By Paul Fischer
The musician and filmmaker Rob Zombie is used to making intense raw films,
but with his upcoming remake of Halloween, Zombie is hoping to reach a more
mainstream audience. But talking exclusively from his editing room where he's
putting the finishing touches to the horror remake, Zombie says that his
decision to do Halloween was no means a way to prove to himself he can be a
mainstream director, "because most of my favorite movies aren't really
mainstream type films anyway." For Zombie, whose last film was The Devil's
Rejects, felt doing this remake of John Carpenter's seminal classic, "was
just an opportunity that arose and truthfully, I don't even know if the movie
I've made is all that mainstream. There are not a lot of classic movie monster
iconic figures left, and Michael Myers is one of the only few modern day sort of
iconic monsters and to be able to make a movie with that character was very
exciting."
The director concedes that there are clearly pitfalls
re-imagining this character. "I think the biggest tightrope that you're
walking is people want it to be different enough that it's worth watching on its
own merit but they want it to be similar enough that they can see familiar
things and go 'Wow, there's that different'. So the balancing act was making it
so that you didn't know what was going to happen next because it was unfolding
differently, adding new things but doing enough kind of glimpses of the classic
moments that you get that vibe."
In his past movies, Zombie has never shied away from
depicting graphic violence, but this is a studio movie, albeit
Weinstein/Dimension, so far can he go? Well apparently quite far, he says
laughingly. "I mean, this is a very violent movie. I know that for a lot of
horror movie fans that Dimension Films a lot of times have a bad reputation for
things but they've been great. From day 1 it's been my thing and they've let me
run with it. They didn't approach it like, 'Well it's best to play it safe this
way because we're trying to protect a franchise'. They weren't done with that
spirit in mind, but kept saying things like, 'Make it your own. Make it your own
thing. That's the way it's going to succeed.' "
And Zombie insists that there are substantial differences
between Carpenter's original film and Zombie's version. "Everything's very
different, just the look and feel of the film is very different. John's is very
stylized the way it's shot, while mine's very like raw looking. I just thought
that it wasn't so much in response to what John had done but just the response
that over the years there's been like eight Halloween movies, so it was really a
response to everything that had been done. By Halloween 8, Michael Myers was no
longer even remotely scary and the whole thing just seemed like complete
buffoonery. It was just a bunch of crappy young actors and a guy in a crappy
looking white mask. That's really what it had boiled down to in movies that
nobody gave a shit about. Nobody over the age of ten was scared by them, so I
thought Michael Myers is a terrifying character, but we need to really go back
to basics and reinvent the wheel here because I just feel that for almost thirty
years they've just been destroying what Carpenter did."
Commenting on the much discussed visual representation of the
new Michael Myers, Zombie says "This I guarantee you that once you watch
this Halloween, this Michael Myers truly makes all the other ones look like
pussies. You will go 'How did the other one ever seem scary?'. I know that
sounds like a ridiculous thing to say but we just made him so raw, rough, gnarly
and gritty that he makes the other characters look like a guy in a Halloween
mask walking around. And Tyler Mane, who plays Michael Myers, has such a big
presence, but he's not like a big, bulky guy. He's very sleek but he's big and a
really good actor, so he has such a menacing presence. He looks like he would
eat all the other guys who played Michael Myers for lunch."
It seems that audiences may be tiring of Hollywood horror,
with a plethora of new titles vying for the movie going buck on as weekly basis.
Zombie understands audience cynicism, because "there are no memorable that
end up in horrible situations and then the movies ends." Zombie counters
that I his Halloween, he says, by having made "a very character-driven
movie. Michael Myers is not just a faceless guy in the shadows, but a character
that we see from the beginning to the end. If someone had never heard of this
movie before and you said 'This is based on a true story', it plays out in a way
that someone would think 'Oh really? Wow, I've never heard of him'. I wanted it
to play gritty and real because it's certainly how those films had not been
playing."
Asked if we see more of a genesis of the Myers character,
Zombie says this is by no means a prequel to the original film. "It's
somewhat of a re-telling of the first film with a lot of back story, so a lot of
things in the first movie that the Donald Pleasance character sort of just
refers to, we go into great detail with. A lot of things in the first film were
very random, so I tried to make things a little more purposeful, why they
happened."
As for signing on to direct a Halloween sequel, Zombie is
emphatic on that score. "There are too many franchises that kill movies. I
wanted this to be a movie unto itself, not just a f***ing cog in some kind of
money making machine." I guess that'd be a no then.
Archived 2007-08 Alex D Thrawn for www.MalcolmMcDowell.net