Rob Zombie's musical career has always been rooted in carnivalesque cartoon horror, which is why after tapping a similar vein for his directorial debut, House of 1,000 Corpses, it came as such a shock to the system when he shifted gears into full-throttle death metal for his underappreciated The Devil's Rejects (still a modern genre classic) and unjustly maligned redo of John Carpenter's Halloween. Eschewing spookshow jokiness, Zombie had crossed over into squalid terrain where the humor was black and the violence was blacker, his deceptively smart aesthetics further amplifying a caustic worldview in which ugly is mankind's true color and the nuclear family—generally of a twisted, psychobilly sort—a fundamentally important unit under constant siege. Out of step with modern PG-13 horror in the best way possible, Zombie's films frighten less with juvenile jolt tactics than by positing a world in which sadistic kin are one's only salvation from a universe gone insane. Alas, with Halloween II, the director goes nightmare-grim to the point of losing his franchise-remake's thread, plunging down a vicious vortex like a metal band following up an acclaimed release by simply going "heavier," a desirable quality that nonetheless comes at the expense of what energized its predecessor.
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