Halloween: Ranking Every Movie From Worst To Best

Rob Zombie's first foray into the Halloween franchise is remembered as divisive and indeed it is, as the film feels constantly at odds even with itself.

When Dimension first approached Zombie with the prospect of pitching them a new Halloween film, Zombie went in with two pitches. One was a prequel about young Michael's childhood and subsequent stay in the sanitarium, and the other was a remake of Carpenter's original. Ultimately, Dimension chose the latter but Zombie found himself increasingly drawn to the former.

Which is how audiences got Halloween 2007, a strange mishmash of a film that wants to have its cake and eat it too. It wants to be this entirely separate beast in the first half, as Zombie populates it with unlikable and completely remorseless characters. As painful as sequences like the opening kitchen scene can be to endure, it's at the very least obvious that this is what Zombie is interested in.

Once the film catches up to the part of the film Zombie was actually being paid to make, the remake, it becomes infinitely less interested in itself. Suddenly, its as if Zombie puts the film on autopilot, just hitting the core beats of the original film in less than half the time. In actively inviting comparisons between his work and Carpenter's own, Zombie's work looks positively amateurish and really falls apart.