Zombie Motives

Rob Zombie, in his two Halloween outings (in 2007 and 2009) approaches the question of Michael Myers’s motives by developing a richer backstory for the character than elsewhere in the franchise (of which these two films are reboots); we can certainly sympathize with him when we learn more about his family life. In the John Carpenter original, we glimpse Michael’s home life; it’s as comfortably middle-class and “normal” as any other Haddonfielder’s. Nevertheless, Michael commits heinous crimes as a boy, therefore he’s Implacably Evil, both as a character and as a metaphor—and all you can do is lock him up or kill him, both of which are difficult. In Zombie’s vision, Michael comes from a broken home (broken and filthy, because this is a Rob Zombie movie), where his stripper mom has rotated through abusive stepfathers and Michael has begun torturing and killing animals. He’s bullied by most people in his life and his sister would still rather fuck her boyfriend than take Michael trick-or-treating. (Said boyfriend conveniently leaves a Michael Myers mask lying around.)

The audience is made to feel sympathy for the boy, who seems just on the line of maybe turning it around if only someone would give him a little love and attention. This does not transpire; Mike kills a bunch of people then gets institutionalized (he’s ten or eleven years old), then grows up and kills WAY more people. And by this point, the conclusion is exactly the same: he’s Implacably Evil and all you can do is lock him up or kill him. So what was the point of all the getting to know you stuff? I’ll admit, it made him a more interesting character. But isn’t that a distraction when thinking about Michael Myers? Are we really meant to invest in him as a character? Can we sympathize with him enough to change the equation on “lock him up or kill him?” 

People regularly try to dehumanize anyone considered monstrous. We would say of Hitler that he’s “not really human,” or the like. Because no human can really do unthinkably evil things. By definition—if it’s unthinkable, it’s undoable. Here, of course, we make a bad error—not the think/do thing—the point of view thing. So you find murder “unthinkable” as an action, i.e, you would never do that. Well, someone else doesn’t. Your perspective—it’s unthinkable!—is irrelevant. The thing about Hitler is not that he’s somehow not human, it’s that he is human. A human can be human and be evil, even if we can’t really accept that word, either. While we argue about whether “evil” is actually a thing, it’s killed another thousand people somewhere.

So why do we say the murderer was “not even human?” We insist on it, even. We can’t abide that another one of us would even be able to do what this sicko did. People get into vicious fights on social media about “humanizing” bad people—which I take to mean making them seem more human. Look, nothing the New York Times writes about him is going to make the white supremacist more or less of a person. That’s the shit of it. Why is this controversial? We all have to pretend that we can exclude bad people that we hate from the human race for the sake of a metaphor?  But to get back to, uh, Rob Zombie’s Halloween…

In humanizing Michael Myers, is Zombie intending to motivate his later serial killing? Audiences tend to make that assumption—otherwise, they reason quite rightly, why the fuck would you be showing us all that shit about his childhood, anyways? Trying to entertain me? Because I came here to watch Michael Myers bringing in the sheaves, so to speak. Harvesting the flowering teens, if you will. I don’t really care why he’s doing it, man. But maybe that’s not Zombie’s game. Dr. Loomis (canonically Donald Pleasance; here Malcolm McDowell, a former teenage thrill killer himself) comes to the same conclusion—that Michael is incurably, unstoppably Evil. In other words—evil does exist. Even a human being can be Evil, in ways unthinkable to other human beings.

So the meaning of Zombie’s contribution to the Halloween franchise might be this lesson—that motive is not a helpful concept. The killer is a human who has lived a life before killing and will live a life after killing. He might have reasons, a rationale, a purpose of some kind. It doesn’t matter—it won’t make any of it easier to understand in the end.