“You Can’t Kill The Boogeyman” - Tommy Doyal, John Carpenter’s Halloween ( 1978 )
Let me repeat that again. You. Can’t. Kill. The Boogeyman.
I took in a viewing of Rob Zombie’s re-imagining of Halloween this evening. I enjoyed it quite a bit, and for all of Zombie’s tinkering, I went with it. Sure, he gave Michael so much back story, he was “reduced” in a way to being a ven diagram of where all the best and perfect serial killers origins intersect. He was changed from “pure evil” to just a perfect storm of circumstances to create the most unremorseful killer.
That is until the end. The end in which, instead of letting Laurie keep squeezing the trigger of the gun to finally end his wrath or disappearing into the darkness like the unstoppable darkness that he is, he reaches up and pulls the trigger himself. He kills himself! Everything, and I mean everything, that the movie builds and creates is shattered with the raising of a single hand into frame and the assistance of pulling the trigger.
If Michael knows that he will never be able to stop himself from killing, why doesn’t he kill himself before his brutal reign of unrelenting murder through Haddonfield?
Or is his choice to die because Laurie has chosen to reject him, or because she doesn’t fuckin’ understand what a photo of a ten-year-old boy holding a baby means?! Are we to imply that through all of his murder and mayhem, all Michael ever wanted was a hug from his baby sister?! That he does in fact have a conscious and feelings?! This is not the embodiment of evil. This is a brat doing bad things to get attention.
Zombie’s envisioning of Myers is not that of evil, of that which can not be stopped. It is of a very real, flawed and fucked up human being, who grew up in a trickle down effect of pain and suffering. It is a two-hour Law And Order episode (you know, that one about the teen with the cooler full of animal skulls buried in Central Park) from the killer’s perspective.
Now, as I stormed out to my car, a thought crystalized in my head as to why why why Zombie has chosen to murder Michael. He does not want to do a sequel, and certainly doesn’t want someone else writing and directing *his* characters. So what better way than to off Michael and be done with it.
Unless of course, something in the movie happened after the screen said “Directed By Rob Zombie”, since I tromped out right then and there. If something to the contrary of what I just have rambled on about happened or a glimmer of hope that the bullet bounced off the magical white mask, I take it all back.
And one other thing. Why wasn’t this released in autumn?! After all those glorious fallen leaves been stepped on and blowing around, all I wanted to do was to leave the theatre and have a good time walking on cracked pavement with rustic colored leaves beneath my feet. It felt like October in the theatre. And stepping outside to see sprawling teenagers in t-shirts was a bit of a bummer.
Rob Zombie’s Michael Myers is no boogeyman. Just a hulking rampaging killer with a broken heart. And as for “Rob Zombie’s Halloween” as a standalone original, I quite like it. It was terrifying, and it was scary, and it was unpredictable. As for Zombie’s remake of “John Carpenter’s Halloween” I have only to say, what the fuck, dude?!
 
