John Carpenter is definitely a legend when it comes to horror and sci-fi films over the years. With that legendary status comes the ability to throw around some pretty hefty opinions about other people’s work, especially when it concerns a remake of your own. But then again, when you’ve made Halloween, The Thing, and some of the best Kurt Russell vehicles of the past 30 years, you’re allowed to get away with such things.
During a chat with Carpenter at the New York Film Academy, the horror great went into detail about his relationship with Rob Zombie and his thoughts on the rocker’s version of Halloween. The response was a little bit of a surprise according to John Squires over at iHorror:
“He lied about me. He said that I was very cold to him when he told me that he was going to make [Halloween],” said Carpenter. “Nothing could be further from the truth. I said, ‘Make it your own movie, man. This is yours now. Don’t worry about me.’ I was incredibly supportive. Why that piece of sh*t lied, I don’t know. He had no reason to. Why did he do it?”
“So, frankly, that will color my response to the film,” he continued. “If I take that away, I did not… I thought that he took away the mystique of the story by explaining too much about [Michael Myers]. I don’t care about that. He’s supposed to be a force of nature. He’s supposed to be almost supernatural. And he was too big. It wasn’t normal.”
Can’t say I disagree with him about the latter point. We spend a lot of time with Michael Myers the kid and not enough time just dealing with his creepy haunting of his home town. You could call a perfect example of why you shouldn’t remake films, but that would take away from all the great remakes we’ve seen over the years, including the remake of Evil Dead and Carpenter’s own The Thing. As for his thoughts on Zombie, all you can say is that you don’t call someone a “piece of sh*t” without having a good reason.
Check out the full chat at the New York Film Academy below:
(Via iHorror / New York Film Academy)
