Halloween - The Myers Case ( Halloween (2007); Halloween II (2009) ) - Maniac (2020)

This is a remake of an older Maniac edit, “Halloween - The Devil’s Eyes”.

Great A/V quality. The A/V editing is done at a professional level, as usual. The audio work - rescore, sound effects, audio fading etc - is superbly done. Quite a few creative editing decisions are taken to overlay different video and audio together and it works very well. The transition between the first and second films is seamless and intelligently handled.

Spoilers for Halloween (2007) below.

The edit takes the opening of Halloween (2007), renders it in black and white, and places it - as a flashback - after Myers’ prison escape. While I do think the idea of turning the opening into a flashback is a good one, so as to allow the film to begin quickly, I do think it would’ve worked better had the flashbacks been chopped up and scattered throughout the first act rather than playing out as a single long block.

Quite a lot of footage is cut - around 75 minutes overall from the two films combined. It allows for this to operate as a single long film, and streamlines the narrative. I do have a critique of this. The reason I quite like the Rob Zombie remakes is because of their characters, story, and atmosphere. They’re closer to psychological horrors than slashers. By cutting so much footage, this feels like a long series of murders, similar to the original Halloween film, and for me loses some of what make Zombie’s remakes so great. I would’ve preferred to see more of the violence cut in favour of the characterisations and conflicts, especially from the second film, rather than the other way around. However, that is just my personal preference, and this cut does work very effectively for those who preferer slashers.

Available on Maniac’s website, maniac1962.

IFDb listing:
https://ifdb.fanedit.org/halloween-the-devil-s-eyes/