A Surprising Horror Remake is Climbing the Netflix Charts

By Russ Burlingame

Last week, Netflix released a new installment in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, and that may have had an impact on the viewing habits of some of their audience. Rob Zombie's 2007 remake of Halloween is currently sitting at #7 on Netflix's movie chart, joining Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2022), which was sitting at #2 last time we checked. A movie more than a decade old cracking the top ten is always notable, but doubly so for this movie, which was highly polarizing in the horror community. Many Halloween fans felt that Zombie's grungy, redneck take on the horror classic did a disservice to the franchise.

The movie was a hit anyway, and spawned a sequel in 2009. There were talks of a third, but the second took diminishing returns both critically and financially, and when Zombie expressed reservations about coming back for the planned Halloween 3D, the stewards of the brand decided to hit the pause button for a while, before returning to the original timeline with Halloween (2018).

When Zombie asked series creator John Carpenter for advice, Carpenter told the filmmaker to make Halloween his own, and not be too beholden to the original. In keeping with that philosophy, Zombie reportedly told the cast that it wasn't necessary to watch any previous Halloween films for research.

 "I have never seen the original Halloween," Malcolm McDowell (who took on the role of Dr. Loomis, originally played by Donald Pleasance) told an audience in 2018. "I did ask Rob whether I should see it and he went, 'No. You can see it afterwards.' Now, I did know Donald Pleasence enough to have a drink with him in a pub, and I always was very entertained by him. He was a lovely man and a wonderful actor; I've seen him in many other things. He was a great stage actor, and actor full stop, and he was a very cultured man....So I was thrilled to be asked to carry on in his footsteps, but I wasn't at all influenced by him since I didn't see it. I can imagine what he did, because there was nobody that played that sort of menacing character as well as he did. I mean, it was just inherent. He played Blofeld in one of the Bond films. God almighty!"  

The movie follows the rough plot of 1978's Halloween, but includes more of an origin story for Michael, and drops the bomb that Laurie Strode is the sister of Michael Myers in the first installment. That twist, which came in the original Halloween II, shaped the trajectory of the franchise for decades, but was ultimately removed from the continuity in 2018. Carpenter had said for years that he regretted making the two siblings, and the way it altered Michael's nature. 

Rather than being "The Shape," as he is called in the script, he became a fully human character with a clear agenda: finish the job he started as a child and wipe out his remaining family members. Carpenter preferred Michael as essentially evil personified, with no real specific drive behind his rage and violence.

The film stars Tyler Mane as the adult Michael Myers, Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Sam Loomis, Scout Taylor-Compton as Laurie Strode, and Daeg Faerch as the young Michael Myers.

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