It’s remarkable that, for someone with the last name Zombie, Rob Zombie just doesn’t get horror. Now three films deep into his cinematic career, it’s undeniably clear that Zombie, who’s made a career in music and film based around his love of horror, doesn’t really understand what makes the genre work. Nowhere is that lack of understanding more on display than in his wholly unnecessary remake of “Halloween,” the 1978 fright flick directed by John Carpenter that set the standard for scary movies for the next decade. Certainly, Zombie has all the right ingredients—gruesome gore, an unstoppable killer, topless teenagers—but the pieces never click. Even worse, Zombie commits the cardinal sin of horror movies: He humanizes the monster.

Zombie’s film roughly follows the same outline as Carpenter’s original. After committing a brutal murder as a child, Michael Myers (portrayed as a youngster by Daeg Faerch and as a man by former pro-wrestler Tyler Mane) is shipped off to an insane asylum. Years later, he escapes and returns to Haddonfield, Ill., his hometown, and embarks on a bloody rampage of slaughter. Following close behind is Dr. Sam Loomis (Malcolm McDowell), a grumpy old psychiatrist convinced that Michael is the embodiment of pure evil.

In Carpenter’s film, Myers was the physical personification of the boogeyman. He was an unfathomable silent killer with no personality and, seemingly, no motive. But Zombie takes a different, much more questionable route. Armed with a host of cameos by genre actors and a soundtrack of classic rock’s greatest hits, Zombie sets out to explore how Michael became a fearsome killer. To do so, the director delves into Myers’ adolescence, and it’s an ugly picture—a stripper mom (Sheri Moon Zombie) with a drunk live-in boyfriend; a trampy, uncaring sister; and the unwelcome attention of bullies at school. It’s no wonder, then, that Michael turns to mutilating small animals as a coping mechanism. Eventually, Michael’s rage becomes so all-consuming that he slaughters his sister, her boyfriend and his mom’s beau. Michael isn’t evil—he just needs a hug. And maybe a haircut.

Making Michael Myers a sympathetic character is a terrible choice that, ultimately, is the downfall of Zombie’s film. The audience can’t fully be scared by someone they’re rooting for, and after witnessing the awfulness of young Michael’s life, it’s hard not to feel at least a tiny bit sorry for the little guy. Once you feel sorry for Michael, it’s hard to be scared of him, even if he’s wielding a big-ass butcher knife.

It also doesn’t help that Zombie spends a full hour on this half-baked, boring back story, wrecking any momentum the film might have built. The second half of the film, detailing Michael’s stalking of Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton), manages to be somewhat suspenseful, especially during the climax, but it can’t overcome that leaden first hour.

Nor does the audience have anyone to root for. Laurie is blander than the average horror movie heroine, mostly because she’s onscreen all of 15 minutes before the mayhem starts. Meanwhile, Malcolm McDowell’s turn as Dr. Loomis is thoroughly unlikable. He’s an arrogant jerk of a psychiatrist, and McDowell brings a weird sort of crazy exasperation to the role that leaves Loomis looking like a buffoon.

But, of course, the murders are brutal and bloody, and there’s plenty of frontal nudity, so horror fans raised on a steady diet of “Saw” rip-offs will be happy. Subtlety is not Zombie’s game—the phrase “skull-fuck” crops up about 10 minutes into the movie. Zombie seems to have confused “shocking” with “scary,” but even for its explicitness, “Halloween” isn’t remotely shocking, nor is it frightening. The real driving force in horror films is suspense, the feeling of being on high alert for the unexpected. While he can efficiently throw blood on the screen, Zombie can’t muster up any suspense of atmosphere. His direction is too obvious and his characters either bland, unlikable or both.

But, even if there were a few good scares in “Halloween” (and there aren’t), it wouldn’t change the fact that Zombie made a hero out of a villain, making the monster one of us. In the credits of the original film, Myers was called “The Shape,” a distinction that Carpenter said made the killer seem like a force of nature, something entirely inhuman. Instead of this, Zombie’s thrown a killer on the screen who’s more human and more sympathetic than most of his victims. Now, that’s scary—but for all the wrong reasons.