10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween (2007)

If you've been following these Halloween retrospectives for any amount of time, you know that we often return to the godfather of horror cinema himself, Alfred Hitchcock, and his explanation of surprise versus suspense. In short, Hitchcock surmised that a shock gave the audience "fifteen seconds of surprise" while a sequence of suspense that built upon the audience's knowledge of the situation provided "fifteen minutes of suspense".

John Carpenter learned a lot from Hitchcock and his original Halloween is one of the most iconic horror films precisely because of how it weaponizes suspense. The way in which Carpenter crafted these sequences of suspense was flat-out masterful and revolutionized horror cinema for decades to come.

Rob Zombie, on the other hand, did not learn these lessons from Hitchcock. He is a filmmaker infatuated with shock, who salivates over surprise and this becomes frustrating. In every single instance, Zombie chooses to go for the easiest possible shock rather than building anything of greater substance.

Take, for instance, Bob's death scene. In Carpenter's film, the sequence was prolonged and charged with tension, using subtle sound design and Dean Cundey's long-takes to put the audience in the moment, feeling the suspense build. Thus, when Michael finally shows up, it's a pay-off that capitalizes on several minutes of build-up.

In Zombie's film, the suspense is gone. The film cuts back-and-forth between Bob's beer run and several other scenes, consistently taking the audience out of the moment. It then just abruptly cuts to a shot of Bob walking down the hallway and Michael jumping out to stab him. There's no build-up, no suspense, just a baseless shock that leaves little-to-no-impact.

When a film consistently returns to surprise and shock as its only method of generating tension or a reaction, it wears thin incredibly quickly. Yet, Zombie continuously returns to the same tricks over and over again.