Zombie/Faulkner – Gwen Hilton

October 31, 2024

Rob Zombie’s films are not well loved in horror or larger film scenes outside of small and vocal parts of the internet, of which I am to some degree a member. Roger Moore’s review of Halloween II that appeared in the Chicago Tribune in August of 2009 lambasted the film, director, and his wife’s performance and casting. He calls Rob Zombie a “sell-out” with a “made up name, a cult following and a wife who can’t act.” He calls the film “artsy-fartsy” and “pretentious” with “capital “S” symbolism and zero characterization or suspense.” 
        Matt Zoller Seitz, now the Roger Ebert website editor, wrote in his 2007 New York Times review of the first Rob Zombie Halloween remake that the film operates as a split sociological case study and slasher that has “sympathy for the Devil, but not enough.” Zoller Seitz didn’t have the entire two act saga to watch at the time, nor did he have the work presented without studio interference. Zoller Seitz describes Michael Myers’ upbringing as “Dickensian” in its squalor. He has more praise for the first film than Moore has for the second, stating that “the case study part of the film re-establishes Mr. Zombie’s status as Modern American horror’s most eccentric and surprising filmmaker.”
        Both critics acknowledge Zombie’s own intent to be like Carpenter or Argento and also mention De Palma as one of his potential influences or an analogue. They claim Zombie does not rise to the level of these directors and Moore recommends Mr. Zombie watch a Hitchcock film before trying to take on the psychological mind.
        I watched the unrated director’s cuts of both films on DVD two years in a row in one sitting. I never saw the films in theaters. I was a child. I did not see the films at home. When I was a child horror films scared the shit out of me. I caught part of one of the films on Spike TV. I turned it off. My childhood recollection of Rob Zombie’s career is the House of 1000 Corpses poster scaring me at Haunted Trails and cool ostensibly sexy friend’s older siblings with girlfriends or boyfriends thinking he was cool. 
        John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) is the story of a faceless killer credited as The Shape that is unstoppable, always inching closer, and supernatural in power, grace, and strength. Michael Myers killed his family and became a specter. Halloween II (1981) picks up immediately after the original and reveals Michael as Laurie Strode’s sibling being stalked by the Shape, a once family member now specter looking to finish the job. Rob Zombie’s Halloween is made with the existing knowledge that Laurie is Michael’s sister. This lore cementing truth is acknowledged in the bloody introduction. John Carpenter helped to establish the slasher with the Boogeyman, the Shape. Critics and viewers alike disavowed the humanization of Michael by Rob Zombie. Many still do. Zoller Seitz was right to ascribe literary aspiration onto Zombie’s depiction, but Dickens is not the source. Later in his review, Zoller Seitz writes that Mr. Zombie is “unusually at ease among white, working class characters who drawl, curse, and like their fun loud.” Rob Zombie’s Halloween Saga fits squarely into Faulknerian tradition, presenting an expressive and painterly psychology of the mind not only of Michael Myers, but his mother- Deborah, Laurie Strode, and even the father figures that represent the state who fail their community and families. Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield, Illinois where history and memory are not past, and past is understood as it really is to occupy its own literal emotional and physical space. He comes back to reckon with the impotence, corruption, and decline of his family that in many ways was shaped by his own hand.
        Zombie’s Halloween opens with the Columbo cold open of our once villain now antihero setting up and committing his immortalizing first act. Michael kills a small animal at home and greets his family before school. His family harasses him. At school, Michael is bullied by Megan Trainor’s incredibly lucky husband Daryl Sabara, better known at the time as Juni from Spy Kids. This is one of his first steps into roles that bridge the threshold of teen movies and serious adult roles. I don’t know if I’ve seen him in many films beyond Machete or maybe Machete Kills. This performance ends with him getting beat to death with a log by Michael as the camera spins around dying fall tree branches. Michael is not wearing a mask when he kills Juni. In our first killing we experience the Faulknerian grapple with nature. The shots cut between Juni begging, Michael blank faced, and then the beating is a set of extreme close-ups of wood and blood jetting slightly in low arcs. By the end, the trees dominate the killing. The most brutal moments are only felt, not observed. Decay lingers. Grey skies. A nature unconcerned with the violence of the world it observes and facilitates. When William Faulkner wrote As I Lay Dying he said it was a book about people subjected to natural occurrences like flood and fire. People are driven mad by fire, lack of sleep, flood, stench of rotting corpses, and their own family that can’t keep tethered. 
        When Michael commits his first killing, Juni begs. This killing is reminiscent of Addie’s chapter in As I Lay Dying. Private selfish logics, lifetimes of hate, a lifetime of underestimation culminates for Addie in the desire to whip her children until they beg. For Michael, it’s the beating until begging and then execution of his bully. He is no one and then he is an emerging myth, already speaking from beyond. 
        Before Michael left for school he was harassed by his mother’s abusive live-in boyfriend at the dinner table after he complained about her and her family as she packs to work at the strip club. Michael’s mother, Deborah, played by Sheri Moon Zombie, is self sacrificing to the end in her role. When she is at work while Michael finishes his spree killing the song “Love Hurts” by Nazareth plays over shots of her dancing at the club and then taking a client for outside sex work. Michael looks forlorn with his little sister, the soon to be Laurie Strode, on his lap. Before that, Michael’s mother is made to listen to her boyfriend saying “[Michael’s] probably a queer, grow up to cut his dick and balls off and change his name to Michele.” Michael slits the throat of the drunk live-in boyfriend. Michael kills his older sister after she has sex. He puts on the mask to do this. Michael looks at the baby, Laurie, and says “Happy Halloween.” This can be a play on trick or treat, happy Halloween echoing something like Merry Christmas, the first of the holiday greetings. Michael gives a happy Halloween to Laurie freeing her from the family that destroyed him. This is not dissimilar to the attempted goal of the barn burning in As I Lay Dying. It isn’t sane, just an expression of someone at their wits’ end. It’s something done to help a sister. The “treat” is a trick ultimately because Laurie and Michael’s lives are tied by his plan to kill her. This may be a twist on Caddy and Quentin’s suicide pact. The wordless relationship that develops between Michael and Laurie is also similar to that between Dewey Dell and Darl.
        Before Michael is a mute killer with an interior that is experienced and cannot be expressed he is described as an impotent man and a homosexual, in this instance explicitly a transsexual. In Zombie’s Halloween II, he is called a “fagtard” during his introduction, another combination of perceived aberrant sexual behavior and disability, not unlike the hostility hurled at Benjy or Darl or Quentin. Here we have Michael as Benjy. Carpenter’s Halloween was criticized in its own time for being another standout slasher linking sex and danger. Carpenter claimed he depicted teenagers acting in normal ways. Benjy is castrated by his family at the first sign of sexual maturity. His castration stands as the symbol of the eventual failing and impotence of the entire line of men in the Compson family. Michael’s return home to Haddonfield to kill the last of his family is the most literal manifestation of the Faulknerian multigenerational destitution. 
        Zoller Seitz claims that the mishmash of case study and slasher is a failed attempt and doesn’t add up to a conclusive whole. If we can accept that genre films are made with expectations of content in mind we can abstract the deeply entertaining killings into something beyond just horror movie tension and release, and plot movement. Who is getting killed and why- with intent or not- will ultimately betray something beyond the text. 
        Michael’s childhood under psychiatric observation and his visits with his haunted, loving, and forgiving mother are explored next. Malcolm McDowell plays the legendary Dr. Samuel Loomis, a heroic if flawed character in the first installment that is fully lampooned and lambasted in the second. Loomis is given the lines that speak on Zombie’s intent to make an explicitly psychological and psychiatric horror film. Loomis’ voiceover narration is like a class presentation or a sales pitch informing us that “to the untrained eye there’s nothing visually abnormal” about Michael. Child Michael is seen in the psychiatric unit getting obsessed with making masks and slowly going mute. He receives unconditional support from only one character beyond his mother. An employee at the prison played by Danny Trejo fills the role of nonjudgmental unconditional love provider that cannot be given by family like Dilsey for Benjy. He tells Michael to “Learn to live inside your head. There’s no walls that can stop you there.” 
        Here we have the Faulknerian perspective acknowledged. In its crudity and brilliance there are no walls inside the mind of Faulkner’s characters. Sentences run on for pages without end. Past collides with present, smell to smell, spoken line interrupted with memory of monologue interrupted with spoken line again. Places from the past and the Morrison-like rememory of walking into those ghosts again dominate the film and Faulkner’s writing. In Faulkner’s South, mind, and writing, and the entire Halloween franchise’s Haddonfield the past is not something that has only happened. It is right now in tandem with the present. It is real like the present on the same ground. It is spectral and immediate. The past does not disappear once it is past. It is always happening again and again in stasis. It is reverberating into the now changing how the now unfolds.
        This combination internal external perspective is given to Michael, Deborah, and Laurie across the two films. After witnessing her son murdering a woman nurse Michael’s mother goes home and commits suicide with a pistol while watching a projected oversaturated super 8 or 16 mm film of her memories with her kids. These images play over the credits as well. The oversaturated past bleeding into the present, dominating the present, overwhelming a present ending in suicide is at home in Faulkner’s world. The scene is another of Mr. Zombie’s additions. Michael’s interiority can only be seen through the literal clinical lens of McDowell’s Loomis, the facility, and the combined police and psychiatric response to the adult killing spree in Halloween. In Halloween II when Rob Zombie is given the ability to move beyond partial remake Michael’s full psyche is explored. The shared perspectives reflect the narrative form and thrust of Faulkner’s major works like As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, and Absalom, Absalom!. The cadence is a rhythm of repetitions, perspective shifts that push forward endlessly and often with an awareness that the push hurts, and a constant recall lurking in shadows and behind your own eyeballs.
        As a mute adult in a combination jail and psychiatric facility, Michael is made to watch the rape of another resident by the staff of the jail. This is one of the many story additions and choices made by Zombie not present in the original text and it reflects Benjy watching the manhandling and attempted rape of Caddy in the barn at night. He is made to watch, mocked for his inability to respond, and treated as impotent by those who know him. Michael kills the rapists. He does not speak for the rest of the series outside of as a childghost to his mother. These are spectral conversations only visible to Michael and Laurie. Michael kills the innocent and helpful Danny Trejo after a fifteen year relationship, who is named Ishmael in the film, rejecting love and redemption. Ishmael is a wink at the literary aspirations of Zombie’s filmmaking, something acknowledged if only in a snide backhanded fashion during the film’s initial release. Zombie’s lack of hesitance to kill the even tempered survivor of the Pequod’s disaster is his own confident slash at those who can’t accept his ability to balance what is seen as base southern white culture and high art.
        After Michael leaves the hospital we are presented with a largely by the numbers remake of Halloween, “Don’t Fear the Reaper” needle drop and all. Laurie’s friends taunt Michael asking if he’s a freak looking for young stuff, a revamp of the Dilsey golfball memory. Michael kills a man who cums before his woman. The impotence and sullied sexuality theme ringing through both. The first film is otherwise unremarkable until Laurie is in a hole next to a gravestone with Michael. They try to communicate. Laurie says she wants to help him but doesn’t know how. This is another moment of the near wordless, or words ruining what is communicated style relationship between Dewey Dell and Darl. Laurie stabs Michael in this scene, echoing the betrayal that is lumped onto Dewey in alerting people to the source of the barn burning. Michael and Laurie are in mud on the brink of death, same as the Bundrens’ journey in As I Lay Dying.
        After Laurie escapes, she is chased to an almost abandoned home. In that home Michael stalks her and literally breaks the walls and the home itself down. This is another literal manifestation of Faulkner’s sagas of deteriorating families. 
        Michael is finally shot down by Loomis. Loomis shoots Michael five or six times. Like Darl, he is rendered non threatening with ineffective violence from the psychiatric state. Laurie’s psychiatric experience becomes the focus and throughline of Halloween II. Her experience echoes Michael’s experience. Michael repeats acts of violence leaving his surviving family to echo his mistakes and live inside the scars of generational traumas. His acts create living ghosts in the survivors like those felt in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom!.
        Halloween II opens with an exceptionally crafted De Palma first act false introduction and memory dream sequence echoing and riffing on the original Halloween II from 1981. The action picks up immediately and we see Laurie in a hospital running from Michael again. When she is about to be overwhelmed and killed she wakes up one year later in anticipation of the memory of that night. It is assumed that Michael Myers was killed. Loomis wrote his exploitative pulp psychology book exposing the sibling relationship between Michael and Laurie under this false pretense.
        Laurie is now battling the physical memories of her trauma, her inability to move forward, and Dr. Loomis’ impending reveal that she is Michael’s brother for ill gotten true crime book money.
        The second film opens with a fake quote from a fake textbook called The Subconscious Psychosis of Dreams about the meaning of a white horse in dreams. Real people made real websites riffing on the wisdom of this line. Non Sequitur. The horse represents instinct and purity. The horse is a drive to expel powerful emotions, including destructive feelings and forces. Michael and Laurie are both visited by this white horse, the white horse that is led by their mother. 
        Michael as a child is seen in a flashback once mentioning the white horse to his mother, receiving a white horse toy from his mother before her suicide. He talks about missing her and wanting to go home. 
        When Michael rises from the dead in the back of a police morgue van he interrupts a conversation between the cops about the potential joys of necrophilia. He kills the police and marches forward. When Michael returns to Haddonfield he encounters classic Rob Zombie southern trope characters that call him “seven foot of fucktard.” The men said they’d kill him if he ever returned to their land. While Michael kills the men, including by impaling one on antlers, man overcome by nature, you can hear one of the dead men’s daughters begging them to stop. Here you have the hubris, sin, and punishment of the father. Anse can’t bring his own shovel to bury his wife. Annie is humiliated by her father and discovered dead just a little too late. Annie’s father can’t save Laurie from the bullets of the other police at the end of the film. 
        Loomis claims he’s the closest thing Michael had to any relationship in the first film and then sells out his surviving family for cash. He takes no responsibility for capitalizing on the murders of innocent people or exacerbating violence with his narcissism. In a heated confrontation at a book signing, the father of a victim recreates the Is/Was conversation shortly preceding the mother is a fish line in As I Lay Dying. Loomis compliments the man’s daughter by saying she is beautiful and the response is was. Then the victim’s father tries to attack Loomis and Loomis is given the power to feel like the victim in that moment because he is arguably more measured. 
        Michael, the child Michael, and his mother stand in front of a billboard of Loomis and the mother asks Michael to think about what Loomis did to their family. Loomis is the psychiatric state given flesh and blood and his violence and hubris destroyed the Myers family in full with the final reveal of lineage. Here is the Faulknerian theme coming to a head again. Michael returns to Haddonfield to settle a feud that is now decades and additional years deep after more time jumps to reckon with the land on which the memory never left, the past in the immediate, and unfulfilled suicidal blood feuds only observed from the outside by a spare few acquaintances, employees in the psychiatric and counseling field, and the police. 
        The kills repeat the same visual and thematic motifs up until the end. When Annie’s father walks in on her dead body he sees the overexposed memories of her life flashing between shots of the body. One of their last conversations is Annie, similar to Addie, stating that “every father perfects the art of humiliating their offspring.” The father in The Sound and the Fury is too little too late while drinking himself to death. Anse is selfish and cruel to his children. Jason is obsessed with his daughter Quentin’s sexuality to the point of his own public humiliation instead of the humiliation he feels from her behavior. 
        Michael kills a teen boy outside of a psychobilly rock show who is nervous and can’t make a move on a woman who explicitly makes moves for him. He gloats about his exploits, but can’t fuck the woman right in front of him who wants to be there with him. This is played as a gag, but is also the most in your face moment of the impotence theme. The critics claimed the film could not balance being a case study and a slasher. If we accept the reason for why kills are deployed in these films beyond entertainment, we know there’s something behind the kill. If each tension releases on a theme of some perceived abnormal sexuality, that isn’t a conflict within the text. It is a stabbing of the point. 
        The final two scenes in Halloween II are further examples of the Faulknerian psychological mind put to film in this series. Laurie is in a wood shed with Michael and she is held down by the child Michael. Deborah, their mother, is talking about the family. Loomis intervenes and comes into the shack telling Laurie to stand up. Laurie tells Loomis, “I can’t. He’s holding me down.” Laurie is still held down by the child Michael. This is the past made present, past made real, real past forever staying real in its own past and now. Michael is next to Laurie. Loomis says that this is all in her mind. Before Loomis enters we see shots of the trio in the barn surrounded by twirling spectral lights. The police lights and helicopter lights are distorted within the vision of the family. The family’s vision of each other and the world grows more detached from reality the longer they are exposed to each other and isolated with each other. The shot from the perspective of the helicopter is sobering. It is just a spotlight on the shed. Almost static. Next to no sound. The barn is not shaking. Structures like that don’t tear apart at the seams of the universe. When the family is seen again the camera and lights resume their nauseating shake and twirl. Loomis lures Michael out. Michael is killed by the police. Laurie picks up Michael’s knife. As she stands over Loomis holding the knife the police open fire on her. “Love Hurts” starts to play again. Laurie is seen on a bed in a white room. Her mother and the white horse walk toward her. 
        Laurie is punished with her own psych ward ending like Darl in death or in limbo. It’s reasonable to think she wouldn’t survive a police shootout. In death, in afterlife, in eternity she is in a clean and white hospital, alone. She is failed by the psychiatric state and killed by the ineffective and cruel police state. Earlier in the film her doctor wants her off heavy meds and out of the hospital. Zombie is concerned about the effectiveness of a cold and uniform clinical psychiatric world. Faulkner was tapped into the use of these facilities as punishment, likening them to jail in As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. 
        Absalom, Absalom! carries the quality of an incantation as a title. Faulkner brings out ghosts in repetition, memory, land, and history. You carry your whole family inside you. Halloween gives us Michael’s destruction of his family and the failure of the psychiatric state to help him. Halloween II gives us that repetition with Laurie. Zombie humanizes Michael and doubles down in that humanization by creating the family repetition with a perfect victim like Laurie. In her attempt to escape the cycle of her family she’s subjected to it fully. She is like Quentin Compson. Her death, her irrational suicide, her unfair execution, her limbo, her eternal fate ends at the psych ward. 
        The central Myers family and extended character universe all find their place perfectly among Faulkner’s characters. The southern paint job on Illinois is truer to the state than non-residents and lifetime city slickers realize. I’d like to think Rob Zombie did know what he was doing and didn’t have to talk about it so openly. If anything, inadvertent or not, the Rob Zombie Halloween saga is enriched with a Faulknerian lens. 
        I write about the psych ward ending, the families in decline, the widespread impotence, the destruction of genitalia, and all other Faulknerian themes, binge and obsess over his books, because research is mesearch. A professor of mine said that and it has held true for most people I’ve met. Zombie’s Haddonfield looks like the Illinois I grew up in. The psychobilly band sounds like my old band. Haddonfield sounds like the wide open spaces of my youth. Faulkner reads like my family. My extended family starred in Faulkner stage adaptations, even as Benjy himself. My mother would tell me I’m not Benjy throughout the duration of my youth. I didn’t read Faulkner until I was 27 because I wasn’t ready and even now individual pages can feel like battles with life and death. Incestuous tinged family pain, drunkard dads, violent sexually obsessive family members concerned about their public image, all these things ring true to my own heart and life. I write about the psych ward ending without judgment beyond its failings as a helping tool because I’ve experienced that ending. I’ve experienced that ending multiple times. 
        When I arrived at the wilderness facility I received a cavity search. I put on a blue shirt and elastic pants that would not be washed for weeks. I walked into the dirt toward a crowd. There was the washing machine shed and two shadowy figures in the corner being talked to slowly. One of the boy campers had a nurse hostage. He kept her hostage until he left the camp. He went to a proper psychiatric medical facility. I spent 47 days at the camp. I asked myself why I didn’t have the chutzpah to take someone hostage. I asked myself why I didn’t push a camper into the wilderness or off a cliff. I knew what it took to leave. I could run and then gung-ho Asheville residents would stalk me through the woods where The Hunger Games was shot. I lured bears to the camp by leaving out food. I could leave food around camp because I never made it out of the isolation phase. I starved myself, but I never had the strength to take someone hostage. I couldn’t throw myself from the cliffs as much as I thought about it because I saw the way out. I desperately wanted to leave, but I couldn’t do what I saw. I couldn’t do what I knew worked. He became a legend. The boy who left when he said he would. Letters from family don’t come for weeks and you realize people’s lives are smoother and better with you gone. It’s easy to forget about you. It’s easy to live a life where you don’t engage at all. It’s so much easier. It’s hard to not want to take something back for that pain. It’s hard to accept that you can be a burden. When I lived my most major psych ward ending, my scared straight moment, I saw the way out and it was beyond me. Laurie Strode in a moment of crisis moves to maybe stab Dr. Loomis and she is hailed on with bullets until she’s given her own forever psych ward ending. 
        Zoller Seitz would probably not see me as the person behind that last paragraph if he met me. We watch films to suspend disbelief. I sympathize with Michael due to skilled filmmaking first, even when I know some of that pain in my body. I feel that now more media than I care to see is receiving heavy marketing pushes where the same central conceit, often about real people, asks us to see the human element of a killer. The case study element works in the Halloween remakes and it’s vital to approaching them as their own films. There’s total congruence between the case study element and the slasher filmmaking. These literary-informed additions can reflect real life in ways real life can’t, like Faulkner. Case studies break containment and will again. The films are maligned at every level for no good reason. I see them as victims of the blended cultural beliefs instead of art observation by film critics in the 2000s. Universal acclaim is its own fate worse than death. Zombie’s remakes leave us asking questions a decade later. If we work for it, making connections. After the most recent trilogy it’s worth asking if he cut closer to something true, maybe even something classically American, than we admit.