Zombie’s movies regularly get trashed in fan pages and all over the Halloween fan base, but there’s something to them, as an alternative to the universe Carpenter established, that sticks with me. They’re far from perfect but I see elements of something more complicated dramatically than just grungy, ugly placards. The issue is that the script doesn’t allow for much exploration of how Zombie wanted to differentiate from the original. Whereas the original was a lot of implication and subtext, Zombie’s goal was never intended to be subtle, and he had an idea of taking a no-holds-barred approach to the original concept. He was trapped between his own unfocused ideas, studio demands and his own obligation to respect the original.
This small sequence of Michael sitting on the curb, intercut with his mother’s sleazy dancing, captures the essence of what Zombie was trying to dig deeper into with his remake but couldn’t, overall, fulfill. The loneliness of this (no longer innocent) kid, bereft of love, stability and identity comes through not just in the tragic image(s) of him isolated and miserable, but that it’s overlaid with Nazareth’s Love
Hurts and spliced in with Deborah’s job.
(And if there’s one thing you can’t call Zombie it’s an uninspired stylist - both scenes show visually, aurally and spatially he understands how cinema can be utilized. People despise Zombie’s Halloween for taking away Michael’s supernatural mystique and giving him a detailed background/motivation but rarely seem interested in how it reworks the original framework under all the white trash surface and why it makes sense, even if unappealing.)
What we get in this sequence is a 70s bluesy rock classic braiding these disparate scenes together to give us a glimpse of a psychological profile that, while ultimately unsatisfying in its progression, has some interesting ideas in its arsenal. Love Hurts at once seems a perfect song choice for the hardy, gritty Zombie-verse, if seemingly too on the nose (we clearly get Michael’s missing a lot of familial love and care in his life). Deborah’s gig as a go-go dancer has her doing her job against the backdrop of pop/rock hits (Zombie makes the first half of the film feel like a mix of eras, it never feels rooted in one particular time) and the music she grooves to on stage is diegetic in its use (it comes from within their world as something they hear through a speaker at the bar).
When we cut back and forth between her dance and Michael’s abandonment on the sidewalk we get a contrast of competing objectives; what is just another rhythm to dance to for Deborah provides further disturbing illumination for Michael’s motivation towards destruction. When the song is played over the glimpses of Michael it’s non-diegetic, it’s played outside his reality to provide character commentary that duplicates visual information; Deb literally hears the song and it’s just background noise, Michael doesn’t hear it but he deeply feels the pain *we* tangibly hear in its vocals, lyrics and instruments, and thus he becomes personalized to us by the music. This highlights the disconnect between the mother and son and how the love they have for each other is genuine but more twisted, complex and ultimately doomed than both yet realize.
The use of Love Hurts also works on another sociological angle. Released in late 1974, quickly inching towards the middle of a decade darkened/enlightened by the realization (and grudging acceptance) of decaying once-standard family/individual values, the song roots the images back into a time that Zombie otherwise keeps up in the air. Michael, in both iterations of Halloween, is the figure which physically manifests the turmoil and dysfunction normally hidden or ignored by most outside the family unit. Zombie’s first half may not even take place within the 70s at all, but it’s simultaneously drawing us back into an era wherein this social/familial dynamic first flourished, as well as giving a reflection on the world Carpenter shaped and illuminated back in 1978. Though H’07 doesn’t show this as an exact replication of what happened in the 70s per se it does play out as a heightened variation of its undercurrent like Carpenter had his film do - conveying the isolation, sadness, anxiety and ultimately destructive consequences of the latchkey generation; kids and teens left on their own to fend for themselves by negligent, absent and/or preoccupied parental figures. Its safe to say that Michael, raised by a supposedly loving but ignorant mother who allows a monstrous, abusive asshole to live with her children, stands in for an extremely volatile latchkey kid.
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