In an interview with a group of students at the New York Film Academy, John Carpenter was questioned regarding his opinion on Rob Zombie’s 2007 remake of Halloween. Never one to hold back his opinions, the director offered his unedited thoughts on both Zombie and his redux.

Making reference to a made-for-cable documentary on the Halloween series and one of the statements Zombie made in it, Carpenter said “He lied about me. He said that I was very cold to him when he told me that he was going to make [Halloween]. Nothing could be further from the truth. I said, ‘Make it your own movie, man. This is yours now. Don’t worry about me.’ I was incredibly supportive. Why that piece of shit lied, I don’t know. He had no reason to. Why did he do it?”

“So, frankly, that will color my response to the film,” Carpenter went on to say. “If I take that away, I did not… I thought that he took away the mystique of the story by explaining too much about [Michael Myers]. I don’t care about that. He’s supposed to be a force of nature. He’s supposed to be almost supernatural. And he was too big. It wasn’t normal.”