Halloween is right around the corner. In Athens that means lots of drinking and bad costumes, but in the theaters it means masked men out to kill, stalking young women until the final shot.
Rob Zombie's remake of Halloween comes to scare audiences just as the original did almost 30 years ago. It might not be as scary as the original, but Zombie crafts a story that is far more disturbing and attempts to step outside the stereotypical slasher film.
The original Halloween, directed by John Carpenter in 1978, was a defining horror film. Arguably, it created slasher movies and at very least invented most of the genre's stereotypes, from the inevitable murders of the kids having sex to the unstoppable, deliberate slasher. It spawned hundreds of imitators, few of which were any good.
Zombie spends half of the film focusing on the character Michael Myers. We see young Michael beaten up at school and made fun of at home. His mother is the only person who loves him. To take out his anger, Michael tortures and kills small animals but eventually graduates to butchering his entire family except for his mother and baby sister. Up until the murder, Zombie almost has the audience feeling sorry for Michael, but then we see that he truly is deranged.
Michael is sent to an asylum and begins wearing masks to hide himself from the outside world. Fifteen years after killing his family, he escapes to wreak havoc for another Halloween night.
The only major problem with the film is that Zombie is not a master of horror. He is a master at creating disturbing scenes that mix sex and violence. They are hard to watch and impossible to resist, but not scary. His shots of gore and murder are voyeuristic and clinical. The murders always switch to a twitchy, hand-held camera at a medium distance, making the audience into clandestine viewers of the macabre.
The film's triumph is that it does not feel like a slasher film. Michael Myers is not a mindless, unstoppable killing machine; the audience is given the back-story to whom he is. The teenage girls that are killed are not stupid; they do not investigate strange noises or fall while running away. They are victims of circumstance. Zombie took all the bad stereotypes out of slasher movies, but kept the good ones.
The coup-de-grace is that the ending of Zombie's Halloween surpasses the original in every way. It builds into a scene of white-knuckled climax that comes quickly, leaving the viewer to ponder as the credits roll.
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Chris Bruce
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