10 Films Directors Wanted You To Hate

Rob Zombie has gone on record stating that writing and directing the remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween was the worst experience of his career. He claimed that the studio heads and producers looked over his shoulder during the entire production and insisted on many changes which diluted his original vision for the film.

So why did he come back and make the sequel? Well, he nearly didn’t. Two other directors, a filmmaking duo from France, were attached for a long time while the film was in preproduction. Zombie had sworn off the project, but then suddenly he opted to come back. Why was that? He was guaranteed complete creative control this time around. So he took the opportunity and churned out this total stinker on purpose.

It was almost as if Zombie made a list of the things that would most piss off Halloween fans and checked them all off: He showed Michael Myers’s face for long bouts of screen time, he made the final girl, Laurie Strode, unlikable, he even elected to use sparingly little of the original Halloween score and sound effects.

Then there are all the additions he made to anger fans, such shoehorning his own wife into the film even though she died in the first, fixating on the brutality of the murders instead of creating suspense, and adding a supernatural element that completely retcons its predecessor film. “Weird Al” Yankovic even shows up for an appearance? Not to bag on Weird Al, but he has no place being in a Halloween movie.

It would seem that once hired on, Rob Zombie made Halloween II purely as a middle finger to the meddling studio and to everyone who hated the first film. Today, H2 has a cult status just for its sheer weirdness, compounded by its fans’ knowledge that the director went full Zombie against his keepers on this one. H2 is on this list solely because of how many people it made angry. But honestly, all of Zombie’s films carry the common thread that they are meant to piss off anyone who clings to convention.