Common Sense

I’m referring, of course, to Halloween. Christmas is nice and all, but you have to admit, Halloween is a more fun holiday. There is dressing up, a lot of fun ghost stories, the weather is usually great, candy and, if you go to the right Halloween party, a very good chance of getting laid. Nothing increases your chances of getting laid quite like getting your date scared out of her panties (Ed. note: I don’t know why, but it is absolutely true that most girls are more willing to put out when they get scared or are in a scary place. I’ve heard plenty of first-hand stories about getting laid in a cemetery.)

No wonder John Carpenter picked Halloween as the perfect holiday in which to set his film dealing with man’s dark side in 1978. Carpenter’s Halloween was a box office success spawning many sequels and many rip-offs. In fact, he practically sparked the revival of the horror genre for the 80’s with the supernatural slasher preying on young teenagers. Without Halloween, we would never have had Friday the 13th or Nightmare on Elm St. or later on the Scream trilogy and a host of other movies.

On another day we might argue about the importance of having horror movies; we can pop out a few folklore and sociology textbooks and discuss the evolution of scary stories from ghost stories around the campfire to ghost stories around the glowing fire of the silver screen.

Carpenter saw the importance of having these stories told in the form of film. Michael Meyers was to represent the bogeyman of all manking. The one that cavemen feared when they huddled around their precious fire, the one that Europeans feared so deeply around the fires they burned supposed witches and werewolves in the middle ages to the pubescent campfires of young people of the 20th century to scare each other as a right of passage. That’s why the actor playing Meyers is simply listed in the credits as “The Shape.”

Rob Zombie, however, has taken a completely different tack with this story almost 30 years later. Instead of Meyers being the bogeyman for everyone, Zombie spends the first third of his reinvisioning of the horror classic looking at Meyers’ childhood.

We can see a young Michael Meyers (Daeg Faerch), torturing and killing small animals like Jeffrey Dahmer did. We can see his mother’s scuzzy boyfriend Ronnie White (William Forsythe, a Zombie film regular) treating him like garbage. We see older school bullies picking on him because his mom (played by Zombies’ wife, Sheri Moon Zombie) is a stripper and her club put an ad in the paper. And we see this almost manic need to make and wear a mask to hide his “ugliness.”

And then, one Halloween night, young Michael Meyers goes on a killing spree. He duct tapes Ronnie to his chair while he’s sleeping then slits his throat. He kills his sister Judith and her boyfriend with a “really big kitchen knife.” Then he takes off his mask and goes into his baby sister’s room and wishes her a happy Halloween.

Mom comes home to find Michael holding the baby on the front steps, covered in blood and Michael is finally sent to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium under the care of Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell). When they start talking, it seems that Michael has compartmentalized what he has done and doesn’t understand where his family is or why he can’t go home.

His mother comes to visit every week and Sheri Moon does a great job of showing both her revulsion at the monster her son is and still seeing the little boy she loves and recognizes as her son. And McDowell shows a different Loomis than we ever saw from Donald Pleasance. From the get-go in the Carpenter flicks, Loomis is out to lock Meyers away and keep him from ever being free, and then he’s out to destroy him. McDowell shows Loomis and the young Meyers and there is a scene where Meyers begins to cry because he wants to go home and McDowell holds him like a father would comfort his child. And there is the sense that he really does care.

Another Rodriguez, Tarantino, Zombie regular, Danny Trejo, plays a janitor at the sanitarium. He tells “Mikey” to learn to live inside his head and not let being behind bars get you down, alluding to his own incarceration at some point.

After that, Michael stops speaking and his manic desire to create and wear masks becomes more evident. After one of her weekly visits, while a nurse sits with Michael and Loomis and mother are walking, Meyers kills again, using the fork on his plate to kill said nurse. Mother Meyers can’t take it anymore; she blows her brains out while watching a home movie of her and Michael, a seemingly happy little boy.

Fast forward 15 years and Meyers hasn’t spoken a word to anyone in all that time. All he has done is create more and more masks and grown to into an incredibly large man. During one scene, Dr. Loomis is explaining to Michael that there isn’t anything more he can do for him, so he’s leaving. Although, after 15 years plus of regular sessions, he considers Meyers to be his best friend. “That’s how fucked up my life is,” he tells him.

Loomis writes the prerequisite book to earn a buck where he explains that Michael Meyers was the “perfect storm” waiting to happen. There was a clash of both nature and nurture that created what he calls pure evil in those deep black eyes. At least that’s the dramatic lecture he gives at a college while hawking his book.

Meanwhile, with Loomis gone, Smith’s Grove readies to transfer Meyers to another facility. He senses his chance and kills all the guards and personnel, even Danny Trejo’s character which has remained and sympathized with him during his incarceration. He even apologizes when he has to put shackles on him to move him around the facility. You sense that Trejo considered Meyers a friend and didn’t judge him, but even he doesn’t get spared. He get’s a TV smashed on his head.

Meyers returns to Haddonfield, to his old home where he has hidden the knife he used to murder his family… and the William Shatner mask that has become iconic now. He’s looking for his baby sister, now grown up and under a new name, Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton).

In the original, Meyers set out to finish what he started that first awful Halloween by killing Laurie. That doesn’t seem to be his intention here, however. Meyers kills relentlessly to get to her, but instead of hurting her, he shows her a picture his mother had given him on the day he killed the nurse, a picture of a smiling young Michael holding his baby sister. He doesn’t want to hurt her, it seems, but in some weird way, reconnect with the family he lost. If you look deeply at his actions, he only ever killed anyone that hurt him: The school bully, his mother’s asshole boyfriend, his older sister Judith and her boyfriend who both picked on him and didn’t take him out trick or treating so they could have sex. His little sister and his mother were both people he cared about and never seemed to be in any danger.

Not until Laurie picks up the knife, not understanding what the photo is or who it is of, and stabs him with it to escape does he seem to try hurt her. And it seems more to defend himself than anything.

Loomis shows up in the nick of time with a .357 and a few bullet shots to save Laurie, only to have Meyers come back after her to drag her back into their home. Instead of being supernatural, his surviving a stab wound and some gunshots seems more like he is just really big and clumsy afterward. He kills Loomis, giving Laurie the time she needs to hide.

Without giving too much away, Laurie gets her hands on the gun and I don’t see them making a sequel out of this ending.

Zombie’s 180 from Carpenter’s original and the view he takes of Meyers as a person rather than the personification of the bogeyman I found to be really entertaining, especially in a genre that demands that writers and directors stick to a formula. Most horror movies you can go in and know what’s going to happen next. Zombie seems to have learned from his mistakes with House of 1,000 Corpses (which was less homage and more rip-off) and his successes with The Devil’s Rejects. Taking a classic horror movie like Halloween and doing this kind of spin on it was a big risk and some purists (including me) were ready to lambast him for making another needless remake.

But he managed to craft something both surprising and realistic in its plot. Sure, some of the tried and true formula comes through during the second act with teenagers and plenty of nudity to satisfy anyone old enough to get into an R-rated movie. The first act, focusing on Michael Meyers as a child and the denoument were both original and securely grounded in the real world we inhabit.

Cavemen and boy scouts may need supernatural monsters to talk about around the  campfire, but Zombie finds an all too real and all too human monster in the character of Michael Meyers. One not too dissimilar from the ones we might find in the True Crime section at the books store… or on front page of any newspaper.

For all that outstanding effort, I give Rob Zombie’s version of Halloween 4 and half our of 5 Silver Shamrock Magic Pumpkins.

Much like Halloween III: Season of the Witch, this film fits nowhere into the Halloween storyline and is a stand alone film. Unlike Halloween III, Zombie made sure to have a movie that did not have an annoying jingle that would drive any sane person to murder or magic bits of Stonehenge rock.