The masked Michael Myers of the Halloween horror series is back in Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2, a movie which he had said did not interest him. But apparently he did become interested in directing it and he’s taken it to a different level of horror, now focusing the story on the survivors of Halloween 1.

Unable to move away from the John Carpenter legacy in the first movie, Zombie, shown here with his typical White Zombie band rocker-musician look, had given himself the creative freedom to do what he had wanted in the remake of the sequel—or rather his own reimagining of it. Zombie’s style takes on a more psychological approach to unraveling the character of Myers who has been described or depicted as pure evil in the original films, never mind his psychiatric condition when he escaped the mental asylum to commit a chain of murders.

The movie prop mask—now a popular movie collectibles item in Halloween—was Carpenter’s idea to make Myers less human and as a fearsome presence that was just there to torment and kill. A back story wasn’t the basis for his existence. Myers was just placed in the story as the living and resurrecting demon whose existence and purpose in the movie was to give a good scare by killing people on screen and it didn’t really seem matter if the victims deserved it or not.

Zombie, who's popularity is fast rising, took Myers as a character and gave him a background and a human side. He escaped the institution to get back to (not get back at) his sister, and along the way, meeting with circumstances that drove out his murdering tendencies. He was an uncured madman on the loose. In Halloween 2, he’s worse than ever and the survivors’ nightmare isn’t over.