In between mixing tracks for his upcoming live CD release, Rob Zombie spoke with MTV Overdrive about why and how he is tackling his already much anticipated re-imagining of John Carpenter's proto-slasher horror classic, HALLOWEEN.  During the five-part video interview, the darkside rocker and burgeoning cinema auteur spoke candidly about the existing film franchise — what works in it, what sucks about it — and what he intends to do about it next year.

But the interview was as interesting for what Rob didn't say as for what he did tell about his plans, and that's what I intend to discuss and speculate about in this SHAPE OF FEAR article.  Reports imply Rob's screenplay for HALLOWEEN is complete, or as much as any script is complete with pre-production and casting underway.  The point is Rob's already laid out his script roadmap leading him back to Haddonfield, and for the next 11 months we will trail along behind him as he shoots the film for release on October 19, 2007.  So here is some speculation on where Rob is going, based upon his online interview tonight at MTV.com.

THE CURSE OF THE REMAKE

As Rob put it, "Horror movie remakes, for the most part, don't work because I think the reason is they just imitate the original.  They don't try to do something new and different, they just follow it.  And if you're going to follow the original, then there's no point because that movie already exists."  At the initial meeting with Bob Weinstein (his company owns Dimension Films which will release HALLOWEEN), Rob was asked the open-ended question, "Halloween . . . what do you think of it?"

I think that's the first good news for this project, that Rob was asked what he would do holding the reins of the Michael Myers saga, and not told what Dimension or Bob Weinstein wanted done to it.  Rob related: "My first reaction was I didn't see the point of any of this.  Then I went away and thought about it for a couple of months and started thinking that that was maybe a weird attitude to have.  The thought of doing anything involving HALLOWEEN never crossed my mind in a million years, until it was right in front of me."

After Rob did think about it, he became very excited by the prospect of rethinking a horror classic that he reveres.  "It's a tricky thing because you want to make something totally unique that stands on its own, but if you've even never heard of HALLOWEEN, it 100% works as this new movie."  Well, that's a great plan to restart a floundering franchise, but how does a filmmaker not alienate a generation of fans who love (at least some episodes of) the existing film series?

Rob states his challenge and his mission is "to find a way to completely re-invent the wheel, but keep people who love the original wheel thrilled."  That knife certainly has two sharp edges, but the writer/director remains confident he's got a handle on it: "It's a tricky balancing act but I think it's totally doable."

So Rob's plans for HALLOWEEN seem like a natural extension of his creative philosophy behind HOUSE OF 1000 CORPSES and THE DEVIL'S REJECTS: tell a solid story well and with a unique, fresh attitude toward its genre which recaptures its original creative spark but advances the concept to a bold new level.  There's no telling what Rob has in mind, but we do know this for certain: he's not making "HALLOWEEN 9."

THE NEW DIRECTOR, THE NEW DIRECTION

Now we know what Rob doesn't want his HALLOWEEN to be — it's not a prequel, it's not a sequel — but what is our path back to Haddonfield?

"What it really is is a remake with more backstory," Rob explains with the following money quote for horror fans: "I want the lead character to be Michael Myers.  He's not just a faceless thing floating around the background, and then you focus on these girls. That's where you can make it different, and that's where you can make it more intense."   Oh hell yeah.

One of Rob's main criticisms of the "almost double-digit" count of sequels is that a character like Michael Myers has become too familiar, to beloved to scare audiences anymore.  So like director Christopher Nolan and actor Christian Bale reinvented the character to put the teeth and claws back in the bat, Rob Zombie intends to rewind HALLOWEEN's odometer by putting a reimagined Michael Myers in the driver seat.

"All we see in the first film is about two seconds of him as a little kid in a clown mask.  We get nothing there.  You can totally do the premise of 'why did this nice little boy suddenly go crazy one day?'   I think it's more disturbing to show events that led up to that person being who they are, and you know more about how crazy that person actually is than a Dr. Loomis just telling me how crazy he is."  Certainly this approach has the best chance to recharge Michael's scare potential, but showing how this boy becomes a homicidal machine will also relieve Dr. Loomis from spouting pages of exposition explaining why. 

"I felt sometimes that the character of Dr. Loomis just popped in and out when they needed somebody to say something dramatic.  I wanted his story through it to feel that he's more intertwined with Michael in a way that means something, which they did in the original.   But sometimes it feels like he disappears for a long period, then just pops up to go 'He's evil' and then he disappears for a while again, especially in the later films." And if one of the main dramatic battles in HALLOWEEN is between Michael and Loomis, deranged patient and prosecuting doctor, energizing both characters with action instead of psycho-babble is bound to strengthen Rob's remake.

Since a paper-traced remake of Carpenter's 1978 classic will no longer cut the grade — for its director or its audience — Rob must film his homicidal vision with new eyes: "Times change, movies change, audiences change, and the things that worked great at a certain point won't work great now.  You have to change with things, and that's really the trick."

THE SIMPLICITY OF SCARES

No, Rob isn't intending to turn The Shape into Hamlet, overrun with anguished motivations for his murder sprees.  In fact, Zombie is well aware of the original film's lasting strengths and intends to keep his version as sharp and streamlined as first created.  Simplicity was a necessity for Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill since they had a few weeks and only $300,000 to complete their film — complexity was an unaffordable luxury for cast and crew.  But fortunately, their gathering of dedicated talents proved that you can't put a price tag on creative ingenuity.

"The simple score wasn't this big over the top scary score.  It was the simpleness of it that became creepy," Rob comments as both filmmaker and fan.  "And the mask is so simple, the character of Michael Myers is so simple, there's almost nothing to him."  It was onto the blank mask and empty canvas of The Shape that the audience could project their darkest fears.  Michael may have proven to be an inhuman killing machine, but at his basis he was a crazed man in a mask, life-size and utterly ordinary, invading the peaceful everyday life of middle America.  Movie fans already know how capable Rob is in turning the ordinary into shocking horror, as seen in the criminally corrupt inversion of society by Otis, Baby and Captain Spaulding inhabiting his first two films.

Zombie, a lifelong fan well-versed in cinema history, shows in his previous horror hits that he gets the concept of how to scare audiences, because he knows what scared him up on the big screen.  "That's why I always say to people when you have big, computer-generated giant monsters, they can be cool or interesting but they're never scary.  Because you have no frame of reference in your actual life for that to strike a chord with you that's scary.  That's why JAWS was scary, there was a frame of reference that's real. That's what terrifies people the most and that's why those images last."

Oh, Rob promises to keep Carpenter's distictive, trademark HALLOWEEN theme in the mix for his new film . . . but given his highly successful horror-rock career, expect touches of Zombie magic in 5/4 time next year, too.

Hey, how about Ben Kingsley as Dr. Loomis, as the MTV net-video caption suggests?

THIS WAY TO HADDONFIELD

Whether it means retooling Michael Myers' psychopathic past, giving Dr. Loomis more ammunition than poetic speeches to battle pure evil, or indeed erasing the entire slate clean and starting over, Rob Zombie's roadmap to reviving what HALLOWEEN means to the slasher genre already appears to be the road to success.

Using a meat cleaver or a surgical scalpel, Zombie plans to cut away all the unrealistic, even ridiculous layers of undramatic fat padded onto the franchise over the past 25 years and make his film a lean, mean horror machine.  Not that Rob intends to butcher the HALLOWEEN series as we know it, rather his interview shows he plans to restore it to a tense, suspenseful shockfest for the 21st century that it originally was for 1978 audiences. 

Tonight's online interview at MTV.com provided some promising insights into the general direction Rob Zombie plans to take his tale of The Shape — not necessarily starting entirely over from scratch, but definitely stripping away the pointless distractions acquired over the years and return to the chilling, dark heart of horror that beats at the center of this successful tale of suburban secrets and murder.

A boy kills his sister and is locked away in an institution for fifteen years until he escapes and returns home to kill again.  It's that simple, and that horrifying.  Having gone around and astray in recent years, Rob Zombie is returning Michael Myers home to the singular knife point of simplicity where he started.  Cue the HALLOWEEN theme.

Visit MTV.com to watch the five-part video interview with Rob Zombie now online.