Post Traumatic Horror: Rob Zombie's Halloween II

In Rob Zombie’s return take on the 70’s slasher, Michael Myers is still at large and just wants some quality time with his sister. Picking up where Zombie’s 2007 Halloween left off, the film follows Laurie Strode as she is rushed to the hospital with wounds inflicted by her brother a few hours earlier. She assumes that Michael is dead but in typical slasher style, Michael somehow lives and continues his murderous rampage on the hospital staff and anyone else unfortunate enough to get in his way.

The original remake of Halloween was criticized for its lack of directorial vision, as Zombie fell into the trap of making a “typical” remake that wasn’t up to par with his gritty style of horror. As a result it was dubbed in some circles as Rob Zombie’s John Carpenter’s Halloween, but that is a mistake Rob Zombie won’t make again. Though he admits to the challenge of working with characters and a story that were not his own in the first film, Halloween II is a second chance for Rob Zombie to craft the narrative on his own terms, with the failures of Halloween already under his belt.

Zombie is particularly interested in the effects that the traumas of the first film will have on the characters in this sequel, and by all accounts it seems Halloween II will be truer to the vision of the man behind the camera.