Rob Zombie's Halloween Remake Reminds of Horror Movies of Today and Yesteryear

On Labor Day some friends and I went to see Rob Zombie's remake of the horror movie classic Halloween. Overall the movie itself was pretty good a nice blend of psychological drama and classic slasher genre scares. Certainly not a great movie but head and shoulders better than most horror movies that have come out in the last 20 years. It got me thinking about horror movies in general.

I am a horror movie fan and I have been for most of my life. I love the old ones going back to the 1930s and '40s with the Universal Monster movies to the 50s through the 70s and the Hammer Horror movies to the Slasher pics of 80s and 90s. There are ones I love and ones I hate, but broadly, I love the genre. What watching Rob Zombie's remake makes me think of is the way horror movies are made and the way they are received.

From the early days of film until the late 70s the bulk of horror movies were monster movies. They were movies about vampires, werewolves, zombies, or aliens for the most part. The same movie would get remade a few different times--look at how many versions of Dracula there are--then came Toby Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre in 1974 and the beginnings of a different kind of horror movie started gaining more ground, horror movies about human monsters. In 1978 John Carpenter's Halloween hit screens and the horror movie genre started down a new path. Halloween's Michael Meyers was an inhuman human monster. He was an unstoppable killing machine. The slasher film was born and dominated the the next 20 years of horror movies.