Rob Zombie Called Directing Halloween “A Miserable Experience”

The Halloween franchise is back on its feet now, thanks to David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s Halloween (2018) sequel. But that relaunch was an uphill climb, as the franchise was left in a bad state after the 2000s remakes of Halloween and Halloween II by Rob Zombie.

In a new interview, Rob Zombie talks about making Halloween, and to hear him tell it, the experience was about as fun for him as it ended up being for horror fans. The reason why: Harvey Weinstein.

“Making Halloween with the Weinstein’s was a miserable experience for me,” Zombie told Forbes. “And so I was very reticent to do the second one. I did do the second one, and I thought, ‘Okay, well the first one was a miserable experience, but it did well, so maybe it’ll be easier the second time?’ It was worse. Oh my God. I felt like they weren’t trusting me on the first one because they wanted to make sure it was a hit and now they weren’t trusting me not to f*** up their hit.”

Halloween II carries the undignified reputation of being one of the franchise’s worst installments – an in the opinion of many fans, the worst of the worst. Based on Zombie’s version of the story, it seems like what fans got really was a the natural end product of a stressed production, in which the filmmaker didn’t truly love the film he was making, resulting in a film that fans could never truly enjoy watching.

Zombie isn’t just relying on his own testimony of what went wrong with his Halloween films – according to the filmmaker, there are actual receipts that prove it:

“We made a behind the scenes documentary for the making of Halloween. That has somehow gotten lost in the vaults. That shows how messed up everything was and what was going on when we were making those movies.”

The scandal with Harvey Weinstein’s fall has thrown a lot of cinematic history into question, as The Weinstein’s were behind some of the biggest films of the ’90s and ’00s, under their Miramax and Weinstein Company production companies. From Zombie’s Halloween movies, to the entirety of Quentin Tarantino’s early career, stories of what working under the Weinstein’s was really like seem to be coming out with increasing frequency.

As for Halloween? The success of Green and McBride’s direct sequel / relaunch has spawned two more sequels, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends, with the former currently in production. Halloween Kills will hit theaters on October 16, 2020; Halloween Ends will follow on October 15, 2021.