Halloween is the time for scary movies and one of the best scary movies is named Halloween.
There are currently 13 movies in the Halloween franchise – and hopefully no more to come.
On top of that there are five different story lines amongst these movies you can follow that don’t actually intersect with each other, though most start with John Carpenter’s Halloween.
Confusing right?
Well, let’s get unconfused.
The 5 Halloween Movie Story Lines
One: Halloween, Halloween II, Halloween IV: The Return of Michael Myers, Halloween V: The Revenge of Michael Myers, and Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers make up the first story line.
These are all about Michael Myers returning to his hometown of Haddonfield, an obsession he has with Laurie Strode, and the obsessive pursuit to stop Myers by Donald Pleasance’s Dr. Sam Loomis.
Two: Halloween III: Season of the Witch is a standalone movie and has nothing to do with the killer Michael Myers known as the Shape.
Interestingly, the original Halloween is shown on TV during Halloween III, making that movie a movie within its own sequel.
I don’t care for Halloween III at all, but as my friend and horror movie affectionado Brandon Plantz pointed out:
Fans were outraged in 1982 (and perhaps to this day) when the series added this gloriously bizarre tale of a middle-aged man trying to stop diabolic Halloween masks from killing children.
But now, in the time of shape-shaping film canons, it’s easier to appreciate Halloween 3. It is a spooky movie with a killer musical jingle, high-quality genre cinematography by Dean Cundey, and an unsettling cliffhanger ending.
Three: Halloween, Halloween II, Halloween H20 and Halloween: Resurrection
This is the first attempt to ignore previous sequels with Michael Myers, so IV, V, and VI exist according to this storyline.
Gone too is Dr. Loomis as Donald Plasence passed. But the Shape is back, as is Jamie Lee Curtis as the hunted heroine of Haddonfield, Laurie Strode.
Four: Rob Zombie did a remake of Halloween in 2007 and followed it up with another Halloween II and 2008.
The first movie is a remake and a re-imagining of John Carpenter’s original, with the inclusion of an origin story for Michael Myers and this Halloween II being a sequel to that movie.
As I don’t believing in making movies that are remakes of a movie that was alreae outstanding in their own right, I never watched either of these.
Five: In 2018 another movie named Halloween came out but it’s not a remake or re-imagining.
This Halloween is a sequel to the 1978 movie of the same name.
Halloween (1978), Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends make up their own timeline and ignore everything that came after the first movie.
Except perhaps Halloween III as the skeleton, witch, and pumpkin masks do make their return.
Whew! I think I need a drink after all the effort it took to untangle that mess!
But let’s get to the purpose of this article.
The Essential Halloween Movies
Amongst all of those movies and all the multiple story lines that can be followed, I only consider two of them worth anyone’s viewing time.
Halloween (1978)
If you watch only one Halloween movie (or one horror slasher movie) this is without a doubt the one to watch.
John Carpenter’s movie is the quintessential scary movie to watch at Halloween, with a synthesizer score than will give you goose pimples just hearing it.
The story is straight forward and eerie.
On Halloween 1963, a 6 year old boy named Michael Myers came home and without word or provocation murdered his older sister Judith.
Forward to October 30, 1978. Michael’s psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis has become convinced that his patient is pure evil and must be incarcerated for the rest of his natural life.
But on the night of his transfer to a more secure state facility, Michael escapes from the Smith’s Grove mental hospital.
Myers returns home to Haddonfield, kills for a set of blue overalls, and steals his iconic mask before stalking teenager Laurie Strode and her friends as she babysits little Tommy Doyle and Lindsey Wallace.
With Halloween being over 40 years old, you might be wondering if this movie still holds up.
I was once watching Halloween again at home, and at a very tense moment towards the end of the movie someone texted me.
I leaped off the couch!
If that’s not an indicator that a movie made in the late 70s is still scary, then I don’t know what is.
Halloween (2018)
40 years later, two investigative journalists are working on a true crime podcast about the Haddonfield Babysitter Murders.
They first go to Smith’s Grove where Michael Myers has again been incarcerated after his recapture following his killing spree in 1978.
Dr. Ranbir Sartain, a disciple of the deceased Dr. Loomis, is now Michael Myers’ psychiatrist.
Dr. Sartain allows them to interview his patient before the transferred to another facility that night, as Smith’s Grove is being closed by the state.
The journalists next stop is the compound of the main survivor of October 31, 1978: Laurie Strode.
No longer a helpless victim, Laurie is practically a survivalist who has spend the last four years preparing for Myers to escape again.
Of course, after their meeting with Laurie, the bus transporting the Smith’s Groves patients doesn’t make it to its intended destination.
If it did, Michael Myers wouldn’t be on the loose for another killing spree in his home town and we wouldn’t have a movie.
This Halloween pays sincere homage to the first Halloween.
It provides plenty of fan service plus properly reverses the viewer’s anticipation in satisfying ways.
It’s hard to watch this movie and not think of Terminator 2: Judgement Day.
Sarah Conner’s character transformation between The Terminator and T2 are virtually identical to Laurie Strode’s between the Halloween’s of 1978 and 2018.
Sarah and Laurie both were frightened prey in their first on screen appearances.
In their returns, they both have been preparing for the dark day each know is coming.
Sarah knows the truth about the Terminator. Laurie knows the truth about the Shape.
No one believes them. Their children are taken away from them by the state.
Yet they wait and they prepare for the day they know is coming.
And when it comes they both kick ass.
This Halloween is indeed the perfect sequel to John Carpenter’s Halloween — and its most satisfying conclusion to this horror story.
What About Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends?
So satisfying and successful was Halloween 2018, you knew it had to spawn its own sequel and one more.
I had great hope for these two follow up installments, but like so much that comes out of Hollywood these days, making money was far more important than telling the best story possible.
Halloween Kills had so much amazing potential — especially with bringing more characters back from the original Halloween and digging in to how Michael was captured alive back in 1978.
But the movie repeated the biggest mistake of Halloween II by confining Laurie Strode to a hospital bed for pretty much the entirety of the movie.
I would have been fine with Halloween Kills if Halloween Ends came along and closed the deal.
It did not. Sadly, a more honest title for Halloween Kills would be Halloween Fails, as fails this movie die.
As a writer, I don’t typically dump on other people’s work, even if I dislike it.
It’s hard to create a good story that works on every level. That’s why writing is a craft. It takes time and effort, struggle and the willingness to improve all the time.
Even when you do get it right, you’re still not going to satisfy everyone that reads or sees or hears your story.
However, as both a writer and a fan of the Halloween movies, I don’t understand what happened here.
Was it laziness or were David Gordon Green being too clever by half and ignoring everything they got right with bringing Halloween back in 2018?
Neither Laurie Strode nor Michael Myers are true to the characters we’ve been watching, at least not until the very end of the movie.
While Halloween Ends has some good parts and a relatively satisfying ending, like Halloween III: The Season of the Witch (whose opening credit scene it emulates) this movie is inconsistent with the rest of the story that’s already been told.
Therefore, I can only recommend the two movies titled Halloween (the one from 1978 and the one from 2018) as the essential movies to view in the 13 movie Halloween series.
Also Worthwhile
If you have Netflix, you should definitely check out The Movies That Made Us third season episode about the making of Halloween.
It’s a great story and provides a ton of insight behind the origin of the movie, its making, and its amazing success.
And if you like a good scare check out my list of scary movies to watch at Halloween and my original spooky story, The Intruder.