In 2018 I had never seen a Halloween film. When the trailer for the reboot/legacy sequel was released that year I was so interested in the film that I thought I’d prepare for it by watching every instalment of the series up to that point, then totalling ten. By the time I finished I was so sick of flimsy sequels and grotty remakes that I couldn’t bring myself to watch the film I had started the mad endeavour for in the first place. I wrote a ranking of those ten films in an attempt to convince myself it wasn’t a complete waste of time and left it there. Six years later I’m ready to finish what I started. That 2018 sequel led to a new trilogy and I can now say I’m a Halloween completionist, adding those three new Blumhouse films to the now complete ranking. All the timelines, spin-offs, and reboots: every film starring Michael Myers ranked. Oh, and the one with the Halloween masks that turn children’s heads into snakes using Stonehenge magic.
13 – Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Halloween 6 doesn’t make sense. No seriously, it doesn’t. The film introduces a convoluted mythology to the once simple slasher series, including a barely-explained evil cult, there are huge leaps in logic, and character motivations are a complete mystery. Why does Michael Myers turn on the cult who have secretly been aiding him this whole time and what was the cult’s ultimate goal? We just don’t find out. Apparently, there’s a ‘Producer’s Cut’ out there which actually explains the plot but the theatrical version is completely incomprehensible. Test audiences weren’t happy with the original version so much of the film was reshot but Donald Pleasence – in his fifth and final appearance as Dr Loomis – died before the reshoots, so his scenes remain as they are even though they don’t connect properly to the rest of the film.
The editing is atrocious, making the behind-the-scenes problems totally apparent, with confusing time jumps and random shots of Michael or a knife spliced between every other scene. The film starts well with Michael hunting his niece Jamie and her baby while a mysterious cult watches on and it actually looks pretty good, too. But the further into the running time, the more it unravels and the ending is shockingly awful. A young Paul Rudd can’t save it and Michael has no presence in the film. Sure, he turns up every now and then to kill someone (at one point he electrocutes someone until their head explodes) but he’s not scary or threatening; it’s hardly a horror film. It might be one of the worst films I’ve ever seen because it’s barely a film. I’m shocked it was released in a such a state.
12 – Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
I’m not a huge Halloween fan but my affection for the series has grown over this watch through and Resurrection pissed me off, so I can only imagine how mega-fans feel about the film. The sad thing is that the opening has potential. The first 15 minutes are easily the best and see Laurie Strode – Jaime Lee Curtis back for her fourth Halloween film – locked away in a mental hospital, just like her murderous brother Michael Myers once was, waiting for one last battle. It’s a fine sequence but then she’s suddenly and unceremoniously killed off and the real movie begins. A real bad movie. A new reality show is being filmed from the inside of the Myers household and steamed live on the Internet, but it turns out Michael never left and beneath the home is his deadly lair.
It’s so much a product of its time it’s now embarrassing to watch. Resurrection was clearly influenced by The Blair Witch Project and the “Found Footage” genre, while also seeking to explore the concept of reality TV but never really has a point to make, and every other line has some reference to email, chatrooms and webcasts. There’s something deeply unsettling about seeing the Halloween franchise mix with the early 2000’s aesthetic and music; or maybe there’s just something deeply unsettling with early 2000’s aesthetic and music in general. The film is totally farcical and feels like a spoof, especially when Michael is defeated by Busta Rhymes doing Kung-Fu. It’s a worse film than ‘Curse’ but I’ve got to put it one better just because it’s comprehensible; I could follow the plot. But there were times I wish I couldn’t.
11 – Halloween (2007)
When convoluted continuity and multiple timelines get too confusing: reboot! Rob Zombie’s reboot of Halloween is a really horrible and nasty film. What was a fun slasher series took a dark and depressing turn and I felt icky after watching it; it’s dripping with the torture-porn style that defined mid-2000’s horror. Looking past the awful dialogue and repugnant violence, Zombie tried to take the franchise deeper into the psyche of Michael Myers. I don’t mind exploring Michael’s childhood – if you’re going to reboot Halloween then you might as well take a different route than the original – but the take that we get just isn’t that interesting. The opening shows us that Michael was bullied and had a truly horrible dad and sister but apart from that you don’t get much more than what was in the original. It takes Rob Zombie 25 minutes to do what John Carpenter managed to do in one shot.
The scenes with young Michael in Smith’s Grove, being interviewed by Dr Loomis, are much more interesting and I like the exploration into Michael’s fixation with masks. And then, about 40 minutes into the film, we get the remake of Halloween proper and it’s bad. The worst mistake Zombie makes is having Laurie be a totally unsympathetic and unlikable character. In fact, everyone’s unlikable expect for Loomis and Danny Trejo in a small cameo. You want Michael to kill everyone but then when he does the kills aren’t fun, just nasty. The saving grace is the portrayal of Michael in the film’s second half. He’s well shot, looks good, and they included the heavy breathing from the original which is just as effective as the classic music. From the way they look to the way his characters speak, Rob Zombies films are an acquired taste and I have yet to be able to stomach them.
10 – Halloween 2 (2009)
My reasoning for enjoying the remake’s sequel more than the remake, despite it being a worse film, is that it’s just so incredibly weird. The decisions Zombie makes are truly bizarre but I’m glad he made them, including the opening 23-minute-long dream sequence, Michael’s trippy music video-style hallucinations of his dead mother, a Twin Peaks-inspired white horse, a Weird Al cameo, and Dr Loomis as a completely different character to what he was in the first film. Now he has taken advantage of the killings for profit, writing a tell-all book and making jokes about PG Tips teabags. I think I love this film. Okay, thinking about it I don’t love it but it’s fascinating to watch despite the lack of quality. Issues from the first film remain, like Laurie being incredibly annoying and doing nothing but scream and shout the whole time, and there’s plenty of bad shaky cam. It’s almost not a Halloween film. Zombie just used the first film as a jumping off point to launch his own horror character/mythology under the guise of Michael Myers. I doesn’t work but boy, he sure did try. It’s rubbish but fascinatingly so.
9 – Halloween Kills (2021)
Halloween Kills isn’t a cohesive film, instead feeling like a collection of disparate ideas jammed together in order to stretch a story that could have been one or two films into a trilogy. Laurie is stuck in hospital for the whole movie, never interacting with Michael, so instead the focus is placed on pretty much every other inhabitant of Haddonfield. There’s an extended flashback featuring Sheriff Hawkins, retconned as a childhood friend of Michael who encountered him again in 1978. Because Laurie’s final confrontation is delayed into the next film, it felt like they were setting up a conflict between Hawkins and Michael but then Hawkins spends the rest of the film in hospital, too. Every single character who ever had a run-in with Michael returns and they are all as traumatised and obsessed with the killer as Laurie is, no matter how minor the connection. Kills places so much dramatic weight on the simple, barebones original film that it just can’t support and all the drama falls flat.
There are some cool visuals, good music, and brutal kills but the film feels more like an action movie than a horror. Michael is the star of the film, getting plenty of screentime, but he’s overpowered and not scary. He’s less a slasher villain and more like John Wick, massacring whole groups at a time. Michael being the one being hunted is an interesting idea but Laurie needs to be at the centre of the campaign. I don’t like or believe any of these dumb characters on their crusade. Kills tries to make a point about mob mentality but is at odds with itself: the mob is viewed as bad when they go after the wrong person and then get a hero moment at the end when they catch Michael. Any serious character drama from the previous film is ignored and the film fluctuates between melodrama and terrible comedy, and it never feels like the filmmakers are taking it seriously, destroying the goodwill created from the first in the trilogy.
8 – Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
‘Revenge’ is the Halloween film that just exists. It’s not of the good quality of its predecessor or the bad of its successor. It’s just a bit lame. It’s pretty hard to discuss it because very little actually happens. The wider mythology is teased but doesn’t get explained until ‘Curse’ (if you can call that an explanation), the usually reliable Pleasence is off somewhat, and there’s the very strange inclusion of a goofy pair of cops who are accompanied by some out-of-place jaunty clown music which I just couldn’t believe was actually playing and had to rewind it just to make sure I wasn’t insane.
The plot sees Michael return to Haddonfield a year after his previous rampage, once again chasing his niece Jamie and her adoptive sister’s friends. That’s the odd thing about the story: Michael kills the sister Rachel – who was a big part of the previous film – early on for shock value to show that nobody is safe but then we are supposed to believe that young Jaime wants to save her sister’s friends for the rest of the film. It was a mistake to kill Rachel; she should have been a main character again. I will praise the film for the confrontation at the Myers home at the end and it brings back Michael’s creepy breathing that disappeared from the franchise after the first film. Overall, it’s the most forgettable entry of the franchise but contains nothing unbelievably terrible. Although, the film even struggles with basic maths because it says the events of the first film took place 12 years prior when it was in fact 11 years.
7 – Halloween 2 (1981)
Like with ‘Revenge’, Halloween 2 is a film I don’t feel too strongly about and is merely okay. Which is a shame considering John Carpenter and Debra Hill were involved and wrote the screenplay, even if they did so begrudgingly. Like a lot of the sequels, it starts off really well. Picking up straight after the first film, we again see Michael stalk the homes of Haddonfield, shot in long POV takes like the original’s prologue and with an incredible version of the theme tune. It’s when the action moves almost exclusively to a hospital that the film becomes dull.
The hospital workers we follow while Laurie is asleep are pretty uninteresting and get killed off predictably and slowly. Once Laurie awakens and is again chased by Michael the film picks up and Loomis chasing after Michael is great. The film is notable for introducing the familial connection between Laurie and Michael and I don’t mind it. Michael has always been a conflicted character in my eyes. On one hand he’s supposed to be pure evil, credited only as The Shape, and acting as the Bogeyman and yet he’s given a human origin story in the very first scene of the franchise and is referred to as “Michael” so him having a personal connection to his victims can work for me.
6 – Halloween: H20 (1998)
Simplicity is both H20’s greatest strength and weakness. On one hand it was wise to ignore the complex and convoluted continuity of sequels past and embrace its more streamlined slasher roots. And yet on the other hand its disappointingly shallow and character work is exchanged for scares. The film sees the return of Jaime Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, making her first appearance since Halloween 2, and this is the perfect place to explore just how that terrifying night twenty years ago shaped her as a person but it’s not as deep as I would like. She has nightmares and hallucinations of Michael and there’s one clipped mention of alcoholism but that’s about it.
It’s hard not to view the film as a missed opportunity – especially retrospectively with knowledge of the Blumhouse trilogy – but looking past that it’s an enjoyable slasher flick. It’s silly and schlocky but in a way that’s quite charming, LL Cool J as an erotic literature-writing school security guard is good fun, and it maintains a steady distance from the pure ridiculousness of ‘Resurrection’. Overall, the film is very slight but what’s there is good; as a revenge slasher film it’s a decent watch.
5 – Halloween (2018)
It’s hard not to look at the 2018 reboot as H20 done right. Or at least done better. Catching up to Laurie Strode 40 years after her encounter with Michael Myers rather than 20, this ‘legacy sequel’ explores the character depth and trauma I felt was missing from the earlier film. But it might actually take it too far instead. I don’t know if I buy just how far they push Laurie into being a suicidal survivalist but at least Jaime Lee Curtis is given something to chew on and the film offers more depth than past sequels. The recreated shots from the original but with Laurie instead of Michael are a cool touch.
There’s a lot of telling rather than showing, and some weird humour I don’t think fits, in the film’s first half but it all comes together in the second. When shit goes down and Michael is released, I think it’s great. The three generations of Strode women have an interesting dynamic and it’s great seeing them come together to face the personification of their generational trauma. Michael himself is on good form, the long shot of him entering different houses on a killing spree is one of the best in the series, and the film balances Myers as just a guy, now older, but also perhaps as an evil force well. It doesn’t venture into the overpowered silliness of the sequel, Kills. I also really like the doctor character who, in a nice subversion, is revealed to be an anti-Loomis.
4 – Halloween Ends (2022)
I hated Halloween Ends right up until the moment I fell in love with it. Supposedly the last in the modern trilogy, for most of the film it feels like anything but. As a sequel it’s dreadful. Laurie feels like a brand new version of the character, the quirky grandma baking pies and laughing and smiling when after her daughter’s death she should be even more messed up. Michael, set up as an unstoppable machine ready for a rematch with Laurie in ‘Kills’ is now old and weak, hiding in a cave. It’s a terrible continuation but an interesting film in its own right, like a new attempt at the original Halloween III yet remaining, just about, in continuity with the other films.
The film is less about Michael and more his influence on the town creating a new monster. With him hiding under the town like a character from legend or myth, Haddonfield needs someone to hate and this aura of evil infects people, with the film ambiguous as to whether it’s a literal infection or purely metaphorical. Haddonfield has become an incubator for evil and Laurie has to defeat the new host and exorcise the town. Michael has limited screentime and instead the film is a much slower study on new character Corey as he becomes a new masked killer. ‘Ends’ has a surprisingly low body count and often feels like a straight drama. After exhausting the original Halloween in ‘Kills’, David Gordon Green instead decides to ape John Carpenter’s Christine instead. The film does revert back to Michael vs Laurie at the end, which feels strange after the rest of the film. The ending could be edited onto the end of ‘Kills’ and it would make more sense. ‘Ends’ is a terrible ending of the trilogy, a slightly better ending for the franchise, but bizarrely one of the better and richest individual instalments of the series. An underappreciated gem I feel will be looked on more favourably in a few years’ time.
3 – Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982)
Halloween 3 is one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen. It’s not bad per say… okay, scratch that, it is bad. In fact, it’s pretty damn terrible, but so entertaining to watch. The producers tried to make Halloween an anthology series, wanting each film to be a different horror story set on the creepy titular holiday. Season of the Witch is the lone example of this experiment, leaving the film as the odd-one-out black sheep of the franchise. And it sure is odd. It sees a doctor track down a factory producing novelty Halloween masks after the death of one of his patients who was holding one and raving about it when he died. It turns out the masks have a chipping of Stonehenge (which was recently stolen!) within them which will kill the kid wearing it when a specific television advert plays on Halloween night, turning their brains into snakes, killing anyone else close by.
The perpetrator of such a crime turns out to be an Irish druidic cult leader businessman who has an enforcement squad of Westworld-style robots. Seriously, that’s what the film’s about. And even with all that craziness, the weirdest thing about the film is that the protagonist is a middle-aged male doctor played by Tom Atkins. This is 80’s horror, the domain of the scream queens, and the decision to go for Atkins as the lead baffles me. It’s incredibly silly but I’ve placed it here on my list because it makes for a fun watch and is at least trying to say something about big businesses and consumerism. It fails in that regard but at least it was reaching for something greater than its slasher contemporaries and I’ve felt the urge to revisit this oddity far more than any other film in the series. I fear it might be brainwashing me, or maybe I like it because it’s essentially a James Bond film.
2 – Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
Halloween 4 is by far the best sequel. While even some the worst Halloween films have had fairly good openings, the opening of ‘Return’ might be the worst part of the film. It’s still enjoyable but the central conceit of the sequel takes a bit of explaining. It turns out Michael and Dr Loomis survived the fiery explosion at the end of the second film. Ten years have passed and Michael is in a coma before awakening on Halloween night to go after Jaime Strode. Jaime is Laurie’s 8-year-old daughter who is living with her adoptive family after Laurie died in a car accident between movies. Once the backstory is out of the way however, the film is a fast, fun, and entertaining romp.
‘Return’ is well directed and Donald Pleasence gives his best performance as Dr Loomis, trumping his previous efforts by being even more entertainingly manic in his hunt for Michael. Speaking of good performances, Danielle Harris plays the young Jaime and gives one of the best horror movie child performances I’ve ever seen. Sure, the film gets a bit silly at times with the aged Dr Loomis having to swan dive over some barrels to protect himself from an exploding gas station but it knows the tone that it’s going for and is enjoyable throughout, including its moments of silliness. It embraces the slasher genre that the first film helped spawn and the ending is brilliant, even though the sequel completely ruins it. I really do love ‘Return’ and it might now get a place on my list of horror movies I have to watch during the Halloween season every year – along with the original.
1 – Halloween (1978)
Were you expecting something else in the number 1 spot? What’s there to be said about the original Halloween that hasn’t already been said a million times before? Its simplistic brilliance has yet to be matched, with Carpenter’s direction, memorable score, tight screenplay (with Debra Hill) and the performance of Jaime Lee Curtis all being pretty damn perfect. I admit, I might find Halloween 4 to be the more watchable movie, but there’s no denying the excellence on display in the original. No subsequent film has come close to portraying Michael Myers in such a terrifying light. He’s “The Shape.” Pure unstoppable evil and the scenes with him stalking Laurie in broad daylight are among the most effective horror sequences on film and his murderous rampage in the film’s final act never disappoints. One of the most influential films ever made, regardless of genre.
