Something about Rob Zombie’s Halloween II
A lot has been said about Rob Zombie’s second Halloween movie, released ten years ago, and how different if not outright contradicting it was to the Michael Myers mythos, and througout the years many have wondered… Why? Why is the movie… like that? Is it just random?
I don’t think it’s random. For all that can be said about Rob Zombie, I admire how he manages to make exactly the movies he wants to make (even if they are not the movies everyone wants to see), how he gets the best performances out of the actors (even if what they are given isn’t to everyone’s tastes) and how he manages to put his thoughts and experiences into the final product for us to see through film filters (even if not everybody can relate to them).
Hobo Michael Myers. Unmasked Michael Myers. Bearded Mychael Myers. Eating-from-garbage-can Michael Myers. Angry Micheal Myers.
What could Rob Zombie have possibly been thinking when he made this decision?
The answer is “how mental patients were being neglected back in the 80s”.
Skip to 1:25 in this interview he gave at Comic-con back in the day:
“I remember hearing back in the 80s during the Reagan years when they were closing out mental hospitals, just dumping the patients onto the streets. So you see these crazy people lying by garbage cans, they could be complete psychotics and I thought, well, it’s kind of interesting that Michael Myers is sort of like living out there in the world, that’s why he’s like this kinda big bearded guy. Yeah I mean you never see him, he could be this kind of like mountain man living off and then Halloween comes and so the light bulb goes off in his brain, you know.”
Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers is not the boogeyman from the original, he’s not mysteryous. Instead this Michael Myers is a victim. First he was a victim of an abusive father, then he was put in a mental hospital and became the victim of a shitty system. A shitty system that Dr. Loomis is part of.
Listening to this interview made me re-think of Rob Zombie’s version of Dr. Loomis, a heroic character in the original film and follow-ups but a major asshole in this movie. Many have found his jump from the nice guy from the remake to the douche in this sequel to be jarring, but maybe it wasn’t? You know when he says to that audience that kid-Michael has “the eyes of a psychopath” even though he didn’t seem that hopeless? Maybe that wasn’t the movie being clumsy and “not getting it”. Maybe this Loomis was already being exploitative and sensationalist. Maybe he was using a traumatized kid to sell his work from the begining. And maybe in this movie, the sequel, rather than doing a 180º like we though… he simply became bad at hiding his true colors.
Remember in the director’s cut of the sequel how at the end Michael takes off his mask, looks at Loomis in the eyes, and screams “Die!” before killing him? Angry all the way through? Maybe it wasn’t random. Maybe it’s this Michael getting his revenge on the second man that ruined his life after his father. Maybe it really was the end of this Michael’s story arc.
Many people have considered the Rob Zombie Halloween films as missing the point of the original, but to be fair, haven’t all the sequels until last year (regardless of quality) also miss the point by making Michael Myers eternally obsessed with his sister, wich was a last minute decision of the first sequel? He stopped being the boogeyman because he had a clear motivation and a connection to his victims, he even was reduced to the slave of a cult at one point. In my opinion we didn’t get a “real” Halloween sequel until the 2018 movie wich ditched the sister angle and even made fun of it (again, not saying the movies are bad because of it).
But now that we got that movie, I find myself wanting to be more open minded about what Rob Zombie and this duology aimed to do, as I wait patiently for both Rob Zombie’s and Michael Myers’ respective next movies.
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