Talking with Rob Zombie and Halloween cast on the set

by Staci Layne Wilson

The petite would-be victim gives her hulking attacker a big hug — her ear hits just above his belly button, even as he bends down to give her a gentle, avuncular squeeze in return.

This is how 18-year-old actress Scout Taylor-Compton greets her costar on the set of writer/director Rob Zombie's Halloween, the 6'8 actor Tyler Mane. He's playing the embodiment of cinematic evil Michael Myers, and she's taking on the role of his stalked sister, Laurie Strode (originally introduced in 1978 by the then-20 year old Jamie Lee Curtis).

They're hugging now, but in just a few minutes, he will be chasing her with a wickedly sharp-looking, glinting knife.

But first, Zombie needs to give Michael's mask a quick once-over. Special effects makeup artist Wayne Toth hands it over for inspection, and the director jokes sarcastically, "Oh, look his hair is too puffy. That is so gay. Oh and the eye-holes look too much like they did in Part 7."

The multitalented artist and performer says the internet message board chatter and speculation about his remake of a classic doesn't affect him, and it probably doesn't — but his tone and insight implies that he's up on the latest blogs.

Earlier in the day, I'd asked Toth about the design of the iconic horror mask, and whether the Shatner connection would be made. "You're not going to have a little Star Trek nod... beam me up, Michael?"

Toth laughs politely. "No." The mask actually has a new back story. "He has it when he's a child this time," explains Toth, "and he buries it before he's sent away to the asylum. When he gets out, he digs it up. It was buried underneath the floorboards in the Myers house which is why it looks the way does."

The back story is so important in this film, that we won't even see Laurie or the adult Michael until much later in the movie. "It's like it's halfway," says Taylor-Compton. "I think what Rob is doing, is trying to explain how Michael got the way he was. Which I love. So from the beginning it's Michael younger [played by newcomer Daeg Faerch] and then he does all the stuff, then he goes to the institution. Then he escapes from there and comes to find me, his sister. I come in through, like, half the film. It's a little bit different than the original."

And speaking of the word original, I ask Zombie about some of the scripts he'd been working on before this Halloween remake was offered. "I would rather do original stuff, but sometimes things just come along that were such big films to you, and it seems like you're being offered... it's like doing Frankenstein, or something. Someone is handing you this sort of iconic monster and allowing you to completely reinvent it."

He admits he knows he's in a tough spot. The excessive sequels of all the classic horror movies have eroded the power of their villains. "Who thinks that Michael Myers or Freddy Krueger or any of those characters is scary? Nobody. People love them and they're revered; kids want to dress like them for Halloween, but you don't really think of them as scary. See, that was part of the challenge: dusting off Michael and trying to make him scary, an intense and more fleshed-out character."

Mane agrees. "The original character of Michael Myers is pretty basic. There's not much of a personality there and, as you saw this morning when we were shooting, there's a whole different scene [with Dr. Loomis – see Part One].

"I wanted to have Michael Myers morph back into Michael Myers from his childhood scenes that he had done to what was in the asylum to back [and] donning the outfit that I'm in right now. I wanted to have a definite kind of arc there of showing different kinds of personalities, and through his different stages in his life. That's hopefully what we're achieving."

Rob Zombie's Halloween will be in theaters everywhere on August 31, 2007.