Rob Zombie's Halloween Remake Reminds of Horror Movies of Today and Yesteryear

On Labor Day some friends and I went to see Rob Zombie's remake of the horror movie classic Halloween. Overall the movie itself was pretty good a nice blend of psychological drama and classic slasher genre scares. Certainly not a great movie but head and shoulders better than most horror movies that have come out in the last 20 years. It got me thinking about horror movies in general.

I am a horror movie fan and I have been for most of my life. I love the old ones going back to the 1930s and '40s with the Universal Monster movies to the 50s through the 70s and the Hammer Horror movies to the Slasher pics of 80s and 90s. There are ones I love and ones I hate, but broadly, I love the genre. What watching Rob Zombie's remake makes me think of is the way horror movies are made and the way they are received.

From the early days of film until the late 70s the bulk of horror movies were monster movies. They were movies about vampires, werewolves, zombies, or aliens for the most part. The same movie would get remade a few different times--look at how many versions of Dracula there are--then came Toby Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974 and the beginnings of a different kind of horror movie started gaining more ground, horror movies about human monsters. In 1978 John Carpenter's Halloween hit screens and the horror movie genre started down a new path. Halloween's Michael Meyers was an inhuman human monster. He was an unstoppable killing machine. The slasher film was born and dominated the the next 20 years of horror movies.

Michael, Freddy, Chucky, and Jason were the kings of horror movies for the 80s and much of the 90s. Like Dracula, Frankenstein's monster, and the Wolfman dominated the decades before they came along Michael and his playmates appeared again and again on the silver screen and were the faces that haunted children's nightmares. While the migration to the more human monsters (Freddy, Chucky, and Jason are more than a little supernatural, but remain characters with human histories and motivations) raised the bar for storytelling in horror movies and for creating more complicated villains the horror genre failed to meet the challenge much of the time.

Sequels were made again and again and each subsequent movie was a copy of a copy of a copy with less originality and more cheap scares. Then in 1996 we got Wes Craven's Scream. Horror moves split with some ending up as parodies of themselves and others competing to be even gorier as an attempt to be what some perceived as scarier. The last 10 or so years of horror movies have been pretty devoid of proper horror movies. Even the good ones like the Saw films leaned on gore for some of their scares as much as they used quality writing and playing on people's fears.

Rob Zombie's Halloween remake gives me hope. It gives me hope because it marries very human psychological drama with the classic situations and scenes of the slasher sub-genre. It's a gory film, but Rob Zombie is smart enough to know that we don't have to see the weapon connect with the victim every time and that we can be just as freaked out by the suggestion of what's happening or seeing the result or the reactions that we can. It's smarter filmmaking and it's revealing of Zombie's love of the classics in the genre. What you don't see is as scary as what you do see. Halloween, while not nearly perfect, is a movie every horror filmmaker should be looking at for how to craft a quality horror film. It could be the genre's savior incorporating some of the best elements of the genre. This horror movie fan would like to see less horror movies that might as well be part of the Scary Movie series or that are just weak remakes of foreign horror films and more horror movies that are actually trying to help elevate the genre in the way the original Halloween and this year's remake have.