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I stood in rapt-jawed attention in the blinding sun in front of the poster hanging at the bone-white giant multiplex in Decatur, Georgia.
My partner in crime over the last few months smiled seeing my childlike joy and said "sure, let's see that one instead".
The movie in question was Rob Zombie's re-imagining of the infamous horror franchise. The original, a late 70s production which put John Carpenter on the map, was a slasher tale about the stalking of Jamie Lee Curtis' character Laurie Strode by her brother Michael Myers, a disturbing metaphor for incest.
As for Rob Zombie, his high-octane horror rock was simultaneously imaginative and a wonderful remix of EC Comics, Alice Cooper, heavy metal and Industrial music. Having transitioned from rock and roll frontman to film director with his direction of the House of 1000 Corpses and the Devil's Rejects, both hommages to grindhouse 70s horror films, he seemed a natural to continue the series.
SPOILER ALERT
Choosing to reimagine the series from the beginning, he interestingly devotes the bulk of the film to factors leading to human monstrosity, as opposed to the results. This Mike Myers we see starts out as a chubby boy whose home life with a stripper as a mother (played by Zombie's wife) and an abusive handicapped foulmouth for a stepfather, provides fertile soil for the monstrous impulses that consume him as an adult. First dispatching his pet rats, he ends up taking pictures of these atrocities which are later discovered and used against him. Zombie imagines Myers as the hideous perfect storm of nature, nurture and neglect.
A bully gaybashing attempt is stopped by a principal, who calls Myers' mother and alerts her to the seriousness of her son's problems. Both boys are dismissed. The bullying is avenged when Myers, wearing a clown mask, beats down his tormentor with a length of wood and then hideously smashes him to death as he pleads, ineffectually, but piteously and horrifically wounded, for his life. Zombie plays this scene to chilling effect as the audience at first partially sides with Myers exacting revenge for his earlier callous treatment, which is hinted at being ongoing for years. Yet he also shows the bully, at the moment of his impending death, to be the frightened child he is and totally undeserving of his incredibly gory demise, and the audience palpably changes its mind about how it feels about the beating. There are no moral absolutes here, no true victim and no true aggressor.
The stress of the discovery of the pre-murder fight and rejection by his sister and stepfather on Hallowe'en trigger a monstrous rampage which only his mother survives (she is at work at the time) as well as his baby sister, whom even he could not bring himself to kill out of love for her.
Sentenced to live in an asylum for the criminally insane, we see his mother and Dr. Loomis, a psychiatrist assigned to him, first watch him slide into a silent world hiding behind hand-made masks, then try to reach him as he slips away from the rest of humanity, and then finally turn his own back on Myers after his mother, unable to take it when Michael attacks a nurse in a moment of inattention, shoots herself dead while tearfully watching home movies of a supposedly happier time with all of her children alive.
His only remaining friend is an ex-con security guard who gives Myers the advice to retreat inside himself, which the dangerously disturbed Myers takes to heart. Towards the end of the film Myers, having grown to a mute seven foot tall monster with prodigious strength, kills the guard and then leaves a trail of corpses in his wake. He goes to reunite with his sister after a particularly disturbing rape of a female inmate by two security guards who make the fatal mistake of repeating the suggestion the childhood bully made about his sexuality. Having escaped from his inner world of maskmaking, jolted out of it by their taunts and the rape, he turns his rage and anger outwards again.
The rest of the movie, plot-wise, is predictable. Loomis begs the police to take him seriously, Myers racks up a body count of various teengaers, and the sister ends up shooting Myers dead, the last frame of the film being her bloodstained and hysterically screaming face superimposed of her crying as a baby, while the camera fades to home movies.
I was stunned. The lights came up and I was absolutely awed. This was a post-Columbine movie, one with sympathy for the devil, and one that suggested that we are ALL complicit in the generation of monsters in our midst. For that daring choice and that point of view, I had to applaud Zombie. Also, for his visual style, raw and visceral and with many a nod to pre-"comedy horror" 1970s grindhouse films. This was a movie in which you were challenged to take more than one point of view, and shift your sympathies often.
From Loomis as a hippie psychiatrist full of psychobabble to a commercial exploitation of his most famous patient to a desperate man who sacrifices his own life to try and atone for his mishandling of his charge. From Laurie Strode being a baby to a strong woman, then a victim, then a survivor, then a banshee-wailing murderess. From Michael Myers being a lonely abused boy to a cold, murdering sociopath to literal boogeyman, then back to a tender brother trying to reconnect with his long lost sister, before trying to kill her in his rage. From the mother, just trying to keep the finances together and promising herself and everyone else that tomorrow she'll get her shit together, to hanging on to the hope that she'll be there for the only child she has left, to distraught and suicidal when she realises her life choices have in part cost her everything.
This is an ugly film. Animals are slaughtered, kids are slapped around and verbally abused. A handicapped man is taunted for his inadequacies. A teenager engages in rather pointless sex (for all intents and purposes selfishly masturbated into by her boyfriend) and is then killed by her own brother. A mentally ill woman is raped by her supposed protectors. And the image of the young bully pleading for his life, sobbing, is well enough acted that it makes you physically ill. Which means that Zombie did his job and did his job very well. This is horror in every sense of the word, which goes beyond shock or fright, but a crawling sense of dread.
But the ugliest thing I saw in that theatre was walking out of the theatre to see about ten children in the single digit ages, having been brought to an R rated film by their parents. That haunted me more than anything else. What the FUCK were they thinking.
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