It’s no secret that Rob Zombie had a miserable time making Halloween and Halloween II, his two most commercially successful films and yet the two biggest nightmares of his career as a filmmaker. In a new chat with Forbes, Zombie reflects on the behind the scenes chaos.
“Making Halloween with the Weinsteins was a miserable experience for me, and so I was very reticent to do the second one,” Zombie told the site. “I did do the second one, and I thought, ‘Okay, well the first one was a miserable experience, but it did well, so maybe it’ll be easier the second time?’ It was worse. Oh my God. I felt like they weren’t trusting me on the first one because they wanted to make sure it was a hit and now they weren’t trusting me not to fuck up their hit.”
He continued, “They would show me scenes from Halloween to try and make a point and I’d be like, ‘Yeah, I know. I made that movie. Why do you show me that like I’ve never seen it before?’ We made a behind the scenes documentary for the making of Halloween. That has somehow gotten lost in the vaults. That shows how messed up everything was and what was going on when we were making those movies.”
Post-Halloween, Zombie joined forces with producer Jason Blum and stepped way outside the box with The Lords of Salem, a film that provided him with complete creative freedom.
“After Halloween, when I had gone through the studio system and I was so tortured by it, Jason came and pitched to me like, ‘We’ll give you 100% of the money you need, we’ll stay 100% creatively out of your way, we won’t say anything, and you can do literally whatever you want.’ That sounded like the greatest thing ever and was the exact opposite experience I just had for three straight years with Halloween,” Zombie told Forbes. “Salem was probably my weirdest movie yet.”
You can check out Zombie’s 3 from Hell in theaters beginning tonight, September 16.
