ROB ZOMBIE Says New 'Halloween' Is 'Very Different' From Original

Paul Fischer of Dark Horizon recently conducted an interview with Rob Zombie about Rob's latest film, an adaptation of the 1978 horror classic "Halloween". A couple of excerpts from the chat follow:

On his decision to do "Halloween":

"[It] was just an opportunity that arose, and truthfully, I don't even know if the movie I've made is all that mainstream. There are not a lot of classic movie monster iconic figures left, and Michael Myers is one of the only few modern day sort of iconic monsters and to be able to make a movie with that character was very exciting."

On the pitfalls re-imagining this character:

"I think the biggest tightrope that you're walking is people want it to be different enough that it's worth watching on its own merit but they want it to be similar enough that they can see familiar things and go 'Wow, there's that different.' So the balancing act was making it so that you didn't know what was going to happen next because it was unfolding differently, adding new things but doing enough kind of glimpses of the classic moments that you get that vibe."

On differences between John Carpenter's original film and Zombie's version:

"Everything's very different, just the look and feel of the film is very different. John's is very stylised the way it's shot, while mine's very like raw looking. I just thought that it wasn't so much in response to what John had done but just the response that over the years there's been like eight 'Halloween' movies, so it was really a response to everything that had been done. By 'Halloween 8', Michael Myers was no longer even remotely scary and the whole thing just seemed like complete buffoonery. It was just a bunch of crappy young actors and a guy in a crappy looking white mask. That's really what it had boiled down to in movies that nobody gave a shit about. Nobody over the age of ten was scared by them, so I thought Michael Myers is a terrifying character, but we need to really go back to basics and reinvent the wheel here because I just feel that for almost thirty years they've just been destroying what Carpenter did."

On the visual representation of the new Michael Myers:

"This I guarantee you that once you watch this 'Halloween', this Michael Myers truly makes all the other ones look like pussies. You will go 'How did the other one ever seem scary?'. I know that sounds like a ridiculous thing to say but we just made him so raw, rough, gnarly and gritty that he makes the other characters look like a guy in a Halloween mask walking around. And Tyler Mane, who plays Michael Myers, has such a big presence, but he's not like a big, bulky guy. He's very sleek but he's big and a really good actor, so he has such a menacing presence. He looks like he would eat all the other guys who played Michael Myers for lunch."

Read the entire interview at Dark Horizon.