that. I really wasn’t interested at all in Halloween or Michael Myers. I left, thinking I was going to call Bob back and say no. But after a month, I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” explains Zombie. “Then I started thinking about it from the beginning, like starting over, because Michael Myers is a great character—like Frankenstein. He’s one of the true modern-day iconic horror characters. It’s very rare that a character will be so popular that he can survive seven terrible sequels and people are still interested. So, I thought I’d go back to the beginning and make a serious movie—not one of these teenybopper movies that are so silly. I thought, let’s have the first act about young Michael Myers’ life, the second act about him being incarcerated as a child into an adult and the third act veer into John Carpenterland.”
MERIN: Why don’t you believe in sequels?
ZOMBIE: Actually, the second movie I made, [The Devil’s Rejects], was actually a sequel to my first [House of 1000 Corpses], but I made it out of desperation—movies are so hard to get made. But you’re right—I don’t believe in sequels, so I basically made a whole different movie under the guise of making a sequel.
What was great about Halloween was that Bob Weinstein wasn’t concerned about a sequel. He never said to me make sure this or that character lives or anything, or I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.
There’s a lot of prequel in the film, and it’s all yours. Why didn’t you stick to that?
Because if I just made a prequel, it would have felt like just another franchise movie. I thought, a remake with prequel elements feels like a clean slate, like starting over. Anything connected to the eight other films would feel like a lesser film. You need to let people know you started from scratch.
[So] I kept Michael Myers, Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode. But everything else is up for grabs. I didn’t use anything from the sequels. In the first movie, we know very little about any of the characters, so it was easy to fill in the blanks. We don’t know anything about young Michael, his parents or what happened to him during his incarceration. In a way, the first movie is just so simple.
But that’s what makes it iconic. It’s a cipher, you transfer your own...
True. And that works great for John Carpenter’s movie. That’s what it was. That’s why people loved it. But I knew that after almost 30 years of B-movies, I needed something else. When Michael Myers popped up on screen—although I use the way he looked in that iconic version of him in the first movie—I needed something else attached to him because he doesn’t talk, and you don’t see his face. So, he’s a very difficult character to work with. You know? (He laughs).
So, you need to get inside his head when he’s a little kid—before he gets locked away and he stops talking and becomes crazier and crazier. It’s kind of like the mental development stops at age 10, so when you see the adult Michael, you can project some of the kid you’ve seen to behind the mask. A lot of people thought that would demystify him and make him less scary. I thought it would have the opposite effect. I thought humanizing him would make him scarier.
As you say, it’s a serious movie, so do you think it reflects some of the serious things going on in the world today?
I don’t know. I saw this as a real character-driven movie. A lot of horror movies get very conceptual and, oh, about the state of the world: this was our reaction to Vietnam or this and that, or torture porn movies are our reaction to Iraq and what’s going on. I didn’t think about any of that stuff. I looked at it as a human drama about people.
Well I’ve seen strange things on TV, like home movies where Jeffrey Dahmer was sitting with his grandparents, opening Christmas presents like a normal person. But he’d already killed everybody, and there was a severed head in his refrigerator at home. To me, that’s so insane that’s what Michael Myers would be like.
Basically, [he’s] a textbook psychopath. He could be charming, friendly and maybe funny, but he has no understanding of human feelings or emotions. Like a Ted Bundy, he must’ve been funny and charming to lure all these women into his car—and then kill them. Then have no feeling of guilt or remorse. And I thought it would be interesting to watch that person as a kid: Someone whose mom and dad think he’s normal, but behind his eyes, he’s just crazy.
When you were a kid, what film gave you that “Oh, fuck!” realization—when you knew you had to make horror movies?
The one that hit me the first was King Kong, the original one. It was the first movie I ever saw. It must’ve been on TV or something. I remember being obsessed with it—and with gorillas. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Willie Wonka.
But they’re not horror films.
No, but King Kong seemed scary at the time. And, when you’re six, Willie Wonka’s terrifying. But I’d say the horror films that really fascinated me were the Universal classics: Frankenstein, Dracula, Mummy. And the first modern horror movie that blew me away was Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead—the more over-the-top ’70s stuff. Those are the movies that made me feel like this is something to do.
Directed by Rob Zombie
Rob Zombie, former lead singer of White Zombie, doesn’t go for sequels and remakes. Yet here he is with Halloween, the ninth installment in John Carpenter’s horror franchise that began in 1978.
“I wouldn’t have thought about doing this in a million years, but I got a call from Bob Weinstein to have a meeting and he talked about Halloween. And, I was going…umm, Halloween. It didn’t interest me at all. I wouldn’t make a sequel because they’re terrible. Each is worse than the last. I don’t know how they did that, but they figured it out.
“I wasn’t interested in a prequel, or any of that. I really wasn’t interested at all in Halloween or Michael Myers. I left, thinking I was going to call Bob back and say no. But after a month, I couldn’t get it out of my mind,” explains Zombie. “Then I started thinking about it from the beginning, like starting over, because Michael Myers is a great character—like Frankenstein. He’s one of the true modern-day iconic horror characters. It’s very rare that a character will be so popular that he can survive seven terrible sequels and people are still interested. So, I thought I’d go back to the beginning and make a serious movie—not one of these teenybopper movies that are so silly. I thought, let’s have the first act about young Michael Myers’ life, the second act about him being incarcerated as a child into an adult and the third act veer into John Carpenterland.”
MERIN: Why don’t you believe in sequels?
ZOMBIE: Actually, the second movie I made, [The Devil’s Rejects], was actually a sequel to my first [House of 1000 Corpses], but I made it out of desperation—movies are so hard to get made. But you’re right—I don’t believe in sequels, so I basically made a whole different movie under the guise of making a sequel.
What was great about Halloween was that Bob Weinstein wasn’t concerned about a sequel. He never said to me make sure this or that character lives or anything, or I wouldn’t have had anything to do with it.
There’s a lot of prequel in the film, and it’s all yours. Why didn’t you stick to that?
Because if I just made a prequel, it would have felt like just another franchise movie. I thought, a remake with prequel elements feels like a clean slate, like starting over. Anything connected to the eight other films would feel like a lesser film. You need to let people know you started from scratch.
[So] I kept Michael Myers, Dr. Loomis and Laurie Strode. But everything else is up for grabs. I didn’t use anything from the sequels. In the first movie, we know very little about any of the characters, so it was easy to fill in the blanks. We don’t know anything about young Michael, his parents or what happened to him during his incarceration. In a way, the first movie is just so simple.
But that’s what makes it iconic. It’s a cipher, you transfer your own...
True. And that works great for John Carpenter’s movie. That’s what it was. That’s why people loved it. But I knew that after almost 30 years of B-movies, I needed something else. When Michael Myers popped up on screen—although I use the way he looked in that iconic version of him in the first movie—I needed something else attached to him because he doesn’t talk, and you don’t see his face. So, he’s a very difficult character to work with. You know? (He laughs).
So, you need to get inside his head when he’s a little kid—before he gets locked away and he stops talking and becomes crazier and crazier. It’s kind of like the mental development stops at age 10, so when you see the adult Michael, you can project some of the kid you’ve seen to behind the mask. A lot of people thought that would demystify him and make him less scary. I thought it would have the opposite effect. I thought humanizing him would make him scarier.
As you say, it’s a serious movie, so do you think it reflects some of the serious things going on in the world today?
I don’t know. I saw this as a real character-driven movie. A lot of horror movies get very conceptual and, oh, about the state of the world: this was our reaction to Vietnam or this and that, or torture porn movies are our reaction to Iraq and what’s going on. I didn’t think about any of that stuff. I looked at it as a human drama about people.
Well I’ve seen strange things on TV, like home movies where Jeffrey Dahmer was sitting with his grandparents, opening Christmas presents like a normal person. But he’d already killed everybody, and there was a severed head in his refrigerator at home. To me, that’s so insane that’s what Michael Myers would be like.
Basically, [he’s] a textbook psychopath. He could be charming, friendly and maybe funny, but he has no understanding of human feelings or emotions. Like a Ted Bundy, he must’ve been funny and charming to lure all these women into his car—and then kill them. Then have no feeling of guilt or remorse. And I thought it would be interesting to watch that person as a kid: Someone whose mom and dad think he’s normal, but behind his eyes, he’s just crazy.
When you were a kid, what film gave you that “Oh, fuck!” realization—when you knew you had to make horror movies?
The one that hit me the first was King Kong, the original one. It was the first movie I ever saw. It must’ve been on TV or something. I remember being obsessed with it—and with gorillas. The first movie I ever saw in a theater was Willie Wonka.
But they’re not horror films.
No, but King Kong seemed scary at the time. And, when you’re six, Willie Wonka’s terrifying. But I’d say the horror films that really fascinated me were the Universal classics: Frankenstein, Dracula, Mummy. And the first modern horror movie that blew me away was Texas Chainsaw Massacre, then Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead—the more over-the-top ’70s stuff. Those are the movies that made me feel like this is something to do.
