Michael Myers is Not Human

I just returned from a private preview midnight screening of Rob Zombie's remake of John Carpenter's horror classic Halloween, scheduled to open tomorrow, August 31. I'd have been better off getting the sleep that I missed. If you came here looking for details of the film itself, I apologize. But I'm sure there are literally hundreds of reviews out there to let you know the basic plot line and who plays whom in the film. Instead, I'm going to lay out exactly why Rob Zombie should not be allowed anywhere near another horror classic.

For those who haven't heard (somehow), Rob Zombie has remade the film that redefined horror in 1978. Unfortunately, it resembles the original only in names; the film's the characters' and the locations. In all other ways it draws too heavily on the same template that Zombie followed in his previous films, House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. Namely, people with bad childhoods grow up to be thugs who kill people in bloody, gory ways. Despite Zombie's repeated assertions that he's a fan of the original and his acknowledgment that it is a classic and Michael Myers is a horror icon, the new film shows zero awareness of why this is the case.

Michael Myers was not a "slasher" or "psycho killer" he wasn't even human. Come on, Rob, it's right there in the scripts - both the original and your remake. Dr. Loomis regularly tells those around him that Michael "isn't a man" and that he's "purely and simply... evil". There's a reason that horror fandom refers to the lead character of 1978's Halloween as "The Shape" more often then as "Michael Myers". It's because the human child that was Michael Myers was, indeed, the first victim of "the shape", well before horror came to the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois.