Halloween

This Michael begins as a deeply disturbed child.

Young Michael lives in a volatile household with his mother Deborah, sister Judith and Deborah's abusive boyfriend Ronnie.

At school, Michael is bullied.

At home, anger and humiliation surround him.

He has already begun killing animals and hiding behind homemade masks.

Zombie doesn't present these things as excuses for what Michael becomes.

But unlike Carpenter's original, the film deliberately asks us to spend time inside Michael's world before Halloween night turns him into a killer.

Michael's violence escalates rapidly.

After attacking a school bully, he returns home on Halloween night.

Ronnie is killed.

Judith's boyfriend is killed.

Then Michael murders Judith.

The one person he doesn't hurt is his baby sister.

Michael sits outside holding her as his mother returns home.

It's an image that deliberately echoes the original film while changing its meaning.

Carpenter gave us a six-year-old whose violence seemed to appear from nowhere.

Zombie gives us a boy whose darkness has been building in front of us.

Michael is sent to Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis attempts to understand him.

Malcolm McDowell inherits one of the franchise's defining roles from Donald Pleasence.

Loomis initially believes he can reach Michael.

He talks with him.

Studies him.

Tries to understand his obsession with masks.

But Michael gradually retreats.

He speaks less.

He hides behind the masks he creates.

And eventually the child Loomis knew disappears behind them completely.

Sheri Moon Zombie plays Deborah Myers, giving the remake a relationship that barely exists in the original film's mythology.

Deborah continues visiting Michael after his institutionalisation.

She desperately wants to believe her son is still somewhere inside the increasingly silent figure sitting across from her.

But Michael becomes more withdrawn and more violent.

Eventually the emotional weight becomes unbearable.

Her story adds tragedy to Michael's childhood, but it also reinforces how radically Zombie's approach differs from Carpenter's.

This version gives Michael a history.

Years pass.

Michael Myers becomes enormous.

Tyler Mane's version of the Shape is physically imposing in a way few previous Michaels had been.

Loomis eventually concludes that the boy he tried to treat is gone.

Michael remains locked away.

Until the night he escapes.

And when he does, there is very little anyone can do to stop him.

After escaping Smith's Grove, Michael returns to Haddonfield.

He retrieves the mask he wore years earlier.

Once it covers his face, the transformation feels complete.

Tyler Mane's Michael isn't the distant, almost ghostlike figure of Carpenter's original.

He's huge.

Physical.

Violent.

When he attacks someone, the impact feels brutal.

The Shape has been reinvented for a different era of horror.

The film eventually shifts its focus to Laurie Strode.

Scout Taylor-Compton plays the new Laurie, living an ordinary teenage life in Haddonfield with her friends Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok.

Laurie doesn't know Michael Myers.

More importantly, she doesn't initially know they're connected.

Michael does.

The baby sister he spared years earlier has grown up.

And he has come looking for her.

One of the remake's nicest connections to the franchise's past comes from Danielle Harris.

Harris played Jamie Lloyd in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5.

Here she returns as Annie Brackett.

It's an entirely different continuity and an entirely different character, but for longtime Halloween fans, her presence provides a direct link to Michael's earlier cinematic history.

This time, however, Jamie Lloyd isn't the one being hunted.

Annie is.

Brad Dourif plays Sheriff Lee Brackett.

He knows something Laurie doesn't.

After the Myers murders, Michael's baby sister was adopted.

She was given another name.

Laurie Strode.

That revelation changes the nature of Michael's pursuit.

In Carpenter's 1978 film, Michael's interest in Laurie is frightening partly because it feels arbitrary.

Here, it is personal.

Michael isn't simply stalking a teenager.

He's searching for his sister.

Once darkness falls, the remake starts echoing increasingly familiar territory.

Laurie babysits.

Annie and Lynda make their own plans.

Michael moves through Haddonfield.

But Zombie's version has a very different texture.

The violence is harsher.

The world is grittier.

The camera gets closer.

Michael feels less like a distant presence and more like an unstoppable physical threat.

Carpenter's story skeleton remains.

The experience is very different.

Eventually Laurie discovers that the man hunting her isn't a stranger.

Michael tries to show her a photograph of them as children.

Laurie doesn't understand.

She only sees the enormous masked killer who has murdered people around her.

Whatever Michael believes he is doing, Laurie is fighting for her life.

The final stretch becomes a brutal confrontation between the two siblings.

Michael keeps coming.

Laurie keeps running.

And the Myers house once again becomes the centre of the nightmare.

Casting Tyler Mane fundamentally changes Michael's physical presence.

At around six-foot-nine, Mane towers over many of the people around him.

Zombie uses that size.

This Michael doesn't merely appear behind someone.

He overwhelms them.

Doors and walls don't feel like particularly meaningful barriers.

The result is one of the most physically intimidating versions of the Shape in the franchise.

Where Nick Castle's original Michael could resemble a shadow at the edge of the frame, Mane's Michael looks like something you couldn't possibly stop once he reached you.

The smartest decision Zombie makes is not attempting a shot-for-shot recreation of Carpenter's movie.

The basic mythology remains recognisable.

Michael Myers.

Laurie Strode.

Dr. Loomis.

Haddonfield.

Smith's Grove.

Halloween night.

But the approach changes dramatically.

Zombie spends far more time on Michael himself and replaces much of the original's quiet suburban suspense with aggression, dysfunction and physical violence.

That makes the remake divisive.

It also gives it an identity.

Any remake of Halloween faces an obvious problem.

The 1978 film is one of the defining works of American horror.

Its simplicity is part of its power.

Trying to reproduce that exactly would inevitably invite comparison.

Zombie instead heads in almost the opposite direction.

Carpenter removes explanation.

Zombie adds it.

Carpenter keeps Michael at a distance.

Zombie takes us into his childhood.

Carpenter's Shape seems almost unknowable.

Zombie's Michael has a family, trauma and history.

Whether that improves or weakens the character depends heavily on what someone wants Michael Myers to be.

Halloween (2007) wiped away decades of increasingly complicated continuity.

There was no Jamie Lloyd.

No Thorn storyline.

No H20 timeline.

No Resurrection.

For the first time since 1978, audiences could watch Michael Myers' story begin again.

The movie was commercially successful enough to launch its own sequel, and in 2009, Zombie returned with an even more unconventional interpretation of the Halloween mythology.

But the 2007 film remains the foundation of that separate universe.

A darker childhood.

A different Loomis.

A different Laurie.

A towering new Shape.

Thirty years after Michael Myers first walked through Haddonfield, the franchise returned to the beginning.

The mask was familiar.

The story was familiar.

But behind it stood a very different monster.

Evil had come home again.