[COLUMN] The Radical Empathy of Rob Zombie's Halloween II | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, which turns 15 this year. If you are going to watch it, watch the Director’s Cut. It’s a cut above.

In Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, people take a long time to die.

Throughout the film, Zombie’s camera lingers on the final moments of life for the victims of slasher villain Michael Myers (Tyler Mane). Some, like Nurse Daniels (Octavia Spencer), react with confusion and disorientation as they bleed out. Others, like Gary Scott (Richard Brake), struggle to breathe as they drown in their own bodily fluids. Others still, like Big Lou (Daniel Roebuck), try desperately to flee as their bones penetrate their skin. Some, like Annie Brackett (Danielle Harris), just scream.

Obviously, every slasher movie involves a lot of murder and carnage. However, Zombie’s Halloween II stands apart from most of the genre because of its willingness to let those deaths linger. Very few of the deaths in Halloween II are quick and clean. Very few of the characters face their inevitable death with dignity and stoicism. There is a cruelty to the violence in Halloween II, even by the standards of the slasher movie, and Zombie forces the audience to linger in that unpleasantness.

To be fair, this isn’t unique. David Gordon Green would do something similar in his later Halloween sequel, Halloween Kills, where he would introduce likeable characters and force the audience to watch them die. Still, there’s a rough and raw quality to the brutality of Zombie’s Halloween II that lingers on, even a decade-and-a-half removed from its original release. Unlike Green, Zombie doesn’t seem particularly concerned about whether the audience likes these victims.

Of course, some of these victims are kind and sympathetic. Daniels is clearly trying to help Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton). Annie has shown the patience of a saint in helping Laurie navigate her trauma and pain. However, others are just awful people. Scott dies while making jokes about sexually assaulting the corpses in his care. Howard (Jeff Daniel Phillips) and Floyd (Mark Boone Junior) both assault Michael, and so – by standard horror movie logic – “have it coming.”

Still, whatever the moral character of the victim, Zombie treats these deaths as weighty and tragic. Floyd might be a horrible human being, but it’s hard to feel catharsis or validation as Michael murders him in front of his screaming daughter (Betsy Rue). As the camera holds tight on Scott’s face in the aftermath of a horrific car crash, sputtering through his own blood and broken teeth, the audience is denied the satisfaction of righteous enjoyment of the suffering of a bad man.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween II was not particularly well-loved. It was slammed as “nearly devoid of wit”, the work of “a looky-loo tradesman whose gory shtick you can see coming a mile away.” Part of this was a sign of the times. Halloween II arrived towards the tail end of a wave of gory and brutal remakes of classic 1970s horrors that began with Marcus Nispel’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre. These graphic and bloody (and often uninspired) remakes were competing with splatter films like Saw and Hostel.

Zombie’s Halloween II arrived past the sell-by date of these horror remakes. That same October, Paranormal Activity would be a surprise hit and usher in the next wave of mainstream horror cinema. However, even if Zombie’s Halloween II had arrived at the right moment, it was still a deeply abrasive and confrontational film, one that was clearly intended to deny a mainstream horror audience the pleasures that they seemed to expect from the genre.

This was intentional. “There is this phrase I hate, where people discuss how the ‘kills’ are in a movie,” Zombie told Scream magazine. “If someone gets killed in a movie, you talk about it like it’s an entertaining moment to watch. I wanted it to be like, ‘You mean the scene where someone gets murdered?’ Not killed. It isn’t a video game. I wanted to make the scenes where someone gets murdered to be horrible to watch.” With Halloween II, Zombie certainly succeeded.

Despite the chilly reception, there is a strong sense that Zombie’s Halloween II has had a surprisingly long tail. The film’s influence is arguably apparent on the big indie horror movies of this year. The past few months have seen a host of talented young filmmakers really pushing the structures and assumptions of the classic horror movie in ways that very consciously evoke Zombie’s experiments with the form in Halloween II.

The long sequences of Michael wandering through the wilderness in Halloween II seem like an obvious influence on the ambiance of Chris Nash’s In a Violent Nature, which Mitch Ringenberg has described as “the most unique twist on the slasher since Rob Zombie’s Halloween II back in 2009.” J.T. Mollner’s subversive slasher Strange Darling opens with a cover of “Love Hurts”, the rather unconventional song choice that Zombie used to close Halloween II.

The indie horror sensation of the year, Terrifier 3, owes a lot to Zombie – particularly its tendency to extend and draw out the kills to torture the audience, “bringing to mind Rob Zombie’s Halloween II.” Art the Clown (Mike Giannelli) first appeared in The 9th Circle in 2008, which director Damien Leone has described as “basically Rob Zombie’s 31.” Leone sees himself as “competing with” Rob Zombie. “I love Rob Zombie,” Leone admits. “I see every movie that dude makes and I love his style.”

In hindsight, it is a miracle that Zombie’s Halloween II exists at all. The director did not enjoy working with the Weinsteins on the Halloween remake. The sequel was originally assigned to French directors Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo. When that sequel fell apart, Zombie returned at the last minute, on the condition the Weinsteins release him from all future obligations. Without a script, Zombie joined the project in December 2008, just eight months before the film opened.

The production was a nightmare. According to Zombie, it was all “just a miserable experience, from start to finish.” That miserableness creeps into the movie itself, particularly in the subplot focusing on Samuel Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), reimagined with his crop of white hair and his moustache so he resembles original Halloween director John Carpenter, but whose contempt at still being tied to Michael Myers feels like a self-deprecating acknowledgment of Zombie’s own frustrations.

However, the result is remarkable. Zombie’s Halloween II is easily one of the most ambitious slasher movies ever made. Much has been made of modern horror’s fixation on trauma as a central metaphor – what critic Sean Fennessey has described as “traumacore.” David Gordon Green would follow Zombie’s Halloween duology with a Halloween trilogy that was built, in the words of its star Jamie Lee Curtis, around “trauma.” However, Zombie’s Halloween II really lives in that space.

Zombie made the decision to shoot Halloween II on 16mm film, rather than 35mm film, which lends the movie’s exterior night sequences a strange dream-like quality. However, it also makes the movie feel more like a home video – 16mm is quite close to the commercially available and widely-used 8mm film. As such, there are moments where the film feels like a weird and dark home video. As her father (Brad Dourif) cradles Annie’s body, home video of Danielle Harris’ childhood plays.

In some ways, Zombie positions Halloween II as a companion to David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. There is even a distinctive white horse and an inept sheriff’s deputy named Andy (Greg Travis). Both Twin Peaks and Halloween II position the home as the site of trauma. Both Halloween and Halloween II literalize this, featuring scenes in which Michael emerges from within a house to pull a victim inside. Michael and Laurie are brother and sister, drawn together, trying to heal a fractured family unit.

However, the 16mm footage also lends the film the feel of a true crime documentary. At the climax, as Laurie is shot, the moment plays out in still photographs, like a recreation in some trashy account of the horror of Haddonfield. Halloween II is in conversation with how society processes and commodifies trauma, how human suffering is a product to be packaged and sold by cynics like Loomis. In Halloween II, pain is never as neat and clean and simple as all of that.

The film opens in the immediate aftermath of the events of the Halloween remake. Laurie is drifting aimlessly through Haddonfield, covered in blood and muttering to herself. She is taken to a hospital. Zombie’s camera fixates on the physical toll the confrontation has taken on Laurie. She screams as blood pours down her face. As classical music plays in the background, belying the violence, surgeons opine that Laurie is “gonna need plastics, but that’s the least of her worries now.”

Zombie cuts that scene together with intense close-ups of the tweezers picking glass shards from open wounds and the thread stitching the torn flesh together. It prefigured the argument that psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk would make five years later: the body keeps the score. It’s brutal in a way that slasher movies are rarely allowed to be, lingering not just on the gory and graphic detail of the injury itself, but the bloody mess left in the wake of such violence.

Two years later, Laurie is still haunted by dreams of Michael. She is struggling to heal. Indeed, Zombie’s take on Laurie Strode is perhaps his most provocative choice. As played by Curtis, Laurie Strode is an icon and a legend. Even in the movies where Curtis plays a traumatized Laurie – Halloween H20 or Green’s Halloween trilogy – Laurie has at least some of herself together. While she might have trouble relating to her children or struggle with alcoholism, she’s still reliable and strong.

As played by Taylor-Compton, Laurie is a mess. She is falling to pieces. “Just when I think I can get back to something as simple as sleep, it's like... right back at me,” she admits to Annie. She is drowning her pain in pills and alcohol. Crucially, though, Laurie is very hard to like. She has genuinely complicated emotions. She struggles with feelings that she cannot control and which make it hard for people like Annie to support her.

“I don't know, I feel kind of shitty by saying this, but… she's a constant reminder,” Laurie admits of her relationship to Annie. “Every time I see her face, and I see those scars, I know that it's my fault.  And I get angry.  And there's something in my body that snaps. And I get this zero to a hundred rage, and I just wanna go up to her and I just wanna… fuck, I don't know.” She confesses this to her therapist, Barbara Collier (Margot Kidder), who is also trying to help Laurie work through it.

The casting of Kidder is a smart choice. Kidder was almost-but-not-quite one of the horror genre’s very first “final girls”, appearing in Black Christmas, a movie that predates John Carpenter’s Halloween. However, Kidder also struggled very publicly with mental health issues, in a way that wasn’t always handled with the greatest degree of sensitivity or tact by the media. Kidder would continue to struggle with her mental health throughout her life.

Taylor-Compton’s Laurie is not “the perfect victim”, in the way that audiences are conditioned to expect women to be in horror films and real life. Zombie’s Halloween II is in clear conversation with this idea. At one point, Laurie dreams that she is trapped in a glass coffin, evocative of Snow White and symbolic of a woman’s virginal purity. It is a reminder that, even (and perhaps especially) in horror films, women are expected to remain virginal and pure to retain audience sympathy.

For all the violence and horror of Rob Zombie’s Halloween II, it is a deeply humanist film. Zombie asks whether victims need to be sympathetic – whether they need to conform to social expectations – to be deemed worthy of the viewer’s empathy and compassion. Zombie takes the language and conventions of the traditional slasher film, and pushes them to their extreme, challenging the audience to grapple with their relationship to the genre. It cuts deep.