Rob Zombie has evolved into a kind of Renaissance man who’s able to excel at both ingenious music and frightening horror films. Horror mavens were surprised that’s he took on the Halloween franchise – because the movies had run their course … and then some. But when Rob Zombie’s Halloween drops tomorrow, the director hopes you’ll see a new side of Michael Myers, one that’s horrifying, deep and compelling. Here, in this wide-ranging interview, Zombie talks about his favorite horror films, bad timing on House of 1000 Corpses, working with long-time gal pal Sheri Moon, and the classic soundtrack for Halloween.

HG: What are your three favorite horror movies?

RZ: Dawn of the Dead, Frankenstein and Texas Chainsaw Massacre, all the original recipes, all for different reasons. For some reason Dawn of the Dead, the original one, is a movie I’ve seen more than any other movie. I just fell in love with it when I saw it and watched it over and over. Frankenstein is one of the earliest horror movies I ever saw as a kid. It’s still great today and the movie is like 70 years old or something. Karloff’s performance is just so compelling and the makeup is so incredible. Everything about it is so dark and creepy.

HG: I remember being two and a half and really being freaked out by the flying monkeys in The Wizard of Oz.

RZ: That was the first thing that scared me when I was a kid. They’re just so f’in’ weird. The witch and the monkeys – the whole thing was just crazy. That was the freakiest, f’in’ thing to me as a kid, those flying monkeys.

HG: I know White Zombie’s name was taken from the classic horror film with Lugosi, but what horror films have influenced your music?

RZ: All different movies have always had a huge influence on my music. I don’t even know where to begin on that. I mean, from the art direction of the films, the style and the vibe. Obviously, A Clockwork Orange was always hugely influential. A made a whole video where we reconstructed the sets and everything for Never Gonna Stop.

HG: A Clockwork Orange is scary in itself, especially the book. Kubrick’s movie, too.

RZ: It’s not technically a horror film, I guess, but it’s definitely horrific.

HG: House of 1000 Corpses took a while to make and I wonder why.

RZ: The movie itself didn’t take that long to make. What happened was, we made the movie with Universal Studios, which was in 2000, I think. We shot the movie on the Universal back lot. And then when we were editing the film, it was just a weird time period. Columbine had happened, and there was a big outcry after that about marketing violent films to children and whatnot. So everybody was on guard for that.

And then when we kept screening the film, the way that the crowd would cheer at violent moments and stuff, it just really wigged out the suits at Universal. And at the point, they didn’t want to release it. See, at that point, Universal wasn’t really making horror movies or anything like that anymore. They’d become very family friendly – they were making like The Flintstones movie and stuff like that.

Now everyone’s sort of over it, and nobody sort of cares anymore but at the time, but it was a big deal then. That’s why the film kind of languished for a while and then was picked up by Lionsgate. Timing is important, and the timing for House of 1000 Corpses couldn’t have possibly been worse.

HG: Beyond story, there’s often a lot of cool gore in your films. How important is that in your films to set a mood?

RZ: I don’t think it’s important at all. It can be an element of the story if it’s necessary or not be. I don’t think that blood and gore is necessarily scary on its own. Certainly, there are tons of scary movies that don’t have anything and tons that do.

HG: Sometimes it’s over the top, too, as with Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive.

RZ: Well, then it becomes a comedy. For me, with Devil’s Rejects and especially with Halloween, it’s not a particularly gory film. My goal is to make it realistic. You know, the amount of blood you would see would just be realistic to what’s happening. But we didn’t do anything extreme. We’re not chopping off people’s heads. We’re not chopping off people’s limbs or arms or heads. I’m not a big fan of stuff like that anyway because, then to me, it just becomes a special effects extravaganza and stops being a movie.

HG: So how did Halloween come about and why Halloween?

RZ: It was presented to me. I didn’t chase it down or even think about it. But Dimension Films presented me basically with the keys to the Halloween kingdom and told me to do whatever I wanted with them. Since I thought in the course of seven sequels, they had degenerated Michael Myers down to nothing, I thought the only way to do it was to reboot the whole series and start over.

HG: The series has its lovers and its haters.  Why should people go to see your version of Halloween?

RZ: I think the main thing that people will be surprised about is that we went back and started at the beginning: taking the whole saga of Michael Myers totally serious. You know, as the sequels continued on, it became like silliness. I wanted to go back and tell the story of Michael Myers as a true story, make it serious and make it a compelling, character-driven story. That’s what people who’ve seen it love about it. Sure, it’s very scary and there’s terrifying stuff. But it’s different. It resonates deeper because of the story. It’s not just a slasher movie.

HG: How in depth do you go into what you believe to be the back story of Michael Myers?

RZ: I broke the movie down into three main acts, Act One being young Michael Myers leading up to the murders. Act Two is his incarceration at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium as a young boy growing into a man. Act Three is his escape and return to Haddonfield.

HG: Is there a scene you can talk about that may be the most compelling scene in the movie?

RZ: I think a lot of the sanitarium scenes surprised people because those are some of the quieter moments where you just watch young Michael Myers just mentally spiral downward. They’re not violent. They’re not bloody. But you just watch him degenerate as a person and see what he will be. Those are the scenes that hit people the deepest and disturb them the most.

HG: Kind of like a Dante-like descent into hell.

RZ: Yeh, because you see this boy degenerate into this monster slowly. That’s the biggest difference with this movie. You don’t understand why he is the way he is. But you see it happen.

HG: There are a lot of classic songs on the soundtrack. Is there’s a song that’s extraordinarily vital to the movie?

RZ: Don’t Fear The Reaper (Blue Oyster Cult) is really important. Sure, that was in the original Halloween. I wanted to bring it back. It appears twice in the movie and actually has a purpose for being there. You’ll know why when you see it.

HG: You work with your girlfriend a lot.

RZ: It’s always easy, especially with movies because we work on them so much together. It feels like we’re intertwined when we work. A lot of the ideas start with her. You know, she plays Michael Myers’ mother, which is a character that’s never really existed. We go into a lot of depth with her because the relationship between Michael and his mother and family is very important. Working with her is great.

HG: Are you really going to redo Bonnie and Clyde?

RZ: No. I don’t know where that started. That’s just a completely random thing that someone posted online which has no relationship to anything.

HG: I think it’s pretty perfect as it stands.

RZ: I love the original. It was always one of my favorite movies of all time. Maybe someone misunderstood what I was telling them. But it’s not going to happen.

HG: Along those lines, if you had carte blanche to do anything you wanted, what would you do?

RZ: I have a lot of ideas for a lot of kinds of movies I want to do. Halloween was kind of a weird situation. But I don’t have any desire to redo any other movies.