10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween II (2009)

Whether this actually counts as a pro or a con for you is going to be determined almost solely by the strength of your stomach, but Halloween II 2009 features the most intense violence and gore of any of the Halloween films-to-date.

Zombie goes above and beyond here to make what he calls;

"The darkest, nastiest, grittiest film ever featuring Michael Myers."

And he absolutely succeeds in this. From the film's very first kill, a clear precedent is set. The coroners driving Michael's body in the prologue accidentally crash into a cow (as unintentionally hysterical as it sounds) which results in the cow exploding everywhere and the driver's face getting caved in by the steering wheel. Michael then emerges from the back of the van, picks up a piece of broken glass, and proceeds to cut the other coroner's head clean off.

Other gory highlights (or lowlights, depending on your point of view) feature Michael brutally smashing a man's face to a pulp with his boot and yet another dog meeting an unfortunate end in the grizzliest way imaginable.

It's not just the actions committed or the prosthetics and copious amounts of fake blood used in sequences like this that make it so affecting, a huge part of it is the sound design. Even when Michael's just doing his general stabbing later on in the film, it has never sounded grosser than it does in this film.

What Zombie creates here isn't a far cry at all from the torture porn films that ruled the horror genre at this time. But I'll give Zombie credit, even those films were unable to capture the kind of gleeful lunacy and visceral madness that these sequences have.