“He’s Come Back for His Baby Sister”: Repetition Compulsion in Rob Zombie’s ‘Halloween’
The amount of time between Halloween: Resurrection and Rob Zombie’s Halloween is only five years, but it feels at least a decade longer, especially for fans of the franchise who had spent so much of that time awaiting any news of what the next sequel would be. Resurrection had not been a success by any stretch of the imagination, but fans were still eager to see the series continue just as producer and godfather of the franchise Moustapha Akkad was eager to make it happen. However, tragically, having produced the original film and every subsequent sequel, Akkad was killed in a bombing in 2005. After that, the future of Halloween became uncertain for several reasons. Not long after Resurrection, a poll had run online for fans to vote on what direction they wanted the next entry to take, including a direct sequel to that movie and a planned crossover with the Hellraiser franchise a la Freddy vs. Jason. Fans at the time were (unfortunately) extremely against that idea, just as Akkad had been.
Throughout this same time, the horror climate was shifting drastically, thanks largely to the remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Despite the genre phenomenon Freddy vs. Jason premiering only two months prior, Chainsaw wound up dictating the course of the decade more than maybe any other single movie. Remakes of Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, House of Wax and so many more followed immediately on its heels. Both Dimension’s unsureness as a studio moving forward with the franchise and the remake climate of the mid-2000s created a perfect storm for Rob Zombie’s fateful call to talk about making a Halloween movie. Famously not a fan of sequels, though his has directed three of them, Zombie initially declined. But, as he’s said, he then thought more and more about the notion of telling his own spin on Carpenter’s classic. A full-blown remake, something that hadn’t been on the table beforehand, but for which the timing was undeniably perfect.
Zombie’s movie began to split fans from basically the first moment it was announced. There are always people dismissive of any remake for fear it may ruin the reputation of the original classic or somehow even besmirch the film itself. But the worst remakes are undoubtedly those that follow the original shot-for-shot and with Zombie being such a singular, stylistic filmmaker, that was really no danger of that happening with this one. Ultimately, those differences would be what would make his Halloween so interesting. I think many would agree that the remake is at its best when it is doubling down on those differences, doing its own thing, rather than recreating the more iconic moments of the original. But even then, it’s the perspective of the remake that makes it such a different beast from the first movie entirely.
After all, John Carpenter’s masterpiece is about a faceless, almost Lovecraftian evil. While it is still about an escaped madman, there’s something abstract about the original’s approach to Michael Myers. He’s a thing, an entity, and the story overall is vaguely supernatural. That’s what makes the ending so unsettling and impactful. From the get-go, the remake is entirely different. Instead of an unknown entity, Zombie’s Halloween seeks to basically explore Michael almost like a true crime documentary, peeling back the mask to examine him from the inside out. In fact, in this movie Laurie is almost as much of a background character as Michael was the first time, whereas he steps into the role of protagonist. Zombie’s Halloween almost never shifts its focus away from Michael, to the point that we’re nearly halfway through the run time before it actually jumps into remaking Halloween in earnest.
As Zombie has said, the plan was originally to possibly split the movie into two, with the focus being on Michael’s time in the asylum, ending with him breaking out. It would have made sense, especially considering that first half is widely considered to be stronger than the second. More than anything, though, one has to commend Zombie’s commitment to telling a completely different version of the story, to allow his movie to stand on its own. Treating Michael Myers as a realistic serial killer might seem like a small change, but it totally shifts the perspective and tone of the story as a whole. It is also a change that, not coincidentally, allows for a version of Halloween that is much more within Zombie’s wheelhouse than any attempt to recapture the tone and style of Carpenter’s film would have been.
There are also, admittedly, some problems that stem from the remake’s completely, staunchly realistic approach. The first is its depiction of mental illness, something that would proven even more complicated in the sequel. Zombie’s Halloween tries to treat Michael as a distinctly real world serial killer, hitting some of the major notes of behaviors shared by many real-world killers, but ultimately treating “serial killer” as the overall all-encompassing mental illness in and of itself. Despite spending a large chunk of time in the institution and seeing much of young Michael’s therapy sessions with Loomis, there’s no real diagnosis given or discussed at any point. Which is weirdly strange for a film that tries to treat the story as if it were a real-life true crime case.
Many ideas that are presented throughout the movie are blatantly contradicted. For example, it’s suggested that Michael is a sociopath, but clearly feels empathy, especially toward his mother and sister. There’s a therapy session where he appears to not remember his crime, which is never really addressed again. But there is one thing especially that the remake gets really right, as it embraces a psychosis that Michael could have even had in the original movie while treating it in a sincere and realistic way, and that is his compulsion to repeat his original crime.
In the original, that was only loosely defined. Michael returns home and once again puts on a mask and picks up a knife, stalking a girl that looks vaguely like the sister he killed when he was six years old. But the crimes he commits on that Halloween night in 1978, though they echo his original murder, are very different. The remake goes much further and Zombie deserves credit for the work he put into much more clearly laying the seeds for Michael’s compulsion. First and foremost, one of the things that Zombie gets very right about many serial killers is their history of animal abuse. Many real-world killers have started by torturing and killing animals before “graduating” to killing human beings.
The remake literally opens with Michael killing his pet rat and flushing it down the toilet. His mother is called into the school because the principal found a collection of photos of dead neighborhood pets in Michael’s backpack, alongside a dead cat. It’s not remotely subtle, but it sets up the warning signs well enough, even though those warning signs are already too late. In fact, they’re too late for both Deborah Myers and the audience, as the scene where she receives the information immediately precedes the scene where Michael claims his first human life by killing his school bully.
When Michael breaks out of the asylum, though he kills many people during the escape itself, his first action upon returning to Haddonfield is to kill a fox and leave its body displayed atop a gravestone. He has killed many people at this point in time. There were his initial murders before his arrest, then a few “accidents” during his time at Smith’s Grove and several more during his escape. But this act effectively suggests a total reset on his own body count, returning him to the novice he’d been that Halloween night as a boy. This scene, even though we only see the aftermath, makes his intentions crystal clear. And it’s not the only thing to do that, either.
One of the biggest changes that helps to cement Michael’s compulsion in the remake is the fact that the classic white mask was, in this case, the actual mask he used in his original crime spree. Unlike the original movie, Michael does not steal a new mask and knife once he returns home. Instead, he buried them both under the floorboards inside his house before he was arrested, as he clearly knew he was going to be. When Michael puts on the mask once again, it’s a strangely profound moment, as this time he is putting on the exact mask that he used in his original crime. Like Michael, the mask has changed and has aged and that, in some way, helps it to feel like it is truly a part of him, as is the knife.
The biggest change is the fact that in Zombie’s film, Michael did not only kill his sister before being sent to Smith’s Grove. With Michael only killing Judith in the original, his return to Haddonfield fifteen years later did not feel nearly as much like a need to complete his original crime. Killing one person seems specific, premeditated, and repeating it feels like a much more literal thing. In Zombie’s remake, however, Michael went on a crime spree and killed four people. His initial attack was a rampage, and felt much more random, almost as if it was something he decided to do in the moment. While his relationships with Judith and his stepfather Ronnie were both incredibly antagonistic — and thus his killing of them feeling much more planned — Judith’s boyfriend Steve was just there. He was even kind of nice to Michael, which is important, because it keeps the film from strictly being about a revenge on anyone who was mean to him, since most of the people he kills upon his return to Haddonfield are people he has never interacted with before.
The randomness of that initial massacre makes his return home feel much more like a repetition of the original events. He is killing people almost at random, for the most part, but that’s something we’ve been able to see in him from a young age by the time we get there. Although, there’s another motive driving Michael throughout the remake that also has to be mentioned, and that is his desire to reunite with his bay sister. Unlike the original, Zombie’s Halloween does not wait until the sequel to reveal that Michael and Laurie are siblings. It’s a major plot point here, even though she once again never actually finds out during at any point during the movie.
Michael is without a doubt driven by the need to essentially reclaim Laurie. Family is a driving force for him in both of Zombie’s films in a way it had never been in prior entries, even when he was stalking his entire bloodline. Many of the people he kills — particularly Laurie’s adoptive parents and her friends — are people he is trying to remove from her life. If he takes everything away from her, she has nothing left but him, even if she doesn’t even know who he is — which is, of course, the fatal flaw in his probably only half-conscious plan.
But this still stems from Michael’s compulsion, his need to recreate his original crime spree. Michael killed a lot of people that night, but he did not kill his baby sister. When his mom returned home to find the horror he had left for her, the first thing she saw was her son sitting on the steps, holding his little sister in his arms. During his time at Smith’s Grove, his mother committed suicide. Laurie is the only family he has left. And when he was done that night, once he had put down the knife, he had his sister. He took care of her and held her until, of course, the police arrived and took him away. Laurie may not remember any of that, but Michael very much does. The tragedy of his character arc here is that the last thing he’s trying to recreate, which should be the easiest, is the one thing he can’t. Michael Myers can kill anyone, as he proves over and over again just in this film, but he cannot have his sister back. He cannot simply cradle her the way he used to and expect things to be the same.
Which might be the thing that sets up the ending, if anything. Zombie’s Halloween, like the original, sees Michael topple over a balcony and land on the lawn. Only this time, it’s the balcony of the Myers house and Laurie falls with him. Instead of disappearing into the night, remaining a spectral mystery, as he did in the original. No, this time Michael lies still and flat on the ground, grabbing Laurie as she tries to crawl away. It’s a grab that looks at first like a jump scare, but instead he helps her quivering hand aim the gun at his face so she can take the final shot to kill him. Zombie’s motivations for Michael interestingly contrast both the original and the franchise as a whole. He’s driven to repeat his original crime in a more specific, yet still loosely defined way. And he’s also incredibly focused on his family, but not to systematically kill his bloodline. Instead, all Zombie’s Michael wants is to have his family back. When he finally realizes that that is not possible, he does the one thing we had truly never seen Michael do in any film up to that point: he admits defeat. Instead of taking an impossible amount of damage only to rise again, Michael allows Laurie to take the shot and kill him, even assists her in doing it because if he cannot be reunited with her or with his mother, he would clearly rather not be alive at all.
