Two Cents is a Cinapse original column akin to a book club for films. The Cinapse team curates the series and contribute their “two cents” using a maximum of 200-400 words. Guest contributors and comments are encouraged, as are suggestions for future picks. Join us as we share our two cents on films we love, films we are curious about, and films we believe merit some discussion. Would you like to be a guest contributor or programmer for an upcoming Two Cents entry? Simply watch along with us and/or send your pitches or 200-400 word reviews to cinapse.twocents@gmail.com.
The Pick: Halloween II (2009)
No one hates remakes as much as horror fans… or so it seems. It’s really just a vocal minority, because once you start talking to gorehounds and horror nerds, you’ll find that most of us appreciate a good remake and are willing to admit that some of them are as good as or better than the original films. This month, we’re spending spooky season with some of our favorite remakes. Each week one of us will present a remake we thing surpasses its predecessor and invite the ridicule, love, agreement, hate, or whatever comes our way.
This week, I’m wrapping us up with 2009’s Halloween II. Rather than comparing it to a single film, we decided to take it on by looking at it in the pantheon of franchise sequels. While I personally am admittedly not the biggest fan of this franchise, I tend to appreciate the outliers of the series, the unique and singular entries. Of course, that means I appreciate Halloween III: Season of the Witch a decent bit, but it’s the oft-hated sequel to Rob Zombie’s remake that really strikes me as the most interesting film in the series. Most importantly, this week we decided to tackle the best cut of the film, Zombie’s own Director’s Cut. Check out my thoughts and the thoughts of our team below…
The Team
Spencer Brickey
The hottest take I may ever have, and a hill I will fully die on, is not only is the Director’s Cut of Halloween II one of the best horror films of the aughts, it is one of the best overall horror films of all time.
Rob Zombie creates something in Halloween II that is truly transcendent, making what is essentially an anti-war film (or, more accurately, an anti-horror film) out of a Halloween sequel. Opening minutes after the events of the previous film, Halloween II immediately sets itself apart, and establishes what Zombie is looking to explore over the next 2 nihilistic hours.
We aren’t given a “2 years later” type intro, or any sort of scene redressing allowing us to ease into the new adventures of Laurie Strode & Michael Myers. Instead, we are dropped into a harrowing scene; Laurie Strode being carted through a hospital, screaming in agony, asking for her mom and hysterically repeating “am I going to die?”. We are then shown the crime scene, as a group of lost local cops wander in a daze, not knowing how to deal with such horrific sights.
Then back to Laurie, now going through the initial steps of surgery, with the wounds from her fight to survive being severe and ghastly, the calm doctors in the background discussing if she is an auto accident victim.The tone has been set. This is a horror film about the victims; about the actual horrors that our characters go through, the acute destruction, both physical and emotional, that they experience. There is no softening of their pain and trauma to get to the next “cool kill” or “grand villain moment”. We are a part of their agony, from every broken bone, to every PTSD induced night terror, to every soul shattering loss they feel as the cycle of violence begins again.
Even the “one off kills”, the quick bouts of violence that Michael sets off on once the body count begins to rise again, are brutal in an unpleasant and realistic way. People begging for their lives with their final breath, crying and shielding away from the blade as it comes crashing down. It isn’t a film that wants you to feel the morbid glee from the killer’s attacks, but instead wants you to exist with the victim, humanize them, up until the final beat of their heart.
The film’s rejection of violence as entertainment, framing it as unimaginable trauma for both the victim and their loved ones, is best represented by Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif) finding Annie (Danielle Harris). A death that, in the original Halloween II, is no more than a quick raise of a hospital sheet and a downward gaze of sadness. Here, Zombie creates what might be one of the most emotionally harrowing moments in horror cinema. The way Dourif breaks down, with no sort of reservation or restraint, just complete emotional vulnerability, like an exposed nerve, is gut wrenching.
The true thesis of the film, though, is demonstrated in the moments directly after that, as Brackett slips into catatonia. As the camera pans between his officers lifting him away, and the bloodied, naked dead body of his daughter, we are shown clips of Annie (Harris) as a child; home movies of a child that had her whole life ahead of her. Annie wasn’t just another body in Michael’s wake, another nameless naked woman that satisfied our lust for both flesh and blood; she was a human being, with a history, with people who loved her.
I’m going to wrap here, because I could write a book on my love for this film (and maybe one day I will) but I’ll end my thoughts with this; it’s been about two years since I last sat and watched this, and in that time, I had my first child. In a split second, at the millisecond of his birth, I fully understood the intense type of love that comes with being a parent. As Brackett was being pulled away from his daughter, and we saw those flashes of the child Annie was, the way Brackett still saw her in his head, I broke into a deep wailing sob, an uncontrollable explosion of empathetic sorrow I immediately felt deep in my bones, that took me several minutes to recover from.
I can’t think of another film that hit me so hard that I instinctually answered with an intensely vulnerable emotional outpouring. Halloween II did that to me.
Matthew Jackson
When I think of Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, I think of its sheer relentlessness, even compared to Zombie’s first brutal remake. It’s a movie that never stops, whether Michael is rampaging through a hospital or Laurie Strode is simply spiraling through visions of fate intervening in her life, whether she likes it or not.
And yet the film, particularly in the superior Director’s Cut, also leaves a lot of room to breathe. It’s not just about Michael returning to wreak havoc on Haddonfield again, it’s also about Laurie’s slow descent into her own breed of darkness, as she walks on a knife’s edge between the trauma she suffered and the trauma she might yet inflict on others. Laurie’s life is meant to be quiet, and indeed Zombie gives us plenty of moments to absorb what she’s going through, how it’s changing her, but there is a relentlessness to the quiet too. With this film, Zombie attempted to create an environment in which a monster in some form, even if it emerged in a dream sequence, was lurking around every corner, and he succeeded.
This is still Zombie’s best film, and I say that as a fan of his work, so this is not damning with faint praise. I understand longtime franchise fans who don’t feel this is “their” Halloween, but honestly, if we’re going to go through the trouble of letting another filmmaker remake a classic in their own image, I want this kind of ambition. This is the clearest, most luxurious vision of terror Rob Zombie has ever given us, and it only gets better with age.
Julian Singleton
In any long-running film series, I’m easily drawn to the big swings—and the more polarizing the umpteenth entry in a franchise is, the more eager I am to see it. I can’t help but blame such terrible joy on Rob Zombie’s Halloween being my first brush with Michael Myers.
Even when I can’t stand his movies, I’m riveted by Zombie’s go-for-broke bravado. I was repulsed by House of 1000 Corpses—only to rave over The Devil’s Rejects. Few directors aim so high while wallowing so comfortably in the charnel pile. His repulsive, gory endurance tests reach for such paradoxically primally felt emotion, far beyond the exploitation schlock Zombie’s often accused of, and far more honest than many of his torture-porn-era peers.
Zombie’s Halloween couldn’t be further from Carpenter’s classic, which I came to love years later. However, it was Zombie’s audacity that not only birthed my love for Halloween, but also sharpened my own love for David Gordon Green’s equally polarizing legacy trilogy. What hooked me wasn’t just the brutality, but the way Zombie takes Michael’s rampage, and its aftermath for Laurie Strode and an ever-widening circle of victims, with devastating seriousness.
Like the original sequel, Halloween II drops us into the harrowing, hospital-bound aftermath of Laurie’s escape from Michael—bathed in the pulse-pounding, color-drained fluorescence of his grindhouse aesthetic. But, much like Lynch’s Fire Walk With Me, Zombie lures viewers in with the familiar only to spring a cinematic bear trap. Michael may be on the warpath again, but for all its violence, Zombie’s far less interested in treating Halloween II like the ninth sequel to a slasher franchise. Instead, it’s a film obsessed with the grim reality that follows such bloodthirsty spectacle.
Zombie pivots to Laurie’s fragile attempts to outrun the trauma of Haddonfield—and the way that single night has poisoned every bond she has left. Annie’s survival and halting return to normalcy turn their friendship into a cruel benchmark Laurie can’t meet. Dr. Loomis, desperate to dodge culpability in failing both Michael and Laurie, turns their pain into fodder for another egocentric book. And Michael, haunted by visions of his mother, clings to the delusion that reuniting with Laurie will somehow salve his own fractured psyche.
Some of the film’s best moments take a bitter breath, pretending for just a heartbeat that life can move on: Laurie at a barn party in full Rocky Horror regalia, or slinging vinyl at the record shop. Zombie peppers these interludes with winking nods to slasher history, like casting Black Christmas’ Margot Kidder as Laurie’s world-weary, impossibly patient therapist. His love of every single character actor imaginable is also on full display: welcome faces include Richard Brake, Mary Birdsong, Daniel Roebuck, Bill Fagerbakke, and grandaddy of them all Brad Dourif, who brings such a hardbitten, howling empathy to Sheriff Brackett.
But it’s the trio of Scout Taylor-Compton, Malcolm McDowell, and Tyler Mane—cornered in the film’s climactic shed—that drives the blade into Halloween II’s bleeding heart.It’s a nexus point of pain long codified by decades of horror pop culture—but finally given the space to come clean about their ugly-as-fuck flaws and strike killing blows at one another. The scene is a full-on sensory assault: screams and seizures drowned beneath relentless helicopter rotors and blinding searchlights. It’s a viscerally chaotic flashpoint no other Halloween film dares to approach, an unfiltered glimpse into what Myers’ victims must be feeling as the Boogeyman inevitably closes in. But it’s also an unbelievably tragic scene, crystallizing how vain it was for these three to move on from one another. This is how it has to be.
Laurie is the axis around which the Halloween universe turns, and every timeline gives her some version of closure. In H20, she claims revenge; in the original sequel and Halloween Ends, there’s a glimmer of light at the end of the tunnel. But it’s Zombie’s Halloween II that delivers a grisly ending that’s impossible to shake.
For Zombie, that light is a mirage, a trick of the ouroboros. Despite all of a final girl’s efforts to finally move on, there’s no escaping the machinery of a slasher film, especially one that fandom keeps resurrecting time and time again. In this bleak, endless loop of violence, we’ve brought Laurie to her fate.
It isn’t to defeat Michael Myers. It’s to become him.
Love Hurts.
Justin Harlan
I have been given much grief – both online and offline – for not caring much for the Halloween franchise. I think the original is pretty good, but it’s not anywhere near my top 5 Carpenter films – and, the only subsequent films I care much for are Rob Zombie’s films and Season of the Witch (I do have a small soft spot for H20, but I’m pretty sure that’s just nostalgia from seeing it in theaters in my teen years). Of all of the films in the series, the original included, I have always argued that Zombie’s Halloween II is the most interesting.
Most of the reasons why I feel this way have already been summarized above by others on the team, but I want to highlight a couple things. First, it’s a window into Zombie’s style and represents a unique bridge period between his trailer park aesthetic of the first couple of his directorial efforts and the lush visuals of Lords of Salem. In a lot of ways, it represents Zombie as a filmmaker better than any other film because it straddles both aesthetics and walks that tightrope very successfully.
Second, I simply love the weird enigmatic and esoteric elements that Zombie weaves into this story. In part, I love that these elements add layers of meaning and force the viewer to look deeper. Yet, I mostly love them as a “fuck you” to the studio (read up on the making of this film if you get the chance).
The long and short of it, I am not a fan of every Rob Zombie film, but I am certainly a defender of his. He doesn’t deserve the hate he gets and has made several really solid and interesting genre films. This is among my faves of his… and is easily one of the best sequels in the entire Halloween franchise.
Next Up: Redford Retrospective
For the rest of the year, we are celebrate a true cinematic giant, the late great Robert Redford. Upon his death, we all realized that we have a variety or Redford blindspots in our cinematic journeys – so there is no better time than now. Join us in celebrating a great American actor and filmmaker who has left us so many incredible pieces of art to remember him by.
