I Sat With a Zombie

Rob Zombie tells why "Halloween II" is really an "interesting human drama" in our exclusive interview

By Don Kaye
Special to MSN Movies

Never let it be said that Rob Zombie isn't fearless. The heavy metal rocker turned screenwriter and director had two feature films under his belt -- 2003's "House of 1,000 Corpses" and 2005's truly nasty "The Devil's Rejects" -- when it was announced in early 2007 that he would script and direct a remake of one of horror's most iconic films: "Halloween." The 1978 original was considered almost untouchable, but the howls of outrage were tempered by voices who thought that Zombie, an acknowledged horror fan and genre expert, would treat the material with respect.

The movie was a hit, earning $60 million at the box office, but reviews were decidedly mixed. Zombie was drained by the experience and vowed that he would not helm a sequel. So it was surprising to say the least when he announced in early 2009 that he would return for "Halloween II." This time out, however, beloved characters Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) and Dr. Loomis (Malcolm McDowell) are turned into a borderline psychotic and a greed-driven profiteer, respectively, by their dealings with unstoppable killer Michael Myers (Tyler Mane), whose ultra-bloody rampage is driven by the need to find his sister. Shot with a gritty, '70s texture, this hard-R flick is clearly Zombie's "Halloween II" and not another generic franchise entry.

Related: Favorite Horror sequels on Rotten Tomatoes 

Now that "Halloween II" is done, Zombie will release a new solo album -- his fourth since his 1998 split with White Zombie -- in November, with a tour to support it. He's also got "The Haunted World of El Superbeasto," his long-in-the-making adult animated film (he calls it "X-rated 'Scooby Doo") coming to DVD and cable in September. Ensconced at a Beverly Hills hotel for press interviews shortly before "Halloween II" opened, Zombie discussed its challenging production, his reinvention of the series mythology and the "Rob Zombie brand."

MSN Movies: You were so adamant after doing "Halloween" that you didn't want to do a sequel. Was there any pressure or sort of quid pro quo from the Weinstein Company (the studio behind "Halloween"), like, "Do this for us, and we'll back your next one"?

Rob Zombie: I mean, I was under contract to them and I owed them another picture, so I was working for them regardless. But no, we never discussed anything like that. We talked about this, and I knew the time frame was short for this movie, but I thought that maybe it would work to my advantage. If a movie sits around for too long, that can be bad. I remember talking with Robert Rodriguez about that when we were doing "Grindhouse," 'cause he's made movies before where they're done and they sit on a shelf for six months, and it's almost worse because you feel like you just lose the energy. Plus you don't want the company to have too long to think about it, so they can start to go, "We have some ideas." [Laughs] That's always my biggest fear.

Did you then look at it as a challenge? Like "I've only got this much time? Sure, I can do this!"

It was a challenge. It worked out great, but even when we were shooting the movie, I don't know how it worked because there were a lot of problems with this movie. I don't even want to get into it, but there were a lot of problems with the company, a lot of problems with internal personnel, a lot of problems with everything. If my creative team wasn't so strong and wasn't so loyal, we would have been screwed. I mean, the whole thing is really a testament to how much the crew and the actors and everyone really bonded, because every day there was another huge problem that should have shut the production down. Everything seemed to be against us, but nothing seemed to stop us.

Was this as tough as "Halloween"? You had a lot of problems on that one.

It was worse. It was 10 times worse. It was brutal.

And yet my sense is that you're happier with this one, and it seems like more of a Rob Zombie film than "Halloween" was.

I like the first film, but I felt like after Michael escaped from Smith's Grove and we went to Haddonfield, that's when I felt like I wouldn't have written that normally. I wouldn't have written about three high school girls and their nice suburban neighborhood. That's just not my life and my knowledge. But once I thought, "Oh, well, Laurie Strode suddenly is f----d up and she likes D.C. hardcore and she's this and that..." Basically all the characters are me in some way, shape or form, and that's when I became excited. If something feels like it's you, then you always feel like you can stand behind it in a way.

Was the hospital sequence early in this movie a little tribute to the original "Halloween II," (which was set completely in a hospital)?

It really wasn't. It's funny, I never thought of it that way until today -- you're like the third person who said that. But it never crossed my mind. In fact, I was always downplaying the hospital sequence because I didn't want people to get the wrong idea about the movie. It just seemed like a logical extension of what had happened in the previous one: "Well, if this girl's f----d up and they found her wandering around in the middle of the street, they would take her to the hospital."

One area you get into a little more in this movie than a lot of slasher films do is the aftermath. There's one chain of scenes where you sort of see the real suffering and trauma that the survivors of a serial killer have to deal with.

Usually these films are just like, "Show us some death and destruction and be done with it." But I thought that, well, if this wasn't "Halloween II" or the "Halloween" franchise and you just went into a studio and pitched it like, "I've got a movie about this girl whose parents are killed by a serial killer, and she wakes up in the hospital and finds out it was her brother" -- it just sounds like an interesting drama. So that's how I kind of approached it. It doesn't sound like a slasher movie, it sounds like a pretty interesting human drama to have this character wake up, most of the people around her are dead, her whole life is destroyed, and she just has to start dealing with it. In fact, we shot so much of that stuff -- a lot of it's not in the movie -- that it felt like we were shooting "Laurie Strode: Portrait of a Teenage Psychopath." We would go weeks without shooting anything related to Michael Myers. But then I'd realize that by virtue of the fact that it was called "Halloween II," we needed to put some death and destruction in there.

Do you feel like you're pigeonholed into directing horror films at this point? You've said in some recent interviews that you don't even really watch a lot of horror films these days. How much do you want to break away and how much do you think that would affect what some studio marketers would call the "Rob Zombie brand"?

Well, I think that when you try to "break out" of something, it can be a big mistake. You have to transition your way out of something. You can't just go, "I'm not a comedian anymore, take me seriously as an actor." It never works. I feel like you have to transition. And that's actually the movie "Tyrannosaurus Rex" that I wrote. I thought that was a great transition film for me, because it's really violent, it's really dark, and horror fans would love it, but it's not a horror movie by any stretch of the imagination. You don't just suddenly do something completely different. People have done that before and it doesn't work. If you have a big, disastrous movie come out, sometimes it's hard to recover from that. I know a lot of directors who have had a big flop and they go to what everybody calls "movie jail," and sometimes it takes them seven years to get another movie going.

Now I know you're going back to music mode this fall, but in your mind, is "Tyrannosaurus Rex" the next movie you'd like to make?

I'm trying not to get too hung up on it because I'd like it to be, but there's other stuff floating around that could (come first). Every director has their pet project that they want to make, and it's always the one that they can never get made. But even movies with the budget of a "Halloween" are so hard to get made. It's so hard to get them to cough up the money. Even when we were making "Devil's Rejects," which only cost $7 million, you're setting up production, you're working, and you're like, "Are they gonna start cutting the f-----g checks or what?" You're working in the production office, but you have no phones!

You've spoken many times about your love for the classics of the horror genre -- the Universal monster movies and so on. With the kind of horror around today, is there room out there for a sort of classic, atmospheric monster movie or ghost story, and is that something you think you could pull off?

I think that would be great. What I would love to do, which I think that they should do -- it would be so cool to do something like, I don't know, "The Return of Frankenstein," but you do it so that the monster looks like it did in all the original Universal films. That would be so cool to go back and make a totally classic horror movie. Don't jazz it all up like "Van Helsing," but make something really classic. I think people would go for it.

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Don Kaye covers movies, TV, and entertainment for MSN.