10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween (2007)
Rob Zombie's attempt to re-imagine John Carpenter's original vision.
Following the fallout of the atrocity that was Halloween: Resurrection, it looked as though Michael Myers may have finally truly met his end. In the early 2000s, the franchise was practically dead with no clear future in sight for it.
This lead to Dimension feeling that the best thing for the franchise was a completely clean slate, a new start. And thus, in 2007, a remake of the original Halloween was released. Directed by shock-horror auteur Rob Zombie, the film opened to big box office success (and a fairly positive reception from the general public) but to little acclaim from fans or critics.
They despised it, claiming that Zombie's film took the hallowed original and turned into a straight-to-DVD slasher flick that was entirely unremarkable. Since then, Zombie released a director's cut and has made it pretty much impossible for anyone to get their hands on the theatrical cut ever again (which is why this rewatch centers around said director's cut).
With Blumhouse's new film growing closer by the day, Zombie's remake is set to become a relic of a long-lost era, forgotten sooner rather than later. But does it deserve this fate? Is it the harmful rehash that many say it is or is it an underappreciated gem? Let's find out...
10. Wants To Have Its Cake And Eat It Too
When Rob Zombie initially went into meetings with Dimension and the Weinsteins about writing and directing a new Halloween film, he had two separate pitches in mind. One was a prequel to Halloween, exploring Michael's childhood and his years spent at Smith's Grove Sanitarium, and the other was a straight remake of the original film.
Ultimately, the studio chose the more bankable idea of just remaking the original. However, during the writing process, Zombie began to experiment with incorporating elements from his prequel pitch into the remake's narrative and resulted in the finished film being a combination of the two. This juxtaposition between the new and the old is a conflict that the film can never really resolve.
Halloween 2007 simultaneously wants to be a completely different beast from the original and a worthy remake. Once it gets to the second half of the film where Michael is an adult, lines, moments, and even entire setpieces from the John Carpenter classic are copied verbatim.
At the very least, Zombie seems to be on cloud nine during the early sequences of young Michael. It is blindingly obvious that that is the film he would have rather made, and he practically said as much on several different occasions during interviews.
Thus, when the film segues into the remake portion of its runtime, it just feels like Zombie is trudging through it because it's what the studio is actually paying him to do. It's a film that wants viewers to be in awe of Michael's radical new origin story while simultaneously expecting them to go nuts over some of the most blatant and in-your-face 'here's a line you know!' fan service ever put to screen.