The most impactful change from workprint to theatrical is the ending. Previously, we saw Brackett’s men open fire on Michael after he releases Laurie. Nothing like that happens in this version. Theatrically, Michael pulls Laurie from the police cruiser and heads back into the Myers house. Loomis begs him to stop, drawing his fury. Michael grips the doctor’s skull with both hands and crushes it, seemingly killing him. He then chases Laurie through the house for nearly ten minutes until they both go crashing from the upstairs balcony onto the front lawn. Laurie regains consciousness enough to shoot her brother in the face. The Halloween theme plays overtop her tortured screams as we see home movies of Michael and Boo as children.
Finishing Halloween ‘07 with old home movies of Michael and Laurie as children give the story a different context than the workprint. With this ending, we would likely conclude that the greater narrative focus was on Michael trying to regain a lost familial connection, not on his therapist’s failure to rehabilitate him. Zombie ultimately dropped the workprint ending for its marginalizing effect on the Laurie Strode character. Having Loomis and the police heroically swoop in to save her only further diminished Laurie’s already small role in the film. Theatrically, Laurie saves herself. This transforms the character from damsel-in-distress to self-actualized final girl. Speaking on the remake’s commentary, Zombie tells that he intended a certain ambiguity in his film’s final moments. Specifically, the moment where Michael reaches for the gun Laurie has aimed at his face. Was Michael trying to stop her from shooting him but too weak to do so? Or was he trying to help Laurie steady her aim so that she could finally end the nightmare known as his entire life? Zombie leaves it for the viewer to decide.
Curious is the low-angle shot of Laurie shooting Michael in the face. This moment is carefully framed so that we don’t actually see the bullet hit, leaving his fate somewhat uncertain. Compare that to the workprint ending wherein Brackett’s men put more holes in Michael than a swiss cheese. You have to wonder if the theatrical ending wasn’t shot with the possibility of a sequel in mind. As for Loomis, the theatrical cut leaves him for dead as we never see him so much as twitch following his audible skull-crushing.
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT
In the wake of Halloween 07’s theatrical release, Rob Zombie expressed regret over changes made to the film during post-production. Fortunately, he was allowed to go back and cut his own unrated version for home video. The film’s theatrical presentation was still released onto DVD and Blu-ray, though it has become increasingly difficult to find. Running ten minutes longer, this second official version is the one most fans are now familiar with.
Compared against the theatrical cut, this version offers a slightly more sympathetic characterization for Loomis. Part of that includes restoring the workprint scene wherein he arranges for young Michael to visit the hospital courtyard. It’s here Loomis makes a desperate plea to his patient: “If you don’t communicate with me, how can I help you? I’m here to help you. I feel an utter failure at the moment, that I just can’t get through to you.” The director’s cut also features a series of black-and-white video diaries recorded by Loomis detailing his patient’s worsening mental condition. Zombie actually recorded Malcolm McDowell’s narration for these vignettes after Halloween ‘07 had been released to theaters. Unlike the workprint, this cut trims the courtyard scene to exclude Michael announcing he has nothing left to say.
Theatrically, Loomis’ resignation speech to Michael abruptly fades into his book tour, suggesting he wasted no time in financially exploiting a patient he never actually helped. In the director’s cut, Zombie expands this moment to emphasize the character’s feelings of guilt and regret. Patting him on the shoulder, Loomis bids a sad farewell: “Take care, Michael. Take care.” Leaving the hospital, he turns back to gaze upon the site of his greatest failure while looking terribly conflicted. These added moments, while small, allow us further insight into Loomis’ conflicted feelings toward Michael.
The director’s cut unfortunately reinstates Michael’s original “rape escape,” which is even more graphic and brutal than in the workprint edit. The Noel Kluggs character also gets several additional moments, each one more hillbilly-awful than the next. He now taunts Michael when accompanying Ismael to his room. (“Don’t look at me. I’ll be a shitstorm in your worst nightmare, motherfucker. I’ll come in here and fuck this place up one night, you watch.”) Speaking of unpleasant hospital staff, this cut also restores Nurse Wynn’s line that the cute baby in Michael’s photo “couldn’t possibly be related to you,” motivating him to kill her.
While Zombie still leaves most of Udo Kier and Clint Howard’s scenes on the cutting room floor, he does add one moment with both men back into the film. Prior to storming out of Smith’s Grove, Loomis joins Walker and Koplenson to view security footage of Michael’s escape. An enraged Loomis charges that both are responsible, though they try to place the blame back onto him. The storming-off bit is also extended with Loomis outright saying that Michael is headed for Haddonfield. The scene closes with Walker paraphrasing Dr. Wynn’s line from the first Halloween: “Haddonfield is a hundred miles away from here!” (We’re still left in the dark as to how Michael managed that journey so quickly without his trusty station wagon.)
In another moment resurrected from the workprint, Zombie fixes a possible plot hole in his story. As with the original Halloween, you have to wonder how exactly adult Michael knew what teenage Laurie looked like as they hadn’t seen each other since they were children. This cut of Halloween ‘07 suggests a primal sort of sensory recognition. Theatrically, Michael simply watches Laurie drop off an envelope at the Myers house in broad daylight. Yet here, he picks up the envelope to smell it, seemingly recognizing his sister’s scent. (Does crazy have a smell? Hey, it’s a theory.) As a plot device, the scent-recognition angle is flimsy, but it is an explanation to an otherwise lingering mystery.
Lastly, recall how the theatrical cut suggested that Loomis died by having his skull crushed. The director’s cut offers an additional moment to show that he somehow survived that nasty injury. Loomis tugs at Michael’s leg in an effort to stop him from going after Laurie. Michael easily escapes his grasp and continues the chase as Loomis falls to the floor.
DELETED SCENES
Halloween ‘07 boasts a veritable cornucopia of deleted material. Some outtakes are exclusive to certain versions of the film while others were reshot or dropped entirely. Due to the wealth of cut scenes, this section will only focus on the meatier missing bits. The first scene missing from all three versions of the film introduces Lou Martini, owner of the Rabbit in Red lounge where Deborah Myers works as a stripper. The scene depicts Lou arguing with a drunk patron as Principal Chambers calls to inform Deborah of Michael’s misbehavior. A subsequent scene showing Lou and Deborah leaving the Rabbit in Red on Halloween night still appears in the film, albeit in montage form with music in place of the dialogue.
Zombie admittedly overshot with Loomis and young Michael’s initial therapy sessions at Smith’s Grove. In one deleted conversation, Michael is asked what he thinks of the devil. The boy replies that the devil doesn’t have anything inside him and is therefore empty, a feeling he identifies with. In another encounter, Loomis jokingly tries on one of Michael’s crude homemade masks. The director also shot multiple takes of Loomis and Deborah entering and leaving the facility throughout the year, which he intended on using in montage. In one of these scenes, Deborah is accosted by reporter Taylor Madison hoping to get a statement about her son. Ismael Cruz rushes in to escort her away from the abrasive newsman.
While seen briefly in the workprint, no version of Halloween ‘07 features Michael’s parole hearing in its entirety. The scene begins with a long take of Ismael Cruz and Noel Kluggs walking Michael to the hearing. Not surprisingly, Noel insults and threatens to rape both Ismael and Michael along the way. This is intercut with footage of Tom Towles’ councilman telling a joke involving gorilla sex. In the actual hearing, Dr. Kopl
enson argues that Michael is “free of any recurring violent tendencies whatsoever” and appropriate for transfer to a minimum-security facility. (While Dr. Loomis is absent from this meeting, he does submit a written objection, which is read aloud.) Towles’ councilman also objects. (“That is a maximum-security psycho if I ever saw one!”) In the end, Michael’s transfer is denied.
As originally filmed, Michael’s “rape escape” from Smith’s Grove went on a little longer than in the workprint or director’s cut. After killing the rapist orderlies, Michael uses Noel’s keys to release his fellow patients from their confinements. He then attacks two security officers at the guard station before using Noel’s keys to exit the hospital altogether. One of the guards in this scene is played by actor Mark Christopher Lawrence, who would return in Rob Zombie’s Halloween II in a minor role as a sheriff’s deputy. As first written into the script, Michael was to kill Lawrence’s character by smashing a television onto his face. This death was later given to Ismael Cruz during reshoots. (Fun fact: The guards are watching the original Night of the Living Dead when Michael attacks, the same film the Elrods were watching in Halloween II.)
This was to be followed by a scene of Loomis autographing books after his promotional appearance at the university. The doctor-turned-author flirts with students and touts how good his book really is, all of which feels like a precursor to Halloween II’s Douchebag-Loomis characterization. It’s while leaving the university that Loomis gets the call from Morgan Walker about Michael having escaped from Smith’s Grove. This disconcerting call was shifted to nighttime during reshoots and instead made by Clint Howard’s Dr. Koplensen as Udo Kier was unavailable to return.
Yet another scene missing from all three versions depicts Michael stealing Judith’s headstone from Haddonfield Cemetery. He’s caught in the act by Ezra Buzzington’s caretaker, who yells obscenities at the escaped slasher in a regrettable effort to make him leave. Naturally, Michael makes quick work of the rude caretaker. In his commentary, Zombie reveals he ultimately cut this scene because “seeing Michael in daylight demystifies him.” He would later recast the caretaker role with Sid Haig during reshoots. In the final film, Michael steals his sister’s headstone without interruption, which Haig’s caretaker only discovers when showing Loomis the way to Judith’s gravesite.
The final major deleted scene from Halloween ‘07 finds Loomis trying to learn the current whereabouts of Angel Myers through her sealed adoption records. The agency clerk, played by Adrienne Barbeau, refuses to divulge that information despite Loomis’ claims that it’s a matter of life or death. As first written into the script, Loomis and Brackett would be trying to find out this information together. The two men would hustle their way into the home of a drug-addled clerk from the agency and essentially blackmail him for the information, which he would provide to them. Loomis leaves empty-handed in the deleted scene, however.
INTERVIEW: Phil Parmet
(Phil Parmet: Cinematographer - RZH1)
Would you consider yourself a fan of the horror genre?
Honestly, I can’t say that I’m a big fan of the genre. I do enjoy the occasional horror movie, but I’m much more into other kinds of films. There are some horror films that I’ve really enjoyed such as Rosemary’s Baby or The Ring. My problem with a lot of horror films is that they tend to fall back on a certain formula, which gets old. That formula gets repeated so much because it’s easy to market without having big name stars attached to it.
I was looking over your filmography recently and noticed that Michael Myers isn’t the first slasher you’ve worked with. You were previously a second unit cinematographer on 1991’s Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare, right?
Yeah! A friend of mine was doing cinematography on that one and invited me to come be a part of it. There was just so much work to be done that they needed a strong second unit. I shot a lot of special effects and things that didn’t have much dialogue. That was the kind of stuff the first unit wouldn’t need to focus on. I specifically remember doing a shot of Freddy Krueger dressed as the Wicked Witch flying outside the window during a tornado. I shot a bunch of stuff in the desert too. That was almost thirty years ago.
Your first movie with Rob was The Devil’s Rejects. How did you land that job?
Rob had admired my work as a documentary cinematographer. In fact, I don’t think he even knew that I was a feature cinematographer at that point. He had worked with a line producer who recommended me for The Devil’s Rejects since Rob was actively looking for someone with a documentary background on that. So we met and started talking about how he wanted to approach the material. That film wasn’t really rooted in the horror genre but in the western genre. Rob and I both had a high regard for westerns and knew a lot about them. The Devil’s Rejects was kind of like the Manson family meets High Plains Drifter.
That’s a good description for it. So The Devil’s Rejects turns out amazing and Rob’s next film is Halloween. How did he approach you to work on that production?
Rob and I became pretty tight doing The Devil’s Rejects, which had turned out pretty great. In the interim, I did a couple of music videos for him and joined him on tour. We actually did a tour film that has never been released. It was while we were on the road that he learned Halloween had been green-lit, so we immediately started talking about doing that together. We went into production soon after the tour wrapped.
Now you’ve got me wanting to see that lost tour film. Why wasn’t it ever released?
Rob had been saying how this was going to be his last tour ever, so he wanted to document it. He asked if I knew someone who would go on tour with him to film it and I said, ‘Yeah. Me!’ So I got on the tour bus with him and we did this fun journey around the country. I’m not entirely sure why he decided not to complete it after we finished it. I thought it was an interesting project as it wasn’t really about the musical performance. It was much more about what going on tour entails, all the logistics and complications that come with that.
So you finish the tour and begin work on Halloween. How much of the film did you and Rob pre-visualize together? I know he can be pretty improvisational at times.
We didn’t storyboard too much of it. Rob is a pretty good artist and draws cartoons and stuff. He would occasionally sketch out an important scene to better communicate something. In our earliest discussions about Halloween, Rob expressed that he wanted to do the same thing we did on Devil’s Rejects but up the ante a little bit. I said, ‘Up the ante? Like how?’ And he said he wanted to make Halloween a little slicker. We basically shot it just like Devil’s Rejects by almost entirely using handheld cameras. That gave us that same documentary feel.
We never talked about making Halloween feel like a traditional horror film. We did reference a lot of films in planning out the look of it, but they weren’t the kinds of films you might expect. We viewed things like Jacob’s Ladder, Deer Hunter, The Silence of the Lambs, Repulsion, and Psycho. We also looked very closely at the original The Last House on the Left as a reference film.
The original Halloween has been widely celebrated for its cinematography. In your discussions with Rob, was that something he ever wanted to reference?
We never looked at it because we had no intention of copying it. Of course, I had seen the original Halloween and several of the sequels as well. Not to take away from it, but we just weren’t interested in recreating any of the visuals that they had already done. Wasn’t that also the case with a lot of the sequels, that they tried for something visually different as well?
With our Halloween, we always wanted to be outside the character’s perceptions as though it were a documentary. By that I mean we never wanted to take on any particular character’s point-of-view. We would go into a room and shoot what was happening in that room without necessarily taking on someone’s perspective as a more traditional genre film might. I think people that study horror films will tell you that audiences often identify with characters by seeing through their eye
s. I don’t think we ever did that on Halloween. We wanted to the audience to feel like an outside observer to what was happening. That meant approaching the material as though we were documenting real events instead of creating a theatrical platform to scare people with, which I know a lot of horror films do. They use setups and payoffs with scares and things like that. We never approached it that way.
Your Halloween’s critics often charge that it deviated too much from the original 1978 film. How do you respond to those criticisms?
Why do something that’s already been done? That’s my feeling. I know Rob felt that way too. Our Halloween was an opportunity to take something that was already well-known and completely reinvent it. That’s how you keep it fresh and interesting. I haven’t seen the latest one, but I doubt it’s exactly like the original film. I will say that it’s interesting that they’ve gone with comedy writers on this new one. That approach worked out pretty well with Jordan Peele and Get Out, didn’t it? Maybe there’s some hidden connection there between comedy and horror.
One thing I admired about your Halloween was its voyeuristic feel. Like you said, we’re always watching the characters from some distant vantage point. In one scene, we’re spying on Michael as he spies on Laurie, Lynda, and Annie.
That all stemmed from Rob wanting to amp up the style we had used on The Devil’s Rejects. If you go back and watch that film, there are a lot of angles and camera positions that are totally voyeuristic. I can’t recall us ever using a point-of-view shot, which is also true on Halloween. With this kind of look, I think back to films like Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and Repulsion. Those films did something similar and it worked very well for them. Rarely in those films do you get to see exactly what the characters are seeing. By making the audience an outside observer, it’s almost as if they’re present in the room watching the horror unfold. I think there’s a lot of horror to be had in that kind of setup. It also put a lot of emphasis on the acting because you’re sharing in the character’s horror.
Taking Shape Page 34