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Halloween (2007)

A quiet Haddonfield-style street at dusk, a lit jack-o'-lantern on a porch and a long shadow across a leaf-covered lawn.

Halloween (2007) is a 2007 American slasher film written, directed and produced by Rob Zombie — a remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) that works as part prequel, part remake, spending its first half inside the childhood of Michael Myers before restaging the night he came home. It is the ninth film in the Halloween franchise and the first of Zombie’s two entries, followed by Halloween II (2009). Where Carpenter’s Michael was an unexplained shape, Zombie’s is a case history: an abused, bullied ten-year-old from a broken Haddonfield home, followed through fifteen silent years in Smith’s Grove Sanitarium and out the other side as a six-foot-eight killer played by Tyler Mane. That single choice — explain Michael or leave him a mystery — split critics and audiences on release and still defines the film’s reputation. Commercially there was no split at all: on a $15 million budget it grossed $80.5 million worldwide, the biggest opening Labor Day weekend in box-office history at the time, and the highest-grossing Halloween film ever in unadjusted dollars until Halloween (2018) passed it a decade later.

At a glance

  • Director: Rob Zombie
  • Written by: Rob Zombie, based on Halloween by John Carpenter and Debra Hill
  • Produced by: Malek Akkad, Andy Gould, Rob Zombie
  • Starring: Malcolm McDowell, Scout Taylor-Compton, Tyler Mane, Daeg Faerch, Sheri Moon Zombie, Danielle Harris, Brad Dourif
  • Cinematography: Phil Parmet
  • Music: Tyler Bates, incorporating John Carpenter’s themes
  • Production companies: Dimension Films, Nightfall Productions, Spectacle Entertainment Group, Trancas International Films
  • Release date: August 31, 2007
  • Running time: 109 minutes (theatrical cut); 121 minutes (unrated director’s cut)
  • Budget: $15 million
  • Box office: $80.5 million worldwide
  • Rating: R

Plot

Haddonfield, Illinois, Halloween 1990. Ten-year-old Michael Myers lives in a house that is already a horror story: his mother Deborah dances at the Rabbit in Red Lounge, her boyfriend Ronnie White is abusive, his older sister Judith ignores him, and the only warmth in his life is his baby sister Angel, whom he calls “Boo.” Michael tortures and kills animals; when the school finds a dead cat and photographs of mutilated pets in his bag, child psychologist Dr. Samuel Loomis is called in. On Halloween day, Michael follows his school bully, Wesley Rhoades, into the woods and beats him to death with a branch. That night, left home while Deborah works, he kills Ronnie, Judith’s boyfriend Steve, and Judith herself — sparing only baby Angel, whom he is cradling on the porch when the police arrive. After one of the longest trials in state history, he is convicted of first-degree murder and committed to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium under Loomis’s care.

At first Michael cooperates and claims no memory of the murders, and Deborah visits faithfully. Then he withdraws — into silence, and into the papier-mâché masks he makes obsessively, his way of hiding from the world. During one of Deborah’s visits he kills a nurse; Deborah goes home and shoots herself. For the next fifteen years Michael does not speak a word. He only makes masks. Loomis, unable to reach him, closes the case and leaves.

Fifteen years later, the adult Michael is being prepared for transfer to a maximum-security facility when he breaks loose, slaughtering the guards and the one kind orderly, Ismael Cruz, who had befriended him. He kills a trucker for his coveralls, returns to the abandoned Myers house, and digs out the kitchen knife and the Halloween mask he hid under the floorboards as a boy. He also tears his sister Judith’s tombstone out of the cemetery — a desecration the caretaker discovers alongside a visiting Loomis, who understands at once where Michael is going: after “Boo.”

Laurie Strode is Angel Myers. Adopted by Mason and Cynthia Strode after Deborah’s death, she knows nothing of it; Loomis reveals the secret to Sheriff Lee Brackett on the road into town. Laurie spends Halloween babysitting Tommy Doyle with her friends Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok — and Michael works through her world in order. Lynda and her boyfriend Bob die at the abandoned Myers house, Bob pinned to the wall, Lynda strangled while Michael wears a sheet-ghost disguise copied from 1978. Mason and Cynthia Strode are killed in their own home. Annie’s boyfriend Paul dies at the Wallace house, and Annie herself is attacked and left badly wounded — but alive. Laurie finds her, runs, and is dragged to the Myers house, where she wakes in the cellar beside Lynda’s body, arranged with Judith’s stolen tombstone.

Then Michael does something no version of him has done before: he kneels, drops his knife, takes off his mask, and shows Laurie a photograph of himself as a boy holding her as a baby — his only way of telling her she is his sister. She doesn’t understand. She stabs him, escapes, and falls into the empty swimming pool. Loomis arrives and shoots Michael three times; walking Laurie out, he answers her shaken question — “Was that the Boogeyman?” — with “As a matter of fact, I do believe it was.” Michael revives, drags Laurie back, and crushes Loomis’s skull when the doctor pleads that this is his fault, not hers. Laurie flees upstairs with Loomis’s gun; cornered on the balcony, she is charged, and both of them crash through the doors to the ground. She wakes on top of the unconscious Michael, takes the gun — and as his hand grabs her wrist, it fires into his face. The film ends on a home movie of young Michael holding baby Angel, and on Laurie’s screams as the sirens close in.

Loomis, left for dead, survives — a fact the sequel depends on. Annie survives too. Neither outcome is a spoiler the film hides; both are worth stating plainly, because summaries of this film get them wrong constantly.

The other versions

Two more cuts of this film exist, and they are routinely confused with each other. The workprint — the June 2007 test-screening cut, leaked online four days before the theatrical release — has a different escape (Michael kills two orderlies who bring a female inmate into his cell to rape her, after one of them handles his masks) and a different ending: Loomis talks Michael into releasing Laurie, and the police shoot Michael dead as Loomis protests. Test screenings killed that ending; it survives as an alternate-ending extra on the DVD. The unrated director’s cut (121 minutes, released on DVD in December 2007) restores the workprint’s escape scene but keeps the theatrical ending. Ismael Cruz’s death exists only in the theatrical cut — one more reason the versions are not interchangeable.

Production

After Halloween: Resurrection (2002) and the death of series founder Moustapha Akkad in the 2005 Amman bombings, his son Malek Akkad took the franchise in a new direction with Dimension Films. On June 4, 2006, Dimension announced that Rob Zombie would write, direct and produce the next Halloween, with Akkad and Andy Gould also producing. Before the announcement went public, Zombie called John Carpenter out of respect; Carpenter’s only request was that Zombie “make it his own.” Zombie’s design brief for the film was a hybrid: an original prequel covering Michael’s childhood and sanitarium years, flowing into a reworking of the 1978 film’s night. His stated reasoning was that Michael — like Freddy, Jason and Pinhead — had become so familiar to audiences that he had stopped being frightening; the backstory would make him frightening again, and the mask would get an origin instead of being a random hardware-store theft.

Casting landed in December 2006: Daeg Faerch as the ten-year-old Michael (announced December 19), Malcolm McDowell as Loomis (December 22) and Tyler Mane as the adult Michael (December 24). Zombie wrote Michael for Mane, his Devil’s Rejects alumnus — “Look, I wrote it for you. You’ve got to do this role,” as Mane tells it. At six foot eight, Mane is by far the tallest actor to play Michael, and the casting was the reinvention in physical form: not an average-sized shadow but a hulking, brute-force giant. He prepared by watching seven of the eight earlier films back to back and has said that acting through the mask meant acting only with his eyes. McDowell, for his part, wanted a Loomis with “a tremendous ego” — a man who could turn his failed patient into a book. Scout Taylor-Compton was Zombie’s first choice for Laurie despite a long audition process. The wider cast is stacked with genre veterans — Brad Dourif as Sheriff Brackett, Danielle Harris as Annie, Danny Trejo, Udo Kier, Ken Foree, Sid Haig, Dee Wallace, Bill Moseley — several of them Zombie repertory players.

Filming began January 29, 2007, and Haddonfield was once again South Pasadena, California — the same town as the 1978 original, with the Myers house at 1110 Glendon Way, a few blocks from Carpenter’s. Smith’s Grove was played by the VA Medical Center in North Hills. The mask was designed and sculpted by Wayne Toth, Zombie’s effects artist since House of 1000 Corpses, working from a lifecast of Mane: deliberately the 1978 shape, but aged — cracked, rotting, decomposing, as if the mask Michael hid as a boy had sat deteriorating for fifteen years, because in the film’s logic that is exactly what happened. For the score, Tyler Bates re-recorded Carpenter’s themes and played them, in Zombie’s words, “pretty straight” on period-style synths rather than modernising them: “We eventually used all the classic stuff… We wanted it to sound authentic.”

Release

The film’s release began with a leak: about four days before opening, the workprint appeared on BitTorrent sites. Zombie stated publicly that the leaked version was an older cut, unlike the film about to be released, and trade coverage speculated the piracy would cut into the box office as it was believed to have done for Hostel: Part II that summer. It did not. Released August 31, 2007 in 3,472 theatres — the widest release of any Halloween film to that date — it opened at number one, took $10.9 million on its first day, and made $30.6 million over the four-day Labor Day weekend: the biggest Labor Day opening in history at the time, a record that stood for fourteen years, until Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings in 2021. It finished with $58.3 million domestic and $80.5 million worldwide. The DVD followed on December 18, 2007, in theatrical and unrated director’s-cut editions; a three-disc collector’s edition in October 2008 added Zombie’s four-and-a-half-hour making-of documentary.

Reception

The numbers were split down the middle — Rotten Tomatoes 28%, Metacritic 47, a CinemaScore of B− — and so were the reviews, mostly along one line: the prequel half. Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle felt Zombie had put his own spin on the material while paying tribute, and found the child Michael almost sympathetic, though the last third slipped into slasher montage. Nathan Lee in The Village Voice thought there was too much sympathy but that the film succeeded in “deepening Carpenter’s vision without rooting out its fear.” The BBC’s Jamie Russell called the expanded backstory “surprisingly effective” and McDowell perfectly cast, while missing the original’s supernatural dread. Against them, Jack Mathews gave it one and a half stars in the New York Daily News for having no tension, Variety‘s Dennis Harvey found it failed on suspense, and The Hollywood Reporter‘s Frank Scheck judged that graphic violence and nudity had been substituted for Carpenter’s building suspense. Audiences eventually had their own say: the film won the Rondo Hatton Classic Horror Award for Best Film of 2007 and the 2008 Scream Award for Best Remake.

Legacy

Everything written about this film since 2007 comes back to the same argument: whether explaining Michael Myers is the remake’s one bold idea or its fatal one. Carpenter himself, having asked Zombie to make it his own, said by 2016 that the backstory “took away the mystique” — “He’s supposed to be a force of nature. He’s supposed to be almost supernatural” — while also making clear he and Zombie were on good terms. Quentin Tarantino has said he disliked the film on first viewing and grew to appreciate it, for Danielle Harris’s and Daeg Faerch’s performances and for what he called Zombie’s Sam Peckinpah aesthetic. What is not argued about is the commercial record: this remains the biggest-grossing film of Rob Zombie’s career, and for eleven years it was the biggest Halloween of all. Zombie returned once, for Halloween II (2009), which abandoned the remake template almost entirely — and the argument started all over again.

Trivia

  • Danielle Harris plays Annie Brackett — nineteen years after playing Jamie Lloyd, Michael’s niece, in Halloween 4 (1988) and Halloween 5 (1989). She is the only actor to appear in both the original series and Zombie’s remake continuity.
  • Zombie originally intended adult Michael to speak exactly once, in the finale, calling Laurie “Boo.” He dropped the line, judging that the photograph said it and that speech would demystify the character — a notable restraint in a film accused of demystifying him at length.
  • Unlike Carpenter’s Michael, who steals a car and drives, Zombie’s Michael cannot drive and travels on foot and by stolen truck — a deliberate change Zombie discussed during production.
  • Young Michael’s masks are papier-mâché, made by Michael himself at Smith’s Grove around the walls of his room; the adult mask is the same one he wore and hid on the night of the murders, retrieved fifteen years later.
  • PETA’s vice president Dan Mathews sent Zombie a public thank-you letter on the film’s release, reading the young Michael’s cruelty to animals as a warning-sign message about real-world violence.

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