Rob Zombie discusses H2 - HorrorMovies.ca

Rob Zombie is currently shooting the sequel to his remake of John Carpenter's classic slasher Hallowe'en on location in Georgia, but took some time to talk with IGN about the movie, his ideas and how he got involved in the first place!

Noone was more surprised than Zombie to be back working on another Hallowe'en flick as he explains,

"Truthfully, after I did the last one, I was like, 'I don't want to do another one. I don't care. I don't ever want to hear the words Michael Myers again,'" he says. "I was so over it because of getting burnt out at the end of it all. And then after having gotten away from it for a year or so, you know, you come back to normal."

Zombie also realized that H2 was a whole different beast than doing the Hallowe'en remake.

"I just realized that the great thing about doing this one is, with the last one there was some sense of retaining some John Carpenter-ness about it all," he explains. "And now it didn't matter. This movie is 100 percent whatever I want to do. And we never discussed Halloween or Michael Myers or anything. In fact, every time we do something we go, 'This doesn't seem [like Halloween].' We can do whatever we want and it's very freeing. And I think it's making for a much better movie because we're not trying to do what anyone is expecting at all. In fact, we're trying to do the exact opposite at all times -- exactly what people aren't expecting. You figure with a character like this, this time I really wanted to reinvent him. Because what is this? The 2,000th film, I mean with all the sequels and stuff? So that was the main thing."

Rob Zombie is definitely taking the liberating aspect of the filmmaking to heart, as he doesn't go for too many takes to get a shot, and he often will change things and wing-it on the spot for many of the scenes.

"We have the script, which of course we shoot," he says. "But within that… Scripts are funny, because I feel like to me they're just a blueprint. Once you get in there and you start working, scenes start going in different directions. Certain characters you thought were important fall away [and] ones you thought weren't so important rise up and have more significance, so you have to be ready everyday to like twist the next scene. Because you go, 'Well, we ended that scene here, so now this one doesn't feel right.' So it's always changing everyday. If we just stuck to the script it would feel really wrong. That's what's great about it. I'm always filming scenes constantly that aren't in the script that I feel like we now need. And that was one of them [with the deputy]. That scene didn't exist but we had a moment where that deputy comes to the house, and we had the aftermath, and I was like, 'Well, we really need something in the middle.'"

H2 picks up right where Hallowe'en left off, but it's unclear how Michael Myers survives the events of the first film, since according to Zombie, there are no supernatural elements to this film.

"There's no supernatural aspect," says Zombie. "I never wanted to have that at all. I'm not really interested in making… people [are like], 'Is it scary?' I didn't really want it to be scary in that sense. I didn't achieve it with the last one as much but it is happening on this one more so because of the locations and how the approach is just… I want it to seem so real that it's not like you jump, 'Oh, I'm scared,' [but instead that] it's like completely unnerving all the way through until it just becomes horrible to watch. That when you kill a character or somebody dies it's horrible and it's drawn out and you really feel something, not just say, 'Oh, somebody's dead.' That's what's good about this one. There's fewer characters, and the main thing I like about coming back to this is we don't have to establish who these people are. We know who they are and we can now really expand on their characters. Sequels mostly are just the same beats hit again, but when they're not, you can go, 'Wow, we didn't know these characters. Now we can really get into something with them. We don't have to just go through the broad strokes of introducing them.' That's why it's nice."

While watching the first Hallowe'en (Zombie's version) did you get the feeling that it was two movies mashed together into one with the Young Michael Myers and then him older? Well Zombie tells them that it was his original idea to have two movies there instead of one.

"The last one we did set the template of the world," he says. "'Here's our people.' But there was too much information I was trying to jam into one movie. Really the first movie would've been better suited if it was just young Michael. Because it felt like two movies. I originally conceived it as two movies and I tried to pitch it as two movies, but they didn't want to do that. So it sort of became two movies jammed together. And it sort of felt like that. Halfway through the movie it switches to like another movie, whereas now it didn't have to be that way."

What about H2, was he forced to make two movies again or not? What is it going to center on, just more Michael Myers killings? What about Laurie Strode is she involved?

"What I struggled with for so long before I started was if you're going to make a movie about Laurie Strode, what [are] really the effects if that was real?" he says. "If one day you woke up in the hospital and I go, 'Oh, by the way, someone murdered your parents last night, and all of your friends, and the murderer is your brother.' Like what would the psychological ramifications of that be? Because usually they just go like, 'Oh, O.K., it's six months later and she's kind of back to normal.' So that's why I jumped ahead two years later and Laurie Strode comes into the movie and she's just a wreck. She's like a totally damaged, f*@ked-up person, and starts low and sinks lower through the whole movie. What I found interesting about it was the final frames of the last one where you feel like she's snapped. And you know, she's related to Michael Myers so I figured like, 'O.K., she's got that same gene.' And you see her start unraveling and losing her mind throughout the whole movie, and that's what I thought was interesting. That's really what it's about more than anything else."

Finally, Zombie talks about how he's moving away from the look and feel of the first movie to make this one truly his own way.

"That's when I finally became interested," he says. "I was bored with the character of Laurie Strode until she was covered in blood, screaming. I go, 'Now that's a character I would like to make a movie about. She suddenly became interesting.' That was the part of Halloween that I struggled with because I'm not really interested in making movies about characters that are clean, nice people living in a clean, nice world. I just don't find that interesting. And that's what the second half of that movie was, where it was sort of John Carpenter-ish Land. I don't have any of that in this movie."

I'm still undecided on whether Zombie is a brilliant filmmaker, or if he's too all over the place to keep things focused and under control. Let's hope H2 is coherent and has a good flow going and will make sense. Zombie did pretty well with his own previous movies, so hopefully the same will come true here now that he is free of the restrictions he had on the first offering!

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