Halloween II Fulfills Zombie's Serial Promise

Halloween II is in many ways what musician-turned-filmmaker Rob Zombie’s first reboot of the slasher franchise should have been (although it didn't fare as well at the box office this weekend, winding up No. 3). It furthers Zombie’s attempt to get into the head of serial killer Michael Meyers, a thoughtful reversal of how John Carpenter’s original film treated Michael as a mythical boogeyman that’s only partially made of flesh and blood.

Carpenter’s Michael is mostly a creation of his victims' over-active imaginations, whereas Zombie’s Michael is that much more brutal because there’s never a doubt that he’s very real and unrelentingly brutal. In their own ways, both Zombie and Carpenter are concerned with the mythos of a killer and, while Zombie’s sequel does not approach the subtlety of Carpenter’s Halloween, it makes good on its aspiration to make an old monster new again.

Just as in the original sequel, which Carpenter co-wrote, Zombie’s Halloween II starts off where the last film left off: Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) continues to have nightmares about Michael Meyers and dreams that she sees him come back from the dead just as he’s being brought to the morgue. Though her friends and surrogate father Sheriff Lee Brackett (the inimitable Brad Dourif) try to help her move on, her visions of Michael intensify as Halloween rolls around exactly one year after Michael’s original attacks.

The ties between Michael and Laurie are just the first of many ways that Zombie shows, instead of tells, as in his flashback-heavy first stab at the character, what Michael becomes when he puts his signature white mask on. Michael’s mask makes him nigh invincible and in this film, it literally allows him to separate his childish psyche from his body. When Michael is attacked early on in the film, he takes a vicious beating but instantly becomes revitalized just as soon as he dons his mask. That one scene say more than all of Zombie’s last Halloween could.

The character’s sadistic tendencies are, however, also very much part of the character’s psychology. Though Zombie artfully films Michael’s attacks and most of the film in a voyeuristic, pseudo-documentary style that mimics Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, it can’t hide the gruesome violence that his Michael enacts to get closer to Laurie in order to reunite his “family.” The film’s high-gore content is certainly not unusual considering what came after Halloween in the slasher genre but it is nevertheless disconcerting considering how much more brains Zombie’s movie has than garbage like Friday the 13th or the Saw franchises. Zombie’s horror films are about his characters and, in this case, the gore complements his take on a villain that still is, for what it’s worth, one of the most complex popular horror icons.