There are certainly plenty of reasons for audiences to dislike Rob Zombie’s 2007 movie. Underlying many of them, I suspect, is the terrible ambiguity of its violence, which at times appears to play out in particularly random and mean-spirited ways. These might seem like rather odd charges to level at a slasher film, but the complex system of moral allowances and cinematic identification that moviegoers expect from the genre is something that filmmakers ignore at their own risk. That is, an audience can tolerate a certain level of apparent arbitrariness as long as they are eventually rewarded with a rationale—a mystery solved, a backstory revealed, a psychosis explicated—that clarifies matters a bit. Not to say that the rampaging monster who selects his victims opportunistically isn’t a beloved horror staple, but that’s not what Zombie has provided audiences. Rather, he’s given us an ostensibly “transparent” origins tale, but one that obfuscates as much as it illuminates, at least emotionally.

In short, Halloween at times takes on the shape of a revenge flick in which the protagonist can no longer recall why he’s seeking revenge, or against whom precisely:  kind of like Memento (2000), except that that film was, paradoxically, diamond-clear about its own ambiguity and the moral complexities that stem from uncertain yet bloody motives. In the original Halloween (1978) the causal factors of abandonment and psychosexual dementia were foregrounded more clearly, starting in its much more straightforward (and briefer)“young Michael” prologue. Michael Myers kills his older sister when instead of attending to his needs as his caregiver, she dallies with a teenage boy; as an adult, he punishes teens in analogous situations or who engage in analogous behaviors. To be sure, Zombie’s script overlaps thematically with these concerns to a certain extent, but the rage at its center also reflects the boiling-over social anxiety of a stunted adolescent with deeply ambivalent attitudes toward his family and hence his own identity.

Like most people who experience shame, Michael Myers is conflicted:he wants to apologize for who he is while at the same time asserting that there’s nothing for him to be ashamed about. It’s precisely this internal conflict that informs much of Halloween’s seemingly inconsistently toned scenes of violence. For much of the movie Myers targets those who make him feel “less than,” such as the school bully. At the same time, he can’t repress his own resentment over his family’s low-rent ways and the existential fact that his identity is grounded in them. Soon this ambivalence manifests explicitly when his dual personality emerges under the care of Dr. Loomis.

It’s an ambivalence that re-appears in a disturbing scene that I believe Zombie was trying to frame as tragic. The problem is that horror audiences understandably have a hard time differentiating tragic sequences from those that are supposed to be thrilling or terrifying. So this is a real miscalculation in some ways, but I admire Zombie for trying to do something new with familiar emotional material. The scene I’m referring to is the one in which Myers kills the Danny Trejo character, Ismael Cruz. Here is the only character at Smith’s Grove who treats Myers with empathy and respect. In essence, Cruz becomes his only “family member” following the death of Myers’s mother. With this notion in mind, though, audiences should not be surprised that Cruz must suffer the same fate as the rest of that family. The very bond that the two characters share derives from their common socio-economic status—Cruz is a janitor who has done time.

Therefore, he also becomes a symbolic target for all that pent-up ambivalence that Myers feels. Accordingly, his death is orchestrated in the most drawn-out, see-saw manner in the entire movie; as Michael drowns him, Cruz is given excruciatingly momentary respites until he meets his inevitable demise. 

After Michael’s escape, he kills and then appropriates the clothing of another working class character, the trucker played by Ken Foree. In case this strikes us as an insignificant detail, we must only recall how class has always been signified by sartorial clues in the horror film: from the “working stiff” (pun intended?) garb of Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula’s stylishly aristocratic cape to Freddy Krueger’s down-at-heels custodian’s hat, work gloves and ratty sweater. In any case, thus embracing his class identity even as he tries to escape it, Michael Myers returns to his childhood home to collect his meager legacy—a knife, a mask, and an old dark house.

Improbably, this house has never been razed and the land rebuilt on during the intervening years. Of course the rundown house that the rest of the neighborhood avoids is hardly an original device. As a story element, a matter of mere setting, this is true, and certainly John Carpenter used the house in a similar way in his film. However, what Zombie does is tie this unchanging reminder of downward mobility to the greater theme of class shame that he explores. For example, unlike in the original, we are provided an extended firsthand glimpse into the mirror image of this home:  the comfortably upper middle class residence of the Strodes, where the biggest problem seems to involve deciding where to go on vacation. Indeed, the bewilderingly gratuitous scene in which Myers slays the Strodes is a kind of weak point in the narrative fabric through which the killer’s class rage erupts loud and clear. That is, the Strodes have neither harmed or taunted him directly, are obstacles in any kind of practical/logistical sense, nor represent psychosexual targets as the babysitters do. Their only crime, it would appear, is to have a well-furnished living room and to be up-to-date on their car payments.

Well, maybe not their only crime. After all, the fundamental target of Myers’s ambivalence is his little sister, now known as Laurie Strode. Again, Zombie explicitly grafts his perpetual themes of class-consciousness—highlighting the literal danger of forgetting “where you came from”—onto the plot and characters created by Carpenter. The sheriff, played Brad Dourif, spells out for Loomis his illicit efforts to find a good home for the infant girl, the only survivor of Myers’s childhood spree. For Zombie this is a critical piece of information, not simply a moment of necessary exposition for the audience’s sake. Indeed, the second half of the movie is largely about Myers attempts to remind Laurie of her true background—or to punish her because she is a living, breathing example of the reinvented future that he was denied. For audiences, his contradictory attitudes toward Laurie can easily cause the story’s through-line to appear muddled:  “Is he trying to reconcile with her or slice her to ribbons?” However, in terms of Zombie’s deeper intentions, his monster’s vacillating motives are a perfect outgrowth of his confused relationship to his own humble origins.

In the end, Myers is of course left owning nothing, not even the clear prospect of a sequel. A horrible end for a monster whose terrible, and terribly secret, acquisitiveness is denoted by the way his name itself twice repeats the word my… as if he is still a young child who cannot bear having his toys taken from him, even if they are broken.