For those hording toilet paper

Rob Zombie's Halloween

I think one of the best scenes in the film occurs really early and addresses the issue of the developing warning signs of a psychopath (hurting and killing small animals and taking pictures of them) and the first real human kill. It also addresses the long term abuse of the bully in school who punishes the weaker until the weaker strike back. In the case of the bully who antagonizes Michael, this was to certainly be at his detriment. Picking on a kid that is an innocent without the proper means to defend himself physically against a bully is one thing, but Michael isn’t beyond using violence of the extreme to end his torment. The mocking of his mother, in particular, stirs the pot and pushes until there’s a boiling over. You get the “what lies behind the eyes of this seemingly sweet child is a danger unspeakable” from Doc Loomis (earliest scene has Malcolm McDowell rocking wavy hair and dark shades!) who goes on a lecture circuit after condemning his patient to an institution with a padded cell his prison. Prior to this, Loomis tries to warn Mikey’s mom but she had no idea that such darkness was so pervasive in her little boy.

 

 

The violent attack with the stick as Michael waylays the bully in a forest harkened me back to Last House on the Left. A trip through the woods after declaring to his fellow bully pal upon leaving detention that Michael would be in serious jeopardy once they got a hold of him leads to quite the beating. The bully has no idea of what awaited him as Michael, clown mask on his face, uses a stick to render him a battered and bloody pile of quivering, crying victimization. There’s a cool camera rotation that Zombie uses to capture the secrecy of the crime’s location as the forest seems to envelope any screams and agony jettisoning from the bully as his begging does little to halt Michael’s silent rage as it unfurls on his skull, back, legs, and face. The sheer brutality more or less hinted at with sound effects and placement of camera (we really don’t see the wood strike the body, but the explicit details aren’t needed as the blunt force of the sound and the bloody face of the victim pleading are enough) tells us that Michael had plenty of this violence left in him. The slight music score works like the forest as this surrounding doom indicates to us that the bully has no out, no escape. I think why Last House on the Left came to mind was because of the isolation within the forest and the idyll that turns into a nightmare. Not far from the crime scene was a school that had dismissed kids and teenagers and a rather bustling town going on with their day while a bully is put to death.