Halloween Remake: Insightful or Indefensible?

John Carpenter's Halloween (1978) is a classic horror movie, one that thrilled viewers for many years. Almost 30 years later, Rob Zombie created a new Halloween (2007), and many fans were interested in what the differences might be. Could the new Halloween captivate audiences like the original?

Although many of its ideas have become trite, the original Halloween set the standard for a decade of horror movies. Michael is the Boogyman come to life. He kills for no apparent reason, with no emotion. He is silent, faceless, strong, relentless. Maybe unstoppable is a better word. Even his psychiatrist is afraid of him. He is never human to the viewer.

To his credit, Zombie knew he shouldn't just redo the same story. He wanted to concentrate on what made Michael the monster, and it is that angle that drew many viewers. Zombie's Halloween does a good job of showing the making of a sociopath. Michael is mistreated at home, outcast at school, and we see his anger grow until he lashes out and then learns to hide behind the mask, both literal and figurative in this case. When Michael escapes from the hospital, the viewer sees that the transformation into the inhuman killer from the original is complete. He coldly murders the one man from the place who has been kind and helpful to him; he obviously cares for no one.

Is there support for Zombie's version of Michael's childhood in the original Halloween? If we look only at the first movie, in which no relationship was drawn between Michael and any of the victims except his sister when he was a child, there seems to be little if any. The family house appears to be well-kept and in a decent neighborhood. The parents, while they are not home on Halloween night, seem shocked at Michael's appearance, and the promiscuity of the sister does not necessitate a poor home life.

The connection between Michael and Laurie seems to have been made in Halloween II in order to give Michael some reason to be so focused on her. Zombie's Halloween created a reason for Michael to want to kill his family members, even the innocent baby he had cared for.

Unfortunately, the ridiculous scenes with nudity and sex along with the tremendous amount of unnecessary gore make the Halloween remake almost unwatchable for many original Halloween fans. The best horror movies from the 70s, like Halloween, were scary because they made you jump, they made you want to check behind you as you walked down the stairs after the movie, they had surprises like the stunning ending of Halloween. Horror movies of the early 21^st century try to outdo each other in gratuitous nudity, graphic sex, and buckets full of blood.

Zombie's Halloween has some interesting ideas but ends up missing the mark because it also needed to be commercially successful. That's the true horror show.