HALLOWEEN II (2009)

Laurie Strode is a hostile, embittered alcoholic who’s ostracised her loved ones. A callous psychiatrist, driven by delusions of grandeur, manipulates her perceived attachment with Michael Myers, the infamous serial killer who has cheated death, escaped via car crash, and once again brutally murdered random people. He even caves a head in with his boot. This is Halloween (2018), the commercial smash hit revitalising the franchise. This is also Halloween II, the aggressively reviled reboot sequel less than a decade before.

Audiences were enamoured by David Gordon Green’s love letter to Halloween (1978), a cloying term that critic William Bibbiani helpfully defines: “a film whose top priority is to make you feel better about all the money you’ve spent on the franchise.” Alien: Romulus (2024) is appeasing fans by riffing on every disparate entry in the series. Deadpool & Wolverine (2024) has Disney auto-fellating itself in a tearful tribute to assimilating the 20th Century Fox catalogue.

Then Green did something strange, yet entirely welcome. His two sequels formed an unstable trilogy with wildly clashing tones, themes, and plots. When fans become fanatical over intellectual property, any stylistic variation from John Carpenter’s 1978 original is sacrilege. Jaime N. Christley for Slant Magazine expounds that Rob Zombie’s “homage goes the route of pagan vandalism and cannibalism, rather than strictly Judeo-Christian exaltation.” That is to say, Rob Zombie writes his Halloween love letter like Devon Sawa writes in Eminem’s “Stan” music video.

Carpenter treated the work of Howard Hawks no differently. Christley observes “The Thing [1982] was a gravestone rubbing of the [1951] original that the uninformed deemed disrespectful”. Both The Thing and Zombie’s Halloween received the same vitriolic response to the perceived vitriolic “bordering on nihilistic” approach toward the source material. I confess my own acerbic reaction to Green’s Halloween Kills (2021), a sequel that has the most in common with my beloved, underrated Halloween II. An unstoppable Michael, an unlikeable Laurie, and two hours of relentless misery with no happy ending.

Most Final Girls wind up sat on the back step of an ambulance, a medical blanket wrapped over them, pensive as we pan out to credits. Halloween (2007) ended with Laurie (Scout Taylor-Compton) shooting Michael (Tyler Mane) in the face, and the sequel picks up with her wandering the streets on residual adrenaline. Hard cut to Taylor-Compton giving such a raw, distressing performance that most actors would save for the finale. Zombie and DP Brandon Trost hide nothing in their documentary-like coverage of Laurie brought into the ER. Relentless screams of “Am I going to die!?” as tears run over her bloodied face. Surgeons make small talk prepping the now gassed young woman. Clothes cut away to reveal glass shards and wooden splinters embedded in her skin. Some of her fingers would be unrecognisable if they weren’t attached to her hand, and they barely are.

Laurie has no time to recuperate. She awakes just long enough to visit her comatose friend Annie (Danielle Harris) before their nurse (Academy Award-winner Octavia Spencer) is pinned down in a pool of her blood by the incessant stabs from Michael. Seriously, she’s stabbed in the double digits, each sickening thud like Mike Tyson delivering a knock-out punch. While the cinematography retains the trembling agitation, Zombie lights her escape outside as an abyss. There is Laurie in the pounding rain and absolute darkness surrounding her. When she hides in a guard hut, Michael tears the walls down like the big bad wolf. This opening, a reference to the hospital-set Halloween II (1981), is a literal nightmare. Her reality is no better.

Laurie wakes up in what resembles an abandoned public restroom. Alice Cooper posters, spray graffiti, and bumper stickers with positive affirmations like “I love happy endings” and “wake the fuck up” litter the walls. Above her bed is a large photo of Charles Manson with the mural “In Charley we trust”. With her parents murdered, she lives with Annie and her dad Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif), all trying to move on with their lives. Sometimes Laurie shares a smile as Brackett impersonates Lee Marvin during pizza dinner. Sometimes Laurie loses it with Annie, “One fucking day at a time! If I hear that fucking phrase one more fucking time…”

“The audience should feel and care about the two leading characters of Laurie Strode and Dr Loomis,” critic Paul McGuire Grimes parsed, “How is that possible when they both have become such despicable characters?” Nobody can complain about this authentic depiction of PTSD when Jamie Lee Curtis used the word trauma approximately 1,978 times when promoting her return to Laurie Strode in 2018.

Real-life trauma doesn’t adhere to a neat three-act structure with an uplifting resolution. It is not pretty, not entertaining, and both Zombie and Taylor-Compton deliver the brutal honesty of one day at a time. Most Final Girls relive the familiar cinematic story of reclaiming their strength from victimhood. Curtis’ Laurie could only find closure by seeing Michael dead. There is no goal with this Laurie; she proclaims “I know Michael Myers is dead. I shot him in the fucking head.” It fixes nothing. A year has passed since that Halloween night, or maybe two, the days all seem the same. Laurie isn’t getting better; she may be getting worse.

“Every time I see her face, and I see those scars… I know that it’s my fault. And I get angry. And there’s something in my body that snaps. And I get this zero to a hundred rage, and I just wanna go up to her…and I just wanna… Fuck, I don’t know.”—Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton).

Her therapist (Margot Kidder) presses her to finish that thought about Annie, but Laurie shrinks back “I’d rather not. You’ll send me away.” Zombie lets us in with a waking nightmare as Laurie recreates Michael’s murder of his father but with Annie. Taped down to a chair, her neck slit open. A frenzied Laurie with an inverted cross carved into her forehead shrieks “Die you fucking bitch!” Zombie wrote a Laurie Strode damned by uncontrollable forces. “Her insanity doesn’t manifest itself in the same way. Michael Myers was clearly insane by age 10, maybe hers comes at age 19,” Zombie posits her as a ticking time bomb.

Perhaps you’ve seen Halloween II, even on the big screen, and don’t recall Laurie being this nihilistic. Didn’t she get on with Annie, her therapist, and generally seem to be in recovery? You’re not going crazy. There are two versions of this film, and Zombie gives us two fundamentally different Halloween II experiences.

“Laurie is the main difference. She’s holding it together, getting her life together and it starts spiralling downward. In the other version, she’s an incredible mess and gets worse. She never has any good moments, she’s just messed up, she’s lashing out at everyone, she’s horrible. She’s just completely spun out through the whole movie. It makes for a real challenging movie to watch, and I don’t know if fans would’ve embraced so much darkness.”—Rob Zombie, writer-director.

The contrast goes deeper than 15 minutes of deleted scenes, for there are many theatrical-exclusive moments. Even the editing itself by Glenn Garland alters how scenes play out. The ‘Unrated Cut’ is the default edition for most physical media, for good reason. As Zombie alludes, the theatrical cut is far too sanitized by studio appeasement for the widest audience reach. Scenes come and go; truncated therapy sessions merely tell us Laurie is getting help, versus the prolonged anxiety that she may be irredeemable. The trite tidiness of being set one year later is nothing—two years implies a relatively quiet Halloween has passed, and everyone but Laurie breathed a sigh of relief that life is back to normal.

Normal is relative when it comes to Zombie’s character work. Halloween II follows the genre tradition of the slasher killing complete strangers that don’t affect the protagonist. Zombie lets his supporting cast shine with delightful turns of phrase like “What up, dick lickers?”, “Coolio to the schoolio”, and “titties good! ass good!” That last one was a guy dressed as Frankenstein’s monster fucking a stripper. A strip club with the sign ‘The world-famous Rabbit in Red, home of Deborah Myers, mother of Michael Myers, The Butcher of Haddonfield.’ Zombie presents not just characters but a society that has hardened in response to arbitrary horrors.

Two separate lives in this are very much thematic opposites. As Laurie languishes, Dr Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) thrives. Donald Pleasence is revered for his portrayal of Loomis in his unwavering dedication to stopping Michael. As his five sequels wore on, Loomis grew steadily worse at his one job while Pleasence received a steady pay-cheque for his one job of shouting variations of “Michael!” and “No!” Zombie gives the former child psychologist some direction, “If the first film was real, what would happen? If Michael Myers was famous, he’d be like Charles Manson. Thus making Dr Loomis Vincent Bugliosi.” Loomis has moved on, deliberately so, admonishing an old promotional photo of him with the trademark goatee and trench coat.

True crime has only flourished since 2009, Green referenced it with podcasters and even Laurie wrote her tell-all memoir. Loomis spends most of this runtime hawking his new book, which time and time again goes poorly. From instigating real weirdos like an overly enthusiastic fan claiming “Michael is so much deeper than that bitch Bundy”, to the real Weird Al asking him on live TV if he’s talking about the Austin Powers guy. But Loomis perseveres as “bad taste is the petrol that drives the American dream.” Our form of escapism has often been labelled bad taste. We cheer on the plucky Final Girls and root for the killers to get back up. Contradictions are laid out ironically as Loomis helpfully spells out for the “gossip mongers” that Michael Myers is “D-E-A-D”, while Zombie cross-cuts with Michael Myers walking toward Haddonfield.

“Sequences of shots that do not contain violence, i.e. the ‘in-between shit,’ share the slaughter set pieces’ abandoned-parking-lot visual aesthetic: cold, stone-grey, industrial—bad things happened here.” Though Christy teases with his definition, that in-between shit is life, to Laurie at least. Trost frames the world through windows and bushes, always at a distance. Constantly peering round the corner like some true crime junkies catching a glimpse into their private struggles.

In the era of digital filmmaking taking over: Paranormal Activity (2007) and Cloverfield (2008) utilised the format narratively, whereas Rodriguez faked his grindhouse throwback Planet Terror (2007) by shooting digital with post-processing trickery. Halloween II was “shot on grainy 16mm instead of the first’s wider 35, a much rougher, hopeless appearance to it, shrouded in darkness for much of its runtime and relying almost exclusively on the natural lighting of porch lights and lamps to illuminate the horrors in front of us.” Zombie is all too often dismissed for ‘white trash exploitation’, and the graphic content may appear a shallow attempt at one-upmanship, but the masterful direction in each department is on full display. Zombie is not just employing genre elements but concentrating the raw essence of horror into every single frame. We are staring into the Devil’s eyes.   

Halloween II starts with a moment of happiness. It’s Deborah Myers (Sherri Moon Zombie) visiting Michael (Chase Wright Vanek) at the sanatorium in an opening flashback. The murderous child acting like nothing happened is as eerie as when he shuts down. People love the mystery of Michael Myers. Many sequels strive to answer it and none have been received well. 2018’s Halloween went to great lengths to establish Michael as purely psychological. Then Kills and Halloween Ends (2022) explored his supernatural empowerment as a genuine boogeyman who could infect others with his evil. Rob Zombie was crucified for making Michael too human.

Zombie’s Halloween unconventionally spent half its runtime with pre-murderous Michael (Daeg Faerch). The sequel explores the mystery of his madness with adult Michael spurred by angelic visions of his childhood self and now dead mother. He was ‘normal’ until the one person he could speak to killed herself. From then on, the murder machine under the white mask is nothing but a vehicle driven by two spirits of vengeance. I once complimented Halloween Kills as a fine Friday the 13th sequel, and overbearing ghost mothers appear to be a trend. Funny when Jason was first riding on Michael’s coattails.

The hospital is where Michael feels the most Michael: his look, his figure, his behaviour, everything we’ve come to expect before Zombie reveals this is the dream and his real Michael enters. It’s a throwback. Plus, the overalls were only ever a convenience in the original after Michael escaped. Every sequel laboriously repeating this step as if it were a fashion statement. He looks like a murder hobo in this because he is one. The hood and scarf ensemble is underrated. People get mad that too much of his face is shown when almost every entry pulls off his mask, even the original!

Another spiritual connector with the first Halloween II is where “Samhain isn’t evil spirits. It’s the unconscious mind.” Zombie peers into Michael’s mind and visits a fantastical Mad Hatter’s tea party of pumpkin-headed royalty. Appeasing the spirits with sacrificial offerings to revisit the dead. The mask hangs on a crucified skeleton, a servant to the Pagan Gods of old.

This all sounds mighty pretentious. Halloween II opens with an excerpt from the Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams, and white horses frequent their shared hallucinations. Laurie spots one in her therapist’s Rorschach test and asks “Am I crazy or sane?”, she gets the response “It tells me you’re a girl who likes white horses.”

“It really could have been anything. It isn’t like that is so significant, but it’s a minor event in young Michael’s life that he has stuck in his brain that I can then tie through to Laurie. I started researching the meaning of dreams but that seems like a bunch of bullshit to me.”—Rob Zombie, writer-director.

The tagline promises family is forever. Laurie and Michael’s relationship has been significantly revamped from the first Halloween II, which similarly reveals it to Laurie in a dream but makes it clear to the audience with some bare-bones exposition. Here, the fame-hungry Loomis is “selling the sizzle, not the steak” by revealing it in his book. An already fraught Laurie reads it and is sent over the edge. Both her distress of crying “I’m not me!” and Sheriff Brackett’s desperate attempts to buffer this devastation are heartbreaking. Loomis’s agent chews him out for toying with people’s lives—the man is in Haddonfield and never once reaches out to Laurie, showing how much the good doctor has lost his way.

It does take 75 minutes before the first sincerely affecting kill. Annie goes to the bathroom, where Michael is waiting, the shutter speed slows every frame of her helplessness. Zombie fades to Laurie driving up to the house as the rumbling heartbeat scoring the scene tapers off with screams and the sick thud of a knife. The familiar cross-cutting by Garland creates an upsetting inevitability in seeing the destruction first, then flashes of Michael trashing the room. A terrified Annie is immediately replaced by a nude body painted in blood. Family is once again destroyed as Laurie is soon chased off by Michael and Sheriff Brackett returns to find his daughter dead. The Director’s Cut adds one last gut-punch—insert shots of Danielle Harris’s real childhood home footage over Brad Dourif’s devastating grief.

The climax unites the cast and, like the hospital, strands Laurie in the middle of nowhere. A far cry from the climactic Myers house. In this dark expanse, Laurie is ‘held down’ by child Michael and forced to submit to her mother. A satisfying moment when Brackett socks an intervening Loomis, who has arrived out of eventual guilt. But his psycho-babble nonsense is just that—painting himself as Michael’s surrogate father leads to an immediate gutting. A rare instance where the theatrical cut exceeds; his head practically scalped exposing his skull, opposite the meagre stomach poke in the so-called Unrated Cut.

Both endings, though entirely different, reverberate back an idea that one can be martyred and sainted in death. Don’t speak ill of the dead but put up with the ones still living. The ones burdened with so much that death seems a comfort. Laurie donning the mask after putting her brother to rest is perfectly fine for the theatrical. But it will never beat the utmost satisfaction of Rob Zombie ending his Halloween story with all three iconic characters lying dead beside each other as “Love Hurts” covered by Nan Vernon plays over their dead bodies.

That Halloween II is so brazenly authentic in any version is staggering given Zombie has been anything but quiet about the “miserable experience” with the Weinsteins. Downright refusing to do a sequel, Zombie recounted “I just wanted out of my contract because I wanted to kill myself. I had a three-picture deal, then a couple years later, they had fired twelve different directors, so I came back.” Earning the trust of franchise producer Malek Akkad, Zombie was given free rein to extricate himself from any “John Carpenter-ness.”   

Zombie has expressed pride in both films and credit to his cast and crew. But the fact that these were his first major studio releases after the low-budget House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005), and the closest his following five films came to the $15M budget was $3M, showcases his resentment towards bloodhound producers. Rumours even state that he was assured by the Weinsteins that cooperation would result in his passion project Tyrannosaurus Rex funded. A film is yet to be made. Zombie recalled a 10 a.m call, “It doesn’t look good. This thing’s a fucking disaster,” followed by the biggest Labour Day weekend until 2021. At the time, the box-office earnings of nearly $40M placed it just behind 1978’s Halloween, Halloween H20 (1998), and his own 2007 Halloween remake.

I pinpointed the audience’s knee-jerk tendencies in my Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) review, stating, “Fans regularly argue over whether the latest Halloween is the best or worst thing ever made.” A cloud that loomed over Halloween II for almost a decade before the latest trilogy managed to hit both extremes of that sentiment. Even now, people debate over which of Zombie’s Halloween films are trash and treasure. But ask if any of the earlier sequels even come close to Carpenter, and unanimously the lukewarm nostalgia from Halloween II to H20 goes out the window. Those sequels were made by the studios more than the journeyman directors or writers—products to appease the audience. Rob Zombie is a shock rockstar whose most famous song, “Dragula”, is a reference to The Munsters (1964-66) TV series, a property he would eventually adapt with his own 2022 film. His “love letters” are the most combative, audacious, esoteric, and authentic ones out there.

USA | 2009 | 115 MINUTES | 1.85:1 | COLOUR | ENGLISH

Cast & Crew

director: Rob Zombie.
writer: Rob Zombie (based on characters created by John Carpenter & Debra Hill).
starring: Malcolm McDowell, Tyler Mane, Sheri Moon Zombie, Brad Dourif, Danielle Harris & Scout Taylor-Compton.