VIEW: Halloween Premiere Pics READ MORE: Scout Taylor-Compton Q&A

Halloween, the 1978 low-budget feature directed by John Carpenter, redefined the modern horror movie both artistically and commercially. Made for less than half a million dollars, it grossed almost $50 million in its theatrical run, and it introduced an iconic — albeit taciturn — serial killer to movie audiences: blank-masked knife-wielder Michael Myers, who went on to inspire the likes of Jason of the Friday the 13th films, Freddie of the Nightmare on Elm Street pictures, and countless others. The picture itself spawned a slew of sequels, none of which captured the strange magic of Carpenter's original, with its deft, creepy point-of-view camera work, minimalist score, and relentless suspense. Now director Rob Zombie is putting a new spin on the Myers myth with a remake of Carpenter's film — a remake of sorts, as the director is at pains to point out.

Rob Zombie in Michael Myers' cell on the set of Halloween Marsha Blackburn LaMarca/Dimension Films, 2007

A longtime horror aficionado (as if you couldn't figure that out from his name, which he changed from "Cummings" at the beginning of his show business career), Zombie started out as a grungy New York rocker, fronting the band White Zombie in the mid-80s. Trained in the visual arts, Zombie had a heavy involvement in the band's look, and the look of its product, often directing their videos. He made his big-screen debut behind the scenes designing the animation for a psychotically psychedelic sequence in 1996's Beavis and Butthead Do America and broke into feature directing with 2003's House of a Thousand Corpses, followed by its sequel, 2005's The Devil's Rejects. But as Zombie explains, his new project, while in the same genre as his first two pictures, is an entirely different proposition from those over-the-top mayhem-fests.

PREMIERE: What was the time span between conceiving this picture and its production?

ROB ZOMBIE: It was pretty fast. It was a little over a year ago that I first met with Bob Weinstein about an unknown project that he wanted to talk to me about. And came to find out it was Halloween. And that's how it all began. I went into the meeting not knowing what we were going to discuss and that's what came up. And it came up just in a general sense, not in terms of a remake or a re-imagining or anything like that; he just kind of threw the concept of Halloween at me and asked what I thought about it. And when it first came up I didn't really know what to say. I went away and thought about it and we re-convened a month or two later. And I had thought it through and thought that the only way to approach it was starting fresh. Because I felt that, for me anyway, the series, Michael Myers and the whole thing, had kind of run its course. The original is a classic and then there were sort of seven sequels that [each] seemed to degenerate a little more than the last one until it just became kind of like, "Who cares?" What I liked about the original was the basic story. It's a strong premise, and Michael Myers is a very iconic character, like Frankenstein or Dracula, and I thought that if you started from that, there was really something great to be done with it.

The original Carpenter picture has something of a back-story. It starts with Michael's first murders as a little boy. Do you take off from that point?

Well no, I don't. My movie takes place as if no other movies ever existed. It's not connected to anything.

We've seen some accounts that suggested that this was a "Michael Myers: The Missing Years" account. So that's all misinformation, then?

Yeah. This picture, to break it down essentially, Act 1 is young Michael Myers, his life and everything that happens. But he's an actual living and breathing character; he's not just a point of view shot through a clown mask. And then Act 2 is his time essentially incarcerated at Smith Grove Sanitarium as a child through adulthood. And Act 3 is the only time that we veer more into John Carpenter territory. And that's Haddonfield [the town Myers terrorized in the first film] and everything that happens there.