Was that the boogeyman?

Halloween. I will admit right out, I went into this one biased because everyone else seem to have hated it and so I was determined to give it the benefit of the doubt, because I am nothing if not an iconoclast.

I should also admit that I don't consider myself a "fan" per se of either Halloween (1979) or John Carpenter. It's a great movie, don't get me wrong. I just never had any of the same affection for it that a lot of contemporary horror fans and critics do. Part of that is a question of age: I was born in 1981 and was a child of the 80s, when "every kid knows who Freddy is... like Santa Claus," but slasher movies in general were not really meant for kids. I always saw Halloween as more of a teen movie, and it certainly didn't get the kind of across-the-board exposure that Nightmare was getting throughout my impressionable years. Heresy though it may be among the hard-core horror crowd, I didn't see Halloween until I was a freshman in college and it really didn't have much of an effect on me. I mean, it was fun, but not especially scary.

That having been said: I did enjoy this movie, but I think Rob Zombie was unequivocally the wrong choice for it. Carpenter is about restraint; Zombie is about excess. If I were going to pick a 70s classic to assign Zombie I'd obviously have had him remake The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: that's a movie that's a clear part of Zombie's filmmaking lineage, far more so than Halloween. I'm sure he's as familiar with Carpenter as any good horror fan, but Chainsaw's gritty, ugly, sweaty aesthetic and fascination with taxidermy, cannibalism, perversion and mad redneckery is all Zombie.

His gift for realizing a particular form of domestic disfunction is put to splendid use: the Myers house is a suburban rendition of the same sense of unraveling chaos he explored so gleefully in House of 1000 Corpses. There may be less taxidermy on display, but the filth is still there, and Zombie still wallows in it, loves it, swims in it 'til his fingers get all pruny.** And his enthusiasm is infectious: the first act of the film, right up through the Myers massacre, is rich and vigorous and just batshit awesome. Watching the movie try to negotiate that central contradiction is like watching amateur gymnastics. Ultimately it doesn't really succeed, and the ways in which it fails really highlight why Zombie was the wrong director.

The nitty-gritty is this: the first half or so of the film is really entertaining, while the second feels like Zombie is swimming upstream against material that, though once horrifying, now feels almost quaint -- even nice, compared to his usual stuff. Everything Zombie injects into the movie -- the background on the Myers family, the scenes at the hospital between Michael and Loomis, even the lengthy scene basically created to give Ken Foree a gratuitous cameo -- it all has the ring of authenticity and the characteristic gonzo excess of a Zombie film.

The whole things starts to unravel when we're dealing with the actual meat of the film that was Carpenter's, when Zombie is treading -- far too carefully, far too anxiously -- on the master's turf. While the murderous chaos of the film's climax works reasonably well, the air has already been let out in an overlong coda in the middle. In Carpenter's film, this was the ramp-up, the tightening of the screws that made the explosive climax work; here, it just feels like naptime. Slow burn tension is just not what Rob Zombie does, and he seems unsure and the pacing goes leaden when he's trying to establish the Strodes and Laurie's friends, characters with whom he clearly never fully connected.

Here we come to why this was maybe the wrong story for Zombie to tell: the moments when the movie really rings false are in the polished suburban tidiness of the Strode house, the ordinariness of a modern high school, the interchangeable ticky-tacky houses where Laurie spends her days, and which Zombie clearly despises and is unable to really portray in any relatable way. Laurie herself, the virginal tomboy Jamie Lee Curtis made sweet but not sugary, is so alien to his universe he has no idea how to make her his own in any meaningful way. Since Laurie is, ostensibly, the hero of the piece, this is obviously a major problem. Michael and his mother are acutely real, multi-dimensional and genuine, while Laurie seems to have wandered in from the set of a sit-com next door.

This is ultimately the film's great weakness: Laurie Strode, her family, and their home are all very clean, very nice, and completely unbelievable. Oh, Zombie makes an effort to make them his own, introducing Laurie by having her tell a filthy child molestation joke to her mother over breakfast, complete with obscene hand gestures. It's ludicrous, and frankly really embarrassing: not because the joke is gross, but because it's a naked attempt to make these characters at home in Rob Zombie's universe, a place none of them would ever be caught dead. Literally. Even Dee Wallace seems embarrassed, not because of the joke but because of how forced it all feels.

Maybe if a teenaged Sheri Moon Zombie were Laurie, or even a younger Fairuza Balk, or Rose McGowan -- hell, Mandy Moore could have pulled this off a few years ago, in the Saved! years, when she was so good at playing a WASP princess with a nasty side. You need somebody with some edge, and not the foul-mouthed cheerleader kind of edge that Taylor-Compton tries to develop. It's like he didn't have the money for Miley Cyrus or Hayden Panatierre, and he didn't have the imagination to conceive of a Laurie who might reasonably be able to survive in his world, so he wound up with this. I'm sure Taylor-Compton is good at doing the thing she actually does, which if I were to guess involves Disney in one way or another. I mean, Jamie Lee Curtis essentially had no edge, but then Jamie Lee Curtis was anchoring a John Carpenter movie, not a Rob Zombie movie. And Scout Taylor-Compton is, let's face it, no Jamie Lee Curtis, much less a heroine who could under any circumstances actually survive a Rob Zombie movie.

But the first part of the film, the part that he's basically invented from whole cloth, the part that's all Zombie, has none of these problems. Zombie has an eye for mise-en-scene like few others in moviemaking these days, or any days, and his style is unmistakable. Like I said, TCM is the obvious granddaddy of the Zombie aesthetic, particularly in the awesome clutter of the universe he works in. He never specifies a period, but the first act feels like it's set in the 70s, and once again his feel for and love for the period is rendered perfectly tactile and real.*

It helps that Daeg Faerch is scary good. I hear he isn't back for the flashback scenes in Halloween II -- inevitably, he did age, even during the production (Zombie notes on the commentary that Daeg was visibly taller in the hospital scenes, which no doubt made him incredibly glad he shot in order). He's a fierce and frightening presence, with eyes more haunting than most grown-up movie monsters. Evil kids have a particular frisson all their own (check out the fantastic Kindertrauma if you doubt it, a site devoted entirely to kiddie and childhood-related horror), as a long string of movies from The Bad Seed to The Omen to The Exorcist and even the currently-playing Orphan are well aware. Most of those kids, though, have an otherworldliness to them that removes them somewhat from our day-to-day experience, making them less a palpable and immediate threat and more a weird apparition from hell. Faerch's Michael Myers isn't at all weird, he isn't spooky or odd. He comes across like a totally normal kid from the wrong side of the tracks, and heaven help you if you don't look in his eyes before you hire him to water your plants or walk your dogs. Because between Zombie and Faerch, they captured exactly what Dr. Loomis always talked about when he tried to explain Michael: the sheer absence of a soul behind those hooded eyes.

But Sheri Moon Zombie acquits herself almost as well. She was the real revelation of The Devil's Rejects, if you ask me: I fully expected to see maturation in Zombie's style as a director and a maturation in terms of his approach (though, granted, I was still a bit boggled by how much more confident and proficient he was by his second outing), but I had no idea, after her vacuous giggling in House, how good Moon could be. And as Zombie keeps writing her better parts, she keeps meeting the new challenges: she actually plays a sympathetic character and is even more real and nuanced than in TDR. Moon and Faerch are really the anchors of the movie, and it's when we lose them that everything goes awry.

*Actually, he never sets a period because the "present day" scenes are clearly set in the present day (2006, per the movie's release date), meaning that at least 25 years ought to have passed since the Myers massacre and Laurie should be a working adult, not a 16-year-old. The clothes, the cars, and the cell phones are all vintage mid-2000s. He didn't want to go to the effort of setting the later scenes in the early-mid 90s, and he supposed, likely correctly, that The Kids at whom he was targeting his movie wouldn't got to see it if all the teenagers were either wearing high-tops and color-blocked neon or not brushing their hair and wearing a lot of plaid. But he loves the 70s and he doesn't love the late 80s, so he said, if I were to guess, "Ah, fuck it." Even though I appreciate Zombie's love for the 70s and it's clearly the period that best lends itself to his aesthetic, the refusal to go make even the vaguest gesture in the direction of temporal continuity grates, because it's stubborn laziness. Remember that point in the 90s when Somebody had an intervention with Hollywood scriptwriters to explain to them that you couldn't have a character in her 40s in the present day whose flashbacks to her teen years involved sock hops and poodle skirts? No, not even you, Stephen King? Whoever did that needs to have a sit-down with Rob Zombie. I'm sorry, Rob: people who were babies in the 70s are approaching 40, and you're old now.

**Yet again, I find myself quoting something with the full realization that nobody else will get the reference, because the crossover audience between Rob Zombie's Halloween and the Meg Ryan/Kevin Kline rom-com French Kiss probably is... just me. Suffice it to say: not my line, but a good line, and I feel the need to cite my sources.