If it’s August, it must be Halloween, right? Well, at least that’s the tradition now, since The Weinstein Company avoids October and Saw’s dominance. They got Rob Zombie to make another Halloween for them, but this one is much more Rob Zombie than John Carpenter.
Crave Online: Why do you think people enjoy horror movies?
Rob Zombie: That’s funny. That was the last question they just asked me in the other room. And I didn’t really have a good answer. I mean for me its just movies period, not necessarily horror movies, you know. I just like dark, violent material. I don’t know why. It’s funny because I’m writing this thing about Clockwork Orange for The DGA Magazine and I was like doing some research and I realized, wow Roger Ebert gave this movie a horrible review back in 1972, and everything he said, why he hated it is exactly why I like it. So I don’t know. Everything in life is weird and f*cked up, so people like to see everything weird and f*cked up, I guess. I don’t know.
Crave Online: Do you remember as a kid, what were you scared of at the time?
Rob Zombie: Yeah, you know weird things are scary when you are a kid. I think probably the scariest thing, as stupid as it kind of sounds, was the Wizard of Oz and the flying monkeys and the witch. I remember seeing that when I was really little. I still think it’s freaky. It seemed really f*cked up.
Crave Online: And Willy Wonka?
Rob Zombie: Yeah, those too. Yeah I mean you would watch Frankenstein and it wouldn’t seem scary and somehow the Wizard of Oz was a freak show.
Crave Online: You were pretty rushed on Halloween II. Is there a longer director’s cut or is this still your vision?
Rob Zombie: Except for Devil’s Rejects I feel that everything in some how has been compromised in some way by scheduling. Because the Devil’s Rejects was the only movie I ever made that had no release date, we worked on it and worked on it until we got it right. Or at least we felt like we got it right and we looked at it and said there is nothing we want to change, there’s nothing else I want to do. Whereas I have never had that luxury since and I don’t know what would be different but obviously, the thing is editing is a crucial time and when you sort of get rushed through that process you’re never 100% sure that you’ve got exactly the perfect take of the actor at every moment because there is so much footage to go through, its so time consuming. You do your best to do with the time you have so as far as the director’s cut, there is another version of the movie that’s very, very different. That will probably be the director’s cut. There was two ways that we could cut the movie. The way we cut it was with the theatrical, so like Laurie Strode’s character is sort of holding it together, getting her life together, and it starts spiraling downward. But in the other version, she is an incredible mess and gets worse. I mean, she never has any good moments, she’s just messed up, she’s lashing out at everybody, she’s horrible. She’s just messed up on drugs, she’s just completely spun out throughout the whole movie, which makes her a really challenging movie to watch and I feel like I don’t know if fans could embrace so much darkness.
Crave Online: Is there still a white horse motif in that version?
Rob Zombie: Yeah everything in that version is the same except for her. Her scenes, these other scenes with her. Mostly Annie, her relationship with Annie is horrible and they are at each other’s throats through the whole movie, which they are not in the theatrical movie.
Crave Online: There was a trailer that suggested some of that right?
Rob Zombie: Maybe. I can’t remember, the trailer that got leaked, I remember really, really liking. Loving it when I saw it but I haven’t seen it in a long time so I can’t remember what’s in it and every time I would want to watch it online, it was loading so slow, I would give up on it so I cant really remember what’s in that trailer.
Crave Online: What was the inspiration for the white horse motif?
Rob Zombie: I mean the white horse thing, I was just trying to find some significant thing that would be a through line that could have been anything. It’s not like that’s so significant. It was just a minor event from young Michael’s life that he has stuck in his brain that I could then tie through to Laurie and that just seemed, a white horse is such a great visual image and then when I started researching the sort of meaning of dream type books, even though it seems like a load of bullsh*t to me, they all sort of really had a significance with the white horse. We kind of put in the definition in the beginning of the movie so it seemed like the perfect sort of childlike image to carry through.
Crave Online: Did you ever imagine when you saw the original Halloween that you would be doing them?
Rob Zombie: I had no idea. I never thought that in a million years. I didn’t even think that a couple years ago.
Crave Online: So what has it been like working on it?
Rob Zombie: I mean, it was pretty strange because when I first had the meeting about the movie and they brought it up, they didn’t really bring up a remake. They were talking about the sequel, a prequel whatever. They weren’t really sure and I didn’t really have any interest in carrying on any of the story lines. I had lost interest in anything with Halloween after the first movie. That was really the only one I liked. I hadn’t really thought about it and I never really thought about remaking somebody else’s material. It seemed a little weird but then I went back and watched the first movie again with that in mind and kind of came up with that idea of remaking it and thought a lot of the story points are pretty vague. If you just look at the first film, we don’t know anything about Michael Myers, we don’t know anything about Judith. We don’t even know if the two people that come up to him on the sidewalk after he kills Judith are even his parents. You don’t know anything. I mean they don’t tell you anything. People assume it all but you don’t know for sure. You don’t know much about Dr. Loomis even. So I thought that another thing is that they talk a lot about what happened, but they never show it. Oh, he was locked away for this long, he was this and that. There is a lot there that you can expand upon and that’s when I kind of got involved with it.
Crave Online: So did the hospital sequence actually happen or is that just Laurie’s dream?
Rob Zombie: That’s just a dream.
Crave Online: Is this more of a Rob Zombie movie than your first Halloween?
Rob Zombie: Yeah. Well, this film to me is more of a logical follow up to the Devil’s Rejects. Whereas Halloween, the first one, seemed like a weird side step that I think happened because it was someone else’s material. It kind of messed with me. Like, it made the first half of the movie more my thing and the second half I felt I should bring in more John Carpenter beats because that is what people are expecting. But as soon as I started doing that, I don’t think I had quite the enthusiasm for the film that I did when it was new stuff because the fun of it is creating your world. When you’re going oh, its Annie Bracketand Lynda and Laurie and it’s just someone else’s characters. That’s why in this movie I tried to flip them all upside down and make them my characters.
