This week, slasher legend Michael Myers will be resurrected once again, this time in a total page one remake of John Carpenter's 1978 classic. It's been a long, strange road for Myers -- at one point, I think his mind was being controlled by Druids? -- but Rob Zombie's remake attempts to go somewhere new with the character by focusing almost the entire first hour on Myers' messed-up childhood -- Carpenter devoted comparatively little time to the origin story -- showing us his torment at the hands of school bullies, his disgust at his slovenly couch potato step-father and promiscuous sister, and tracking his slow degradation into a mute nutjob. This first section of Halloween, which strongly echoes the grotesque, white-trash circus atmosphere that surrounds Zombie's first two films, House of 1000 Corpses and its sequel, The Devil's Rejects, is where you'll most easily see the director's fingerprints. A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from Rob to talk about the film, what he wanted to accomplish with it, and what other irons he's got in the fire.

RS: So have you seen the film with an audience yet?

RZ: I've seen the film twice, two different versions with an audience, but I have not seen the final, finished version yet.

RS: How was the reaction in those early screenings?

RZ: The reaction was awesome -- it was one of those test screenings. You actually get more information than you'd normally get. It's actually hard to judge, when you're sitting in the crowd, what people are thinking. When I watch a movie, I don't make a sound or move. The more I'm into the movie, the more bored I look. So you're sitting there, kind of panicking, like 'I can't tell if people like it!' Then afterwards, when people started talking, everyone loved it. If someone jumps or something, you can tell they react, but most of the time when they're paying close attention, there's no reaction at all.

RS: Why was it important for you to cast a big, tall guy like Tyler Mane as the adult Michael? The scary thing about Michael is that he's crazy and you have no idea what he's thinking, right?

RZ: Well, the fact that he's tall doesn't take away the part that he's crazy or any of that. None of that is lessened. Two reasons -- one is that I didn't want to make him supernatural, you know, which he had sort of been. In order for a guy, in the other films, of his size to do the things he was doing, he'd have to be supernatural and have superhuman strength. I didn't want to do that, because I thought that had been done and I wanted to take a different approach. The only way to get somebody who could physically do the things I have him do in this movie would be someone of that size. And I just thought, frankly, he's much more frightening. When he comes crashing through ... You know, people always say that to me -- 'don't you think a normal-sized guy is more frightening? And I go 'F*ck no.' If a normal-sized guy comes at me, I'm not worried. If a guy like Tyler comes at me, I'm f*ckin' worried. I wanted him to be like Frankenstein -- a total monster. And he is. Tyler's great, because he's not ... he used to be a lot bigger. He lost 100 pounds, so he's not really bulky. He's actually pretty slim, but he's just so big. I wanted him to have a physical presence that was different than, you know, the average people in the movie, and he totally does.

With a little over a month to go before the release of Rob Zombie's Halloween, the director has released a whole slew of character posters on his MySpace page. They're not nearly as high-quality as the Golden Compass character sheets we brought you recently -- they all have the same background, so its mostly a cut and paste type of job, but they're not bad. There are posters for pretty much every major character here, from Scout-Taylor Compton as (a presumably smaller-chested) Laurie Strode to Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis. There are two for Michael Myers, one of Tyler Mane as the adult, masked Michael and one of Daeg Faerch as the young Myers, with some kind of party hat pushed up onto his head and a creepy look on his face. There are even some posters for Danny Trejo, William Forsythe and Udo Kier -- I didn't even know the first two were in the movie until seeing these posters.

Also in his MySpace update, Zombie lets fans know that the official website for the film has been updated, with some new images in the cast bio sections. I took a look, and they do look like pics I haven't seen floating around yet, so hop on over if you're a Zombie-head. As of now, Halloween has its ticket punched for August 31, when the competition will be Balls of Fury, the Jennifer Lopez festival film Bordertown and Kevin Bacon's Death Sentence, which is being directed by another horror mainstay, James Wan. Looks like Wan isn't afraid to go head-to-head on this one -- we'll see who wins.

Oftentimes Hollywood's lack of originality leads to overexposed trends. Remember when every action movie seemed to be easily defined as 'Die Hard on a ...'? Remember when disaster movies were all the rage? And then twenty years later when they were all the rage again? Remember when there were like a hundred body-swapping comedies? Well, there appear to be fewer trends these days, or maybe it's just that Hollywood turns trends into full-blown practices, as in the case of sequels, comic book movies and fantasy films based on literary franchises. Nowadays even a promised trend, like the one involving religious Passion of the Christ copycats, isn't necessarily going to happen. But despite there being so few here-today-gone-tomorrow film fads, there's at least seven bad ideas currently in vogue in Tinsel Town, and all of them need to disappear soon, lest they too become permanent.

1. Torture Porn

I'm going to start with an easy, surely obvious one. Torture porn is the latest trend in horror, a genre that changes its predominant style every few years, and it may be the most despised -- at least by us non-horror junkies. I miss the days when a friend, an actual junkie, could drag me to a harmless scary movie that provided a few screams, a few laughs and afterward, at the most, a few silly nightmares. Now, with each new horror movie there's promise of a seriously depressing experience. After watching The Hills Have Eyes, I realized I hadn't been frightened at all. Instead I wanted to cry my heart out. I haven't been to a horror flick since, and my friend is going solo. Sure, I hear that Eli Roth's movies are a lot more enjoyable than watching a young woman raped while watching her father burned alive and her mother raped and then shot in the head, but I just haven't been in the mood to find out.

Apparently the torture porn trend is already on its way out. Hostel II performed poorly at the box office and Captivity may have peaked too soon, reaching maximum tastelessness before even opening in theaters. So what will be next? I'm rather looking forward to when slasher movies are in fashion again, when I can delight in seeing sinful human beings killed off quickly and deservedly by an implausible maniac. Which brings me to the next trend ...

Since John Carpenter's theme music for Halloween is probably one of the most recognized theme songs in movie history, you can imagine the outcry when a MTV interview with director Rob Zombie reported that he was not using the original music in his "re-imagining" of Carpenter's film. In the interview, Zombie was quoted as saying, "The plan was at some point to [remake it], to change it around, the actual way it sounds now doesn't really work with what we're doing." But it looks like all that upset was in vain as Ain't it Cool News has since reported that Zombie has corrected the article on the MySpace page for the film.

Zombie posted "Now I get it, MTV misunderstood what I was saying about the music. Oh well, I am still shooting and haven't even begin to explore the music side of things yet. I always planned on using the original theme since the beginning." Zombie is still promising plenty of changes; including no cameos from original cast members or re-creations of some of Carpenter's famous shots. But he seems determined to keep the music in one form or another -- although I can't help but worry another "re-imagining" could include "Halloween: The Dragula Remix."

The folks over at Bloody-disgusting.com have scored an interesting exclusive -- the first photo of Rob Zombie's new Michael Myers in full costume. For my money, he looks almost exactly the same as the old Michael Myers, although in this shot he looks a little worse for wear. He might have been shooting a scene to take place near the end of the film, rather than the beginning, when his mask would presumably be a bit less dirty and roughed-up. Myers is, of course, played by Tyler Mane, who was Sabretooth in the first X-Men film. Even though Myers looks pretty much exactly the same, Zombie has gone on record as saying that his Halloween is not a shot-for-shot remake but "a bit of a prequel and a remake combined," which sounds, frankly, just confusing to me. Shouldn't horror franchises start caring a little bit more about consistency, or am I just kidding myself?

In other Halloween news, the cast continues to grow -- Zombie announced recently the addition of actor Richard Fancy to the cast. Fancy, who will play a character called Dean Carpenter, is one of those actors who you recognize as soon as you see his face, even though it would be hard to pinpoint from memory a handful of big films he's been in. The major cast is already complete, with 18-year old actress Scout Taylor-Compton taking on the iconic role of Laurie Strode, originally made famous by Jamie Lee Curtis.

The filmmakers behind the remake of John Carpenter's 1978 horror hit Halloween have announced the addition of three new cast members. Kristina Klebe, a young actress whose biggest credit to date is a recurring stint on the television show Rescue Me, will play Lynda Van Der Klok, Laurie Strode's friend who falls victim to Michael Myers in the first film. Udo Kier, a German actor popular with horror fans, has also been cast as Morgan Walker, the head of Smith Grove Sanitarium, where the sororicidal Myers was incarcerated before escaping. As we've reported before, several other notables have already been locked into the cast, including Malcolm McDowell as Dr. Loomis, Dee Wallace-Stone as Cynthia Strode and Brad Dourif as Sheriff Brackett, the role originally played by Charles Cyphers. Tyler Mane, the big guy who played Sabertooth in X-Men, will play 'The Shape' himself.

And so.....who the hell is going to play Laurie Strode? There's been a persistent rumor that the part was down to two young actresses, Canadian Lindy Booth and Blood & Chocolate's Agnes Bruckner, but nothing solid ever materialized on that front. This morning, Zombie has put all speculation to rest -- the part has been handed to Scout-Taylor Compton, a young redhead most known for being in this year's Sundance film An American Crime and several episodes of the television show Charmed.