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ON THIS DAY IN HORROR - August 31st

"HALLOWEEN" released in 2007

He has been silent for nearly fifteen years... until one Halloween, Michael Myers (Tyler Mane) brutally massacres the staff at Smith's Grove Sanitarium and continues killing his way back to his childhood town of Haddonfield, Illinois. In dogged pursuit is his former psychologist, Dr Sam Loomis (Malcom McDowell), who believes he knows exactly what is drawing Michael back to the scene of his first murders, in Rob Zombie's reinterpretation of John Carpenter's cult classic, Halloween!

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Already showing signs of psychopathic tendencies, ten-year-old Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) lives in a broken home with his single mother Deborah (Sheri Moon Zombie), older sister Judith (Hanna R. Hall), and Deborah's violent alcoholic boyfriend, Ronnie (William Forsythe). While at school, Michael is confronted by school bully Wesley (Daryl Sabara), who teases him with flyers featuring Deborah advertising a local strip club. Getting into a fight, Principal Chambers (Richard Lynch) has a meeting with Deborah and child psychologist Dr. Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), who explains that after searching Michael's locker they found numerous Polaroids of dead and tortured animals - seemingly done by Michael. Waiting outside, Michael quickly flees the school and later ambushes Wesley in the woods, beating him to death with a heavy tree branch while wearing his Halloween clown mask. Later that night while Deborah is at work, Michael returns from trick or treating to yet more taunts from Ronnie and Judith. Waiting for Ronnie to fall asleep, Michael duct tapes Ronnie to the recliner and slits his throat with a kitchen knife. Michael later bludgeons Judith's boyfriend Steve (Adam Weisman) to death with a baseball bat in the kitchen, before going upstairs to his sister's room. Wearing a pale-white mask dropped ealier by Steve, Michael stabs Judith and continues butchering her even as Judith crawls down the hallway to escape him. Only his baby sister, Angel, is spared. Michael patiently waits on the doorstep for his mother to return and discover the massacre. After one of the longest trials in the state’s history, Michael is found guilty of first degree murder and sent to Smith's Grove Sanitarium, under the care of Loomis. Michael initially cooperates with Dr. Loomis (claiming no memory of the murders while exhibiting a strange fixation for his papier-mâché masks) and is regularly visited by Deborah; until one day Michael explodes and viciously murders a nurse in front of Loomis and Deborah. Unable to bare the grief, Deborah later kills herself, and after fifteen years of not being able to get Michael to even speak, Loomis decides he has had enough too, and tells him he is leaving. That night, Michael (Mane) escapes from Smith Grove, murdering the entire staff with his bare hands, including a kindly custodian Ismael Cruz (Danny Trejo). Alerted to Michael's escape, Loomis immediately heads to Haddonfield, believing Michael will try to murder his remaining sister, now living with her adoptive parents as Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton). As night falls on Halloween, Loomis races to get to Laurie before Michael finishes his bloody family business!

[Loomis speaking at a lecture]
Dr. Samuel Loomis: These eyes will deceive you, they will destroy you. They will take from you, your innocence, your pride, and eventually your soul. These eyes do not see what you and I see. Behind these eyes one finds only blackness, the absence of light, these are of a psychopath. 

Top:   A young Michael Myers (Daeg Faerch) kills his first victim;

Above:   15-years later, Dr Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) still can't reach Michael (now played by Tyler Mane)

After the release of 2002's Halloween: Resurrection, executive producer Moustapha Akkad and Dimension Films spent the next four years trying to develop the next installment in the franchise. Originally there was going to be another sequel entitled "Halloween: Retribution" starring Lindy Booth but the idea was scrapped. At one point, Dimension considered making a crossover film featuring Pinhead from the Hellraiser series, following in the footsteps of New Line Cinema's horror crossover Freddy vs. Jason (2003). A poll was held on the official site, but response from fans was negative and the studio dropped the concept. The studio was on the verge of green-lighting another film, this time a prequel set within Michael Myers' early days at the asylum, called "Halloween: The Missing Years". The inclusion of the plot-line about Michael Myers' early days at the mental asylum under the care of Sam Loomis is a nod to a plot-line added in by John Carpenter for the television viewing of the original Halloween (1978). As told by Carpenter, when the original film was first sold to television, they demanded added scenes to replace the edited portions of the murder scenes. So Carpenter recalled Donald Pleasence, the original Sam Loomis to film scenes of him at the hospital taking care of Michael. Production of a sequel was halted in November 2005, when producer Moustapha Akkad was tragically killed along with his daughter, Rima Al Akkad Monla, in the Amman bombings in Jordan. His son Malek Akkad, who had been a producer on the Halloween films with his father since 1995's Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, would eventually dedicate the Halloween remake to his father.

At the beginning of 2006, Bob Weinstein approached Rob Zombie, fresh off the success of House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, about rebooting the series with a remake. Zombie, who was a fan of the original Halloween and a friend of John Carpenter, jumped at the chance to make a Halloween film. In an interview, Zombie said he went into the meeting with the Weinstein's with two films in mind; one being strictly just Myers and his childhood, then the remake. Unfortunately, they shot the first idea down, but it does explain why in the remake that the first half of the film focuses on Myers's childhood. Before Dimension went public with the news on June 4th, 2006, Zombie felt obligated to inform John Carpenter, out of respect, of the plans to remake his film. Carpenter's request was for Zombie was simple; to "make [the film] his own". Zombie's intention was to reinvent Michael Myers because, in his opinion, the character, along with Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees and Pinhead, had become too familiar to audiences, and as a result, less scary.  A deeper back story would add "new life" to the character, as Zombie put it, and further explained that he wanted Michael to be true to what a psychopath really is, wanting the mask to be a way for Michael to "hide".

[Loomis speaking at a lecture]
Dr. Samuel Loomis: The darkest souls are not those which choose to exist within the hell of the abyss, but those which choose to move silently among us.

Top:   Friends, Annie Brackett (Danielle Harris), Laurie Strode (Taylor Scout-Compton) and Lynda (Hanna Hill);

Above:   In a scene inspired by the original film, Michael pins Lynda's boyfriend Bob (Nick Mennell) to the wall with a butchers knife!

Although Zombie was opposed to casting anybody from the previous Halloween films, he always had a part in mind for Danielle Harris (who played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers). Originally Zombie wanted Danielle Harris to play Laurie Strode and Sheri Moon Zombie to play Laurie's friend, Lynda. But ultimately Harris chose to play the role of Annie Brackett, and Moon Zombie playing Michael's struggling single mother Deborah (the role of Lynda was eventually played by Kristina Klebe). After first considering John Hurt, Malcolm McDowell was given the role of Dr. Samuel Loomis, leaving only the pivotal role of Laurie Strode yet be filled. Scout Taylor-Compton endured a long audition process, but as director Zombie explains, "Scout was my first choice. There was just something about her; she had a genuine quality. She didn't seem actor-y." Of all the female leads (all the girls are supposed to be in high school including Judith Myers, played by Hanna R. Hall), only Taylor-Compton was actually a teenager at the time of filming (she was 18 at the time of production), much like how Jamie Lee Curtis who played Laurie in the original Halloween, who was only 19. Zombie completed casting with a large number of frequent collaborators; Danny Trejo as Danny Trejo, William Forsythe as Ronnie, and Bill Moseley, Tom Towles, Leslie Easterbrook, and Ken Foree as the three guards and the trucker that Michael kills while escaping. Tyler Mane also reunited with his Devil's Rejects director to play the titular role of the older Michael Myers. There was also an online competition for a "walk-on role" for Halloween, which was won by Heather Bowen and played the role of a news reporter who covered Michael's arrest but her scene was cut from the film and does not appear in the deleted scenes.

When Halloween had it's first test screenings in June, 2007, the reaction was mostly negative - especially the rape scene of one of Smith's Grove female inmates during Michael's original escape sequence. The studio quickly ordered Zombie to shoot alternate scenes, included a new escape for Michael from the hospital as well as an alternate ending where Loomis survives and Myers is gunned down by Brackett's men in front of the Myers house. Also cut from the test screening workprint was Danny Trejo's death scene. Zombie lobbied Dimension Films, stating it was important to show how brutal and uncompassionate the character truly is. Zombie won and was allowed to put the scene back in the final cut. Halloween would not be released on Halloween weekend, as was the original, for fear of going head to head with Saw IV, and instead was scheduled for released two months earlier. However, approximately four days before the theatrical release of the film, a workprint version of Halloween appeared online and was circulated around various BitTorrent sites. Upon hearing of the leaked copy, Zombie stated that whatever version had been leaked was an older version of the film (the test screening version) that differed from the final release. The leak of Zombie's workprint led to speculation that the film's box office success could be damaged, as director Eli Roth attributed the financial failure of his film, Hostel: Part II, to the leaking of a workprint online, but instead Zombie's Halloween proved to be the highest grossing film of the franchise (not counting for inflation), grossing almost $60 million in the US alone.

TRIVIA:   John Carpenter has not seen the film and said he would not criticize the film because Rob Zombie is a friend of his.

Top:   Writer/Director Rob Zombie with Tyler Mane and Daeg Faerch;

Above:   Zombie inside Michael's cell set. 

Critics however were less enthusiastic for Zombie's re-imagining of Halloween, with New York Daily News critic Jack Matthews believing the film lacked tension, and went more for cheap shocks — focusing more on enhancing the "imagery of violence" — than real attempts to scare the audience; he gave the film one and a half stars out of five. Dennis Harvey's, from Variety magazine, opinion was that the film failed to deliver on the suspense; he also felt that you could not tell one teenage character from the next, whereas in Carpenter's original each teenager had real personalities. Peter Hartlaub, of the San Francisco Chronicle, was more measured in his review writing he felt Zombie was successful in both "[putting] his own spin on Halloween, while at the same time paying tribute to Carpenter's film"; he thought Zombie managed to make Michael Myers almost "sympathetic" as a child, but that the last third of the film felt more like a montage of scenes with Halloween slipping into "slasher-film logic". Critic Matthew Turner believed the first half of the film, which featured the prequel elements of Michael as a child, were better played than the remake elements of the second half. In short, Turner stated that performances from the cast were "superb", with Malcolm McDowell being perfectly cast as Dr. Loomis, but that the film lacked the scare value of Carpenter’s original. But it was Bill Gibron, of PopMatters, review that states he believes, "that audiences and critics cannot compare Carpenter's film to Zombie's remake; where Carpenter focused more on the citizens of Haddonfield—with Michael acting as a true "boogeyman"—Zombie focuses more on Michael himself, successfully forcing the audience to experience all of the elements that Michael went through that would result in his "desire for death".

With impressive box office numbers, Halloween producer Malek Akkad confirmed at 2008's 30 Years of Terror Convention that a sequel was in the works, with Zombie officially signing on to direct in December of that year. Zombie explained that with the sequel he was no longer bound by a sense of needing to retain any "John Carpenter-ness", as he "felt free to do whatever" after encouraged by Akkad to ignore any rules they had set for him on the previous film and make the vision for Halloween II his own. Unfortunately, Halloween II was not a success at the box office and received even worse reviews than it's predecessor when released in 2009. The future of the franchise was once again in doubt, with many false starts with various writers and directors to come up with a satisfactory story. Then, on May 23, 2016, horror fans were shocked and ecstatic when it was announced that Miramax and Blumhouse Productions were developing a new Halloween film with John Carpenter set to produce the project and act as creative consultant. Carpenter later stated, "Thirty-eight years after the original Halloween, I'm going to help to try to make the 10th sequel the scariest of them all!". And for the millions of Halloween fans around the world, we can't wait to see what they'll come up with!

ROTTEN TOMATOES SCORE:   25%

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