I watched the first half of Rob Zombie's Halloween last week. It was the first 2/3, really. John Carpenter's 1978 original spent less than 10 minutes on the story of young Michael killing his sister, and barely more than that on his incarceration, while Zombie takes over an hour to unfold the tale of a troubled and violent young man who slaughters his family one Halloween night while his mother is working at the local nudie bar. By showing us Michael's childhood, his mother's love for him, and his descent into utter derangement, we have a sense of a person behind the killer's mask, a wounded child who just wanted to take it all back but couldn't stop killing. By making you identify with the killer, Zombie makes you complicit in all the horrific murders he commits, and that's probably the scariest thing of all. He did the same thing brilliantly in The Devil's Rejects, where you see these 3 people do the most unspeakable things in the first act, then you eat some ice cream with them and have a laugh, and in the final act they become the victims, hunted down and tortured like dogs by an angry sheriff with God's righteousness on his side.
I didn't watch the end of Halloween this time around; it's really the least entertaining part. It ends up as pretty much the same thing as the last hour of Carpenter's film, except the end, which I won't spoil for you.
Alright, enough procrastinating. I'm supposed to be looking for a job, you see. There's more, there's always more.
2 comments:
Sometimes it's nice to know the why behind everything in a movie. But I tend to like it better when I'm given no background and can just believe that the killer is truly pure evil. It's scarier for me that way I think. In Saw II I got all kinds of pissed off because you find out the bad guy has cancer, woe is him, blah, blah, blah and I think it lost it's edge. The first one, despite the incredibly bad choice of actors, was much scarier because it seemed as though the killer was only demented and evil. When things have causes it takes away from the scariness of no motive.
i prefer to understand why one transforms into a killer. what motivates his/her behavior. what happened? why are they hunting other people? can it be prevented?
likely not.
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