At the risk of being staggeringly, blindly reductionist I’d like suggest that movies about human beings stalking and dispassionately doing away with other human beings are largely about class.  Sometimes this element is practically overt, as with the aristocratic villain of The Most Dangerous Game (1932) and his many film descendents.  Sometimes it’s obliquely woven into a more recognizable fabric of resentment, deviancy, and sadism as in Wolf Creek (2005) and its U.S. cousins (Wrong Turn, The Hills Have Eyes, etc.).  I say “dispassionately” because the more the passions are brought into play, the less the narrative action will resemble the hunt, with its never-breaks-a-sweat predator and the often stately pacing of the pursuit.

By methodically preying on those of greater station, the downtrodden, inarticulate, and often uneducated caricatures of the working class in such movies do their bit to tip the social scales, bit by bloody bit.  After all, within the context of their rural (or even wilderness-set) communities, who occupies a lower social rung than these monsters that would hunt their fellow man?  Answer:  only the animals whom they routinely track and/or slaughter.  The Texas Chainsaw Massacre cycle has pretty much traded on class consciousness since its beginning; indeed, the 2006 prequel explicitly provided an economic origin for the Hewitt family’s descent into bloodlust.  One of the many virtues of Rob Zombie’s 2007 take on Halloween is that the writer/director makes use of the class warfare so frequently implicit in the slasher subgenre and weds it rather seamlessly to his own nightmarish vision of class conflict in twenty-first century America.

So it’s no accident that the first victims of Michael Myers in this ambitious remake are animals.  The psychology of this behavior is framed for the audience in the most glib of textbook terms:  it’s an early warning sign of homicidal urges.  It’s easier, of course, to ignore the classism and class anxiety that permeate the film when presented with such facile explanations, and that’s exactly what we, the audience, want—to experience the film consciously as the hero-in-peril while identifying unconsciously with the “Shadow” and his mission to right (or to repress) the social wrongs done to him.

In fact, this schizoid dichotomy is what often makes horror movies so compelling:  no matter who we are, the screen serves up our reflection at some point in the scenario.  We’re either the “every dog has its day” monster or the self-flagellating member of middle or upper class... or we alternate between the two.  After all, who doesn’t feel envy of the higher social classes at some points in his or her life and guilt regarding the lower ones at others? We fear and are feared, simultaneously.  Such is the special beauty of the modern American horror film that reigned from 1960 until about 1990 and of which the original Halloween (1978) is an exemplar.  The gifted filmmakers of this period realized that the audience could be both subject and object, if only they pointed the camera in the right direction and provided the proper subtext.

I’ve read reviews of Halloween that, quite understandably, lament what they term Zombie’s continuing fascination with “Redneckdom.”  But Zombie has radically expanded upon the simple-minded backwoods fetishism and self-conscious kitsch of his earlier work.  Whereas The Devil’s Rejects is more of a postmodern horror film (i.e., the monsters are the heroes—deal with it), Halloween is intent on drawing its audience into a far more ambiguous relationship with its monster.  This is true on many levels—not only within the social context discussed here—and it’s also why many purists are upset with the new film.  They don’t like the latent content of the original to be so foregrounded, their monster to be so freighted with psychological backstory.  There is a legitimate point to be made here, and if you thrill to the Manichean dynamic of the John Carpenter movie, you could claim that this film sells out its mythic components for cheap social commentary.

What that analysis has to be careful not to overlook, though, is the degree to which Zombie doesn’t simply overlay the original with his thematic preocuppations, but prefigures and transfigures the story to accommodate them.  That is, he gives us a remake and a prequel in the same movie.  For structural reasons, that may have doomed the film in aesthetic terms (at least until the day when releasing a three-hour horror epic becomes commercially viable).  However, Zombie is to be applauded for the nasty depths of his social vision, and the willingness to take on such issues authentically in a genre that so often deals with them by means of cliché and condescension.