Musician and horror filmmaker Rob Zombie had only wanted to make one Halloween film, figuring that his time in Haddonfield was over with his 2007 remake of the John Carpenter classic. In years past, Zombie has been pretty open about the difficulties he faced when making that Halloween film, and it was clearly not an enjoyable experience for him. That may make it all the more surprising that he would go back and do another Halloween film, but for Zombie, that was a sacrifice he was willing to make to avoid having to work with The Weinstein Company on any more movies.
This is a situation that was touched on by Zombie in a new interview for the Howie Mandel Does Stuff podcast (per JoBlo). Zombie told Howie Mandel that it was an absolute nightmare working on Halloween because of the Weinsteins' involvement, with Bob Weinstein in particular constantly screaming at him throughout the production. Maybe that's just the way Weinstein approached big-budget movie projects, but for Zombie, who was accustomed to working on indie films with much smaller budgets, it was unbearable. As Zombie explains:
"(Bob was) very cuckoo. We would get into this big fights and scream at each other and he loved it. That’s how he liked to communicate. … It was horrible. It was three years of that. By the end of it I was insane because it was like being in Crazy World. And it was all done with negative energy all the time. They would find a way to upset every single actor... When Bob watched the movie when it was done, he calls me and goes, ‘I hate every single f*cking frame of this movie. You have to fire your editor, he’s a f*cking idiot, he doesn’t know what he’s f*cking doing.’ This is what it was like every single day, and he calls a lot. At first you try to appease it, but you can’t appease it because it’s just crazy."
When Halloween came out on Labor Day weekend in 2007, it pulled in more than $31 million at the box office. It was a record that was held until 2021 when it was finally dethroned by the opening of the big-budget Marvel movie Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. That's certainly a success to be happy about, though Zombie recalls how the Weinsteins were still complaining even at the time, as nothing seemed to be good enough for them.
"The day the movie came out, Bob calls me at 10am. He goes, ‘It doesn’t look good. This thing’s a f*cking disaster.’ It’s 10am, are any theatres even open anywhere yet? And then he calls me a couple hours later, ‘We’re adding more screenings. This thing’s going through the roof!’ But then Harvey calls Bob and goes, ‘It you had listened to me, we coulda done double!’ So then they start fighting. The number one record-breaking weekend isn’t good enough because I was talking to some people in their office who were like, ‘Oh, it’s a nightmare here right now. They’re fighting. They’re screaming at each other over why it’s not sixty million.’“
Doing Halloween II Meant Avoiding a Third Project With the Weinsteins
Zombie also described how Bob Weinstein would chime in with bizarre ideas, at one point suggesting that Michael Myers wear a necklace made out of human ears. By that point, however, much of the movie had already been shot, making it far too late, continuity-wise, to add something like that in to Michael's wardrobe. Not that Zombie would have wanted to do it anyway, calling the idea "dumb on every level." That was just one of many crazy ideas that Zombie said was presented to him by the Weinsteins, making the experience all the more bizarre.
The problem for Zombie is that he'd signed a three-picture deal with The Weinstein Company, and that meant that he was contractually obligated to work with the nightmare producers on two more projects. At first, he was declining their offers to direct Halloween II, given how miserable he was making the first movie. As the search for a director went on without him, however, Zombie realized that he could use this as an opportunity to get away from the Weinsteins. So the filmmaker went to the producers and said he'd make Halloween II on the condition that he wouldn't have to work with them a third time. Fortunately for Zombie, they obliged.
“I go to make the sequel, which I refused to do at first because I just wanted out of my contract because I wanted to kill myself. I had a three picture deal (with the Weinsteins), then a couple years later they had fired twelve different directors for Halloween II so I came back. ‘I’ll direct it if you let me out of the third picture. So I don’t have to do three pictures. Let me out of the deal and I’ll do it.’ So I go to shoot that and Bob comes to the set. He’s showing me the trailer for my Halloween, as if I’ve never seen it, and he goes, ‘Every frame of this movie’s f*cking genius.’ This is the same guy who said, ‘Every frame in this movie I f*cking hate.’“
If you want to revisit Rob Zombie's Halloween, the film is currently streaming for free (with ads) on both Amazon Freevee and Tubi. Zombie's sequel, Halloween II, is also currently free to watch on Amazon Freevee as well as on Pluto TV.