Film Clips	Halloween by M. Faust

Having called Rob Zombie’s last film, The Devil’s Rejects, “A movie only a moron could love,” I admittedly was not looking forward to his latest. Of course, I probably wouldn’t have looked forward to any remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 horror film, whose simple premise (teenagers stalked by a relentless, unstoppable killer) has long since been worked to death in seven sequels and so many imitators that they became a new sub-genre, the “slasher film.” The good news, at least from my point of view, is that Zombie has reined in the sordid dwelling on scenes of torture that made Rejects so repellant. Like Carpenter’s original, his Halloween is a well-crafted exercise in suspense, even if there is literally very little suspense in the film—you know what’s going to happen in almost every frame of the film. The biggest difference (and the factor that makes this run half an hour longer than the ’78 movie) is a more developed backstory for Michael Meyer, who, as a 10-year-old, slaughters his family and spends 15 years under lock and key before breaking out in search of his one surviving sibling. Of course, the notion of a psychological understanding of Michael runs counter to his conception as Pure Evil. But without that there’s no reason for Zombie’s remake to exist, other than to employ a small army of B-movie veterans and make the occasional film buff reference. (The oddest of these has to be naming a character “Lee Brackett,” presumably a nod to Leigh Brackett, who was one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters, though hardly one you would expect to find on Zombie’s personal pantheon.) A line of dialogue about the “faceless corporate monster” of American capitalism destroying everything good about small-town life I can only interpret as a joke on Zombie’s part to anyone searching for meaning here. Ultimately you have to wonder who this Halloween was made for: Fans of the torture-porn horror model that Zombie helped create will find it tame; young horror fans in general will find it lacking in anything designed to appeal specifically to them (the film is so generic it’s hard to tell when it’s supposed to be taking place), and there certainly aren’t enough John Carpenter fans out there to push this into the top 10—if there were, Hollywood would still be employing Carpenter himself.