Halloween’s Michael Myers has seen many incarnations during his 29-year reign of terror. While the character hasn’t yet seen the vastness of space (boldly not going where most horror franchises eventually go), he has just met a familiar fate – the remake. Although the majority of horror moviegoers are just looking for the next gore-fest, true horror fans are as rabid as Christians looking to crucify the latest blasphemously filmed story of Christ. Luckily, director Rob Zombie is a member of the horror genre cult and treats his Halloween remake with the utmost respect, while amping up the intensity for a post-Saw audience.

From the 90-minute Abercrombie and Fitch ad that was 2003’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the abysmal The Hills Have Eyes in 2006, classic horror films have been turned into exploitive, empty fillers for the benefit of the box office. Zombie, on the other hand, explores the mythology of the original Halloween by psychologically deconstructing Michael Myers instead of exploiting the original idea of The Shape – the personified evil of the original. So Zombie’s film opens with the Myers family; of course, this being a Zombie film, they are a white-trash, long-haired clan whose cursing would put sailors to shame. And in this Halloween outing, we see Myers’ transformation into the infamous serial killer.

As Zombie constructs a working profile of young Myers as that killer to be – mutilating animals and obsessed with masks – the irony is that we already know Michael will kill his sister and run amok through Haddonfield 15 years later. The hiccough in Zombie’s artistic liberties is that we can’t quite make the leap from young Myers to the unfeeling killing machine we know he will be later in the film. Still, with the background of his white-trash family, Michael’s childhood rage is, at the very least, understandable. We want him to teach the school bully, his mom’s deadbeat live-in drunk and heartless sister a lesson. It essentially turns him into the anti-hero of the film’s first half and destroys the original terror of an unexplained evil that somehow exists naturally.

While the first half of Halloween is largely Zombie’s creation with references to the original (Michael’s mother is a stripper at the Rabbit in Red Lounge), the second half of the film completely relies on our knowledge of the first film. The set-up of a sex-filled night planned by three teen girls is so quickly put into place it will leave your head spinning and your mind asking “Who’s that?” and “What’s going on?” if you don’t already know the story. Given the iconic first film though, it’s likely most horror fans will be able to fill in the gaps and spend most of their time anticipating the appearance of Tommy Doyle or the mention of Ben Tramer.

For those not in the Halloween-know, Myers’ brutality and energy are enough to hold attention. This is Michael Myers at his most brutal, but the terror doesn’t come from exploitive gore. Ex-pro wrestler Tyler Mane walks Myers with authority and nothing can stop him – doors, windows, walls, fences, bullets – nothing. While Mane is bashing through everything in his way, Zombie’s aesthetics fail to truly capture the energy. The director’s camera is mostly shaky, sometimes out of focus and generally ineffective.

Although his style hasn’t really grown since House of 1000 Corpses, his storytelling ability has, to some degree. He takes stabs at the influence of music on child violence by putting young Myers in a KISS T-shirt and slashes at corporate America. But, like the rest of the film, his thematic jabs are uneven, the subtle social commentary overpowered by heavy-handed motifs such as Myers’ self-made masks. But Zombie’s cinematic heart is in the right place. Instead of trampling over the original, he builds on it and creates an homage that should motivate the new generation of horror fans to seek out John Carpenter’s original with the respect and excitement it still deserves.

Jason Morgan