Halloween II

Despite the fact that Rob Zombie the screenwriter keeps preemptively shooting Rob Zombie the director in the foot a priori via sub-Tarantino character-development-as-pop-culture-reference and on-the-nose stabs at satire that land as cheap, bloodless farce, this does not diminish his not inconsiderable mastery of the murder tableau. It is in the treatment of violence at the site of its realization and psychic excitation – the zone of person-to-person overlap where it engenders ruptures, fissures, traumas, and transferences – that Zombie emerges as a genuine artist of insight, empathy, and radicalized spiritual connectivity. His original Halloween film was less a remake than the humanizing biopic of a famous fictional archetype, focusing on how violence is communicable, tragically passed on generation-to-generation and person-to-person (it starts at home), which built up to an exquisitely executed ending where Michael Myers’ unknowing sister Laurie/Angel comes to a point of neural equivocation, circuit overload, and ecstatic merger w/ her deeply repressed brother. That film becomes, at its explosive decisive-moment point of exhaustion, a film about tragic connection and poisoned affinities at the site of violence’s implantation of its legacy. Zombie’s new sequel begins minutes after this point of ego-collapse and circuitously brings us to one year later, where the once virginal and innocent unknowing sister has sublimated the abject brother, decorating her room w/ dour Goth furnishings and death’s heads, unconsciously absorbed within the family Id whereby she continues to psychically merge w/ brother and undead matriarch. Ego-collapse has led to a zone of umbilical virtuality where dreams are shared and individuation collapses. This is a film about how the traumatized retraumatize themselves out of confused love and monstrous devotion; how profound traumatic disruptions explode the striated construction of self and open up smooth fields of psychic interpolation; about the bonds that preserve and double developmental perversions. Zombie and DOP Brandon Trost have added to the film’s intimacy by shooting it in 16mm not to feed off grindhouse nostalgia so much as to bring to attention the film’s grain, its haptic physicality, its tactile skin. The dark, ashen texture of the film allows wounds within the frame to bleed stabs of pale light. It has a very specific feel. The film is often focused on touch. While men and older women are dispatched suddenly and w/ cursory matter-of-factness, only to be lingered on, felt, and absorbed, young women receive heightened attention in a manner that bespeaks something more complicated than misogyny. First they are made subjects. We are put in their nervous systems at the precise moment their sensory-motor apparatus is overloaded by the onset of horrific violence: they perceive in slow motion, sound is cut out so that the soundtrack quietly throbs; they become locked in a double-movement w/ Michael Myers, the subjectivity becoming doubled, interchangeable; the attention to touch, contact, returned gazes is exhaustively detailed. Death is reciprocated through the gleam of serene, druggy relief of the eyes and sanguine skin. There is a rigorous detailing of gestural interchange, each death enacting a mimesis of the very real transference of identity, drive, and affection from Michael to Laurie/Angel. What Zombie creates w/ this film is a horrifying remonstration of exchange value within a violently transgressive libidinal economy. It is a subversive notion for a slasher film: we are all ready to return the gaze of violence, to turn the trauma around, to secretly enjoy its return, to share in the vile acts that define us, to die or to kill (or both) w/ real selfless ecstasy.