Ranking The Nights He Came Home: The Ultimate Guide to the Halloween Franchise
Welcome to your ultimate guide to the Halloween franchise
The air has a chill in it. Jack o’lanterns adorn the neighbors’ porches. Leaves cover the sidewalk. A silent tall figure stalks the streets holding a butcher’s knife looking to murder his family members. Or maybe he’s just stalking Jamie Lee Curtis because she went up to his old house. Or maybe he is actually related to her. Or maybe he’s possessed by a druid’s curse!
Welcome to your ultimate guide to the Halloween franchise: A series that has no fewer than five separate storylines over the course of 13 films, all of which vary widely in quality. Get your masks on and start cranking that iconic piano theme.
It’s time for the ultimate guide to the Halloween franchise!
Not Ranked: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
It is a cheat to put Season of the Witch outside the full ranking of the franchise. But Season of the Witch is a Halloween franchise film in name only, and very well may have done better with audiences had it completely eschewed the Halloween brand name. The film tells the deranged story of the attempted (?) mass murder of millions of children at the hands of an Irish-run Halloween mask company (that also mastered the creation and programming of androids). The story is truly one of a kind in horror history: what other film can be fairly described as anti-Irish, anti-consumerist, anti-television, and anti-child?
Everything about the movie is dripping with Halloween spirit: the cinematography and music just ooze atmosphere (seriously, try getting the Silver Shamrock jingle out of your head). There’s an effective sense of dread hanging over the proceedings as director Tommy Lee Wallace threads enough mystery that builds to a satisfying and genuinely disturbing payoff (again, the movie is incredibly anti-child). The number of creative elements on display (Stonehenge! Androids! Ancient Celtic curses!) means that Season of the Witch has become a cult classic for good reason: Its strangeness and ability to create some memorably insane and disturbing moments will stick with audiences long after the Silver Shamrock jingle fades away.
12.) Halloween Resurrection (2002)
One of the consistently positive through-lines of the entire franchise is that it never quite descends into self-parody in the same manner as the later entries in the Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th series. The closest the series comes, though, is 2002’s risible Halloween Resurrection.The premise involves a group of teens and 20-somethings who are enlisted to participate in an Internet reality show (hilariously titled “Dangertainment, captained by Busta Rhymes) by staying in the decrepit Myers house overnight while being filmed by hidden cameras.
There’s a kernel of a smart idea about burgeoning internet culture and reality television’s conflation of reality and fiction, but it is lost underneath a dull movie that’s short on scares and memorable kills. When the most memorable part of the film involves Busta Rhymes doing karate to defeat Michael Myers while uttering the cringe-inducing catchphrase “trick or treat, motherfucker,” something is very wrong with your Halloween movie.
11.) Halloween II (2009)
Rob Zombie concludes his vision of his humanized Michael Myers in a sequel that feels half-finished. Zombie deserves credit for doubling down on his idea of what the character of Michael Myers is, but the film feels haphazard in a manner that suggests serious production problems. Myers, who somehow survived being shot in the head at point-blank range at the end of the preceding movie, is now haunted by visions of his dead mother and a white horse while Laurie wrestles with the psychological aftermath. Zombie doubles down on the “family is destiny” theme of the first and takes the story in a new direction from the same-old, familiar formula he emulated in the second half of his first remake. Credit goes to him for trying to shake the franchise up, given how stale the second half of his first remake feels, but the film just feels too slapdash to capitalize on any of the ideas it introduces.
Credit should go to the cast, highlighted by a scenery-chewing Malcolm McDowell as a more blustery and arrogant Loomis, Danielle Harris as a more mature and empathetic Annie, and Scout Taylor-Compton as a traumatized Laurie. There’s just not enough meat on the bones to fully experience what Zombie is trying to do with his vision. What we do get is weighed down by his need to be as excessive as possible in every creative decision he makes. The result feels both needlessly gratuitous and frustratingly incomplete.
10.) Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
Halloween 6 falls into the category of “movies with production histories that are far more interesting than the movies themselves.” The film famously has two very different versions, the theatrical cut and the producer’s cut, but they both have the same problem: neither of them are good. Curse has the unenviable task of picking up on a series running on fumes, and tries to provide the most comprehensive explanation for Michael’s apparent immortality. It’s a silly and convoluted explanation, and its attempts to tie the series together fall flat.
The theatrical cut goes completely off the rails with a bizarre cloning subplot and an incoherent action sequence that looks and feels very much like the franchise throwing anything at the wall to see what sticks. The Producer’s Cut is more coherent, but the finale is underwhelming and anticlimactic. Either way, Curse is not worth your time, and only gets points for trying to provide a climax that ties the preceding movies together. Again, the production history here is significantly more compelling than the movies themselves. Donald Pleasance’s last turn in the franchise deserved better.
9.) Halloween (2007)
The biggest issues with Zombie’s Halloween are that half of it is an origin story explaining the background of a character whose whole raison d’etre is to be a supernatural, unexplainable force of evil, and then the other half is a beat-by-beat recreation of the original, only condensed into a little less than an hour. Explaining Myers’s backstory is not necessarily a bad idea, but Zombie does it in the least imaginative ways possible: not only is Myers inherently a monstrous child who tortures animals, but he is also relentlessly bullied, and he is also treated terribly by his alcoholic, homophobic, abusive stepfather. And Zombie’s decision to depict Michael as fully human saps the film of any atmospheric dread or ambiguity – and also confuses the ending where Michael is clearly killed, only for the sequel to inexplicably resurrect him.
But in terms of sheer slasher-y goodness, the movie is very satisfying, as Zombie’s direction excels at depicting Myers as significantly more physically imposing than he is in prior films. The kills are relentless and gory and often border on sheer gratuity. No one has accused Zombie of being a subtle filmmaker, and his grindhouse aesthetic transposed into the suburbia of Haddonfield makes for a fun combination. Overall, it is a middling entry that feels like it has the desire behind it to try to steer the franchise in new directions, but then falls back on the iconography and familiarity of the original in its second half, making it nothing more than a pale imitation.
8.) Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
The biggest sin this entry commits is failing to capitalize on its predecessor’s dynamite twist ending. Revenge is a mostly bland entry that retreads most of Return’s greatest hits. Danielle Harris’s performance as Jamie Lloyd does most of the heavy lifting in this one, and the only real moments of terror involve Jamie (who, mind you, is a nine-year-old girl) in serious peril. This is perhaps the entry in the franchise that feels most like it’s grasping at story ideas and a direction. Very little plot actually occurs, and yet the movie is somehow 10 minutes longer than Return.
The idea of the psychic connection between Michael and Jamie is executed better than another ignominious sequel to establish a psychic connection between its antagonist and protagonist. And the film does manage to build a fairly tense finale out of an extended sequence of Michael hunting Jamie around his old house. But the inclusion of the unexplained Man in Black just makes the whole film feel like a series of studio notes put on screen as the producers are a little too keen on explaining plot points in the next entry. Moreover, the scenes of Michael stalking his victims feel interminable and added just to paper over the thin plot. Revenge is not necessarily terrible, it just commits the cardinal sin of being the most forgettable movie in the franchise. Unlike the film, this review will not extend itself further than necessary.
7.) Halloween II (1980)
Picking up where the first left off with a bigger budget, the continuation has its moments with a couple of satisfying kills, but it already feels like Carpenter is running on creative fumes (he has admitted as much in subsequent interviews). But II is not without its pleasures, including a fantastic opening scene of the franchise that lets Donald Pleasance start to really relish in Loomis’s increasing mental instability. The characters are not as memorable as the first, but setting the primary action in a hospital gives the action a fresh, more expansive, but still claustrophobic feeling. And there’s a lack of urgency to much of the proceedings that makes the movie feel far more inessential than its predecessor.
Indeed, its decision to make Laurie Michael’s sister set the franchise on its course to eventual irrelevance. Perhaps it was inevitable that if the producers wanted to bring Jamie Lee Curtis back, they would have to explain why Michael was so obsessed with killing her. It’s far more frightening to think about Michael stalking Laurie and her friends in the first film simply because Laurie walked up to Michael’s old house to deliver a key and Michael decided to follow her. That sort of arbitrariness in Michael’s killing is part of what makes the first film so effective, and is a nihilism modeled in other more recent horror classics. So while Halloween II is one of the better sequels, it also signals the franchise’s departure from its core idea about the existence of evil.
6.) Halloween Kills (2021)
Kills follows in the original Halloween II’s mold of resuming the action right after its predecessor’s ending. What makes Kills underrated is how subversive a movie it is (although not quite as subversive as its follow-up). Almost every single storyline the filmmakers set up ends up paying off in the least heroic way possible. The mob that forms to take matters into their own hands to protect Haddonfield? Not only do they end up getting an innocent mental patient killed, but when they finally do find Michael, he ends up being the one to massacre them all. The film also heavily suggests that Sheriff Hawkins made the wrong decision in stopping the execution of Michael after his initial capture in 1978, which he credits to the fact that he couldn’t help but think that Michael was “someone’s baby.” And even after Karen’s seemingly second consecutive triumph over Michael and saving of her daughter, she is brutally murdered as the final note the film ends on.
All of this adds up to a film that lacks the tension and suspension of its two predecessors, and revels in its gory excesses and relies on clunky dialogue and a little too much filler, but that is so determined to play on its audience’s expectations that it marks a fascinating experiment in franchise filmmaking. It suggests that there is no heroism in the face of pure evil, that attempts to take matters into your own hands can not just result in the deaths of innocent people, but in your own death, that the only answer to pure evil is to try to destroy it while knowing full well your efforts could be futile. Kills plays out like a knife to the stomach and will leave a sour taste in the audience’s mouths, but it is a film that can be appreciated as a follow-up that’s entirely interested in undermining the closure the filmmakers provided the audience with in the film before.
5.) Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
After going off the rails with the “Curse of Thorn” storyline, H20 smartly takes the franchise back to basics with this tense and hugely underrated continuation of the Halloween ‘78 – Halloween II storyline. Jamie Lee Curtis returns as a traumatized Laurie living under a fake name in California where she oversees a boarding school. The movie takes place completely outside of Haddonfield, and the change in scenery is a useful indication of a movie trying to freshen up into the series. It does so by emulating the structure of the original, producing one of the best sequels of the series.
After a sufficiently unnerving opening that catches the viewer up on this new continuity, the film holds back any further Michael Myers mayhem until the third act. While the set-up relies on too many fake-out jump scares, it’s an effective slow-burn that stretches out the tension into the third act. When the killing starts, the movie is effectively tense and scary, and the Michael-Laurie showdown feels raw and earned. What really helps H20 succeed is a smart script that does feel like it’s lifted directly out of the Scream movies, but it gives a rhythm and sense of humor to the proceedings that was missing from previous entries. The simple stakes, the fresh setting, and the strong performances all carry a film that at 87 brisk minutes, does not overstay its welcome.
4.) Halloween Ends (2022)
While Ends was poorly received on its release, it’s bound to find a devoted fan base drawn to its big creative swings and emphasis on themes and ideas. Ends opens with the best opening scene of the franchise, a brilliantly tense sequence that plays off audience expectations and sets the tone for the rest of the film, which is the most clear attempt by David Gordon Green and company to try to subvert the creative decisions made in the first entry in the trilogy.
Instead of focusing on Michael Myers, the lion’s share of Ends’s attention rests on Corey Cunningham, the unfortunate protagonist of the bloody opening scene who becomes the boogeyman Haddonfield sets its sights on in Michael’s absence. It’s a bold decision to make the final film of the trilogy a story about how a combination of evil, nature, and bad fortune send an innocent young man down a dark and destructive path. The film is chock-full of ideas about the influence of trauma on communities and families, trauma that lurks underneath the surface but never quite rears its ugly head. It is a patient, more thoughtful film than any other Halloween film, and it is not afraid to play around with symbolism or to linger on moments, such as how the camera constantly lingers shots of characters’ faces and eyes as they confront the evil inside Corey.
The fundamental problem is that the film falls back on the expected Michael/Laurie showdown in the final 15 minutes, which feels practically perfunctory. This makes Ends an uneven conclusion to the trilogy, and it is understandable that audiences rejected it. It rewards rewatching, though, takes huge risks, and tries to be an intelligent and big franchise film instead of just standard slasher fare. Audiences should reevaluate it in the coming years and give it the credit it deserves.
3.) Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
This is perhaps a little too generous to a movie whose existence was wiped out three entries later and is associated with the much-loathed “Curse of Thorn” storyline. But Halloween 4 is a surprising breath of fresh air, and is the sequel to the original that we really needed. The film simply does not get the credit it deserves. It is undermined by a generally cheaper look, but Return packs a lot into a brisk, quickly-paced hour and a half.
The first impression Return makes is a spectacular opening credits sequence that eschews the Halloween theme for an ambience that incorporates the sound of wind blowing, emphasizing the isolation of the setting. It’s a choice that could be in any autumn-set movie, but it effectively pulls the audience into a rural farmland setting – a frontier soaked in Americana ready to be torn apart. The film explores ideas that future entries would return to repeatedly, especially Halloween Kills: Michael’s obsession with returning to his childhood home, the formation of an angry mob that ends up doing more harm than good, the panic running throughout Haddonfield. It’s all here in Return, and while the movie does not dwell on these ideas or delve into them as much as Kills does, they provide an effective backdrop and scale for the film’s action.
The film’s violence certainly delivers, exacting on characters who are thinly, but effectively sketched. Director Dwight H. Little films a couple of death scenes with some memorable panache. The ending is one of the few risks in this timeline: Jaime, evidently possessed by Michael, murders her mother in a sequence emulating the opening of the original. The closing shot of her standing motionless holding a bloody pair of scissors in her clown costume as Loomis screams in despair is a great, memorable image for the film to end on, and sets the franchise on a potentially transformative track. It’s a shame Revenge decides to just play the greatest hits and re-tread so much of what makes Return work so well. But we can appreciate that the accursed “Curse of Thorn” trilogy gave us at least one truly great sequel.
2.) Halloween (2018)
One of the biggest horror hits of all time deserves the accolades. David Gordon Green’s take on the franchise is one of the most satisfying, crowd-pleasing movies to come out in recent memory, and while certainly derivative of the original, it distinguishes itself by staying true to the original’s themes.
At the heart of Halloween is the choice between trying to understand evil, or simply trying to confront it and destroy it. This choice informs Rob Zombie’s decision to try to humanize, and thus explain, Michael Myers. Gordon Green goes in the fully opposite direction by repeatedly emphasizing the point that anyone who tries to understand Michael will end up destroyed by him in one manner or another. The podcasters, Michael’s doctor – any character who attempts to understand or pathologize Michael ends up dead. It’s a theme that is hammered home throughout, and it speaks to Carpenter’s original vision for the character and gives the franchise its central theme: that evil exists, and it must be defeated at all costs. The film’s decision to get back to basics and emphasize the randomness and nihilism of Michael’s killing is its most effective creative decision. Watching Michael terrorize Haddonfield at will hammers home the suburban horror that the original spoke to so well, and gets the franchise away from any discussions of curses or thorns.
The film also draws heavily on H20’s depiction of an alcoholic, broken Laurie who failed at becoming a parent because of her obsession with Michael. Curtis does not hold much back in playing Laurie as a borderline-doomsday prepper who has completely cut herself off from the world while waiting for Michael to return. Removing the familial connection also emphasizes the back-to-basics approach, although it does force the script to do some creative backflips to get Michael and Laurie to face off against each other. But when they do, boy is it satisfying. The plays on the iconic moments from the first film are extremely apparent nods to fans. On re-watch, it is clear that Green and company poured everything they had into this first entry in their trilogy and emptied the bag, causing the subsequent entries to feel underwhelming in comparison. But these are creative decisions that paid off at the box office by attracting new fans to the franchise, even if they backed Green and company into a corner for subsequent entries. Depending on your tolerance for Kills and Ends, you can watch the original and this one as a perfect one-two punch of Michael Myers slasher goodness.
1.) Halloween (1978)
The original remains unapproachable more than four decades after its release. So much has already been written about why Halloween is such a timeless horror film, and why it still resonates with audiences today.
Everything about the film is so perfectly calibrated: from the haunting opening POV shot to the extended sequences of Michael stalking Laurie and her friends to the solid dialogue between Laurie and her friends, a huge credit to Carpenter’s co-writer Debra Hill (seriously, compare the dialogue in this to the dialogue in Zombie’s remake and you see exactly how important it was to have Hill’s writing to make the characters feel like actual human beings).
One thing that is underappreciated and that the gorier sequels miss is how restrained Carpenter’s directing and editing are. After the opening murder, we don’t see Michael kill another person on-screen until more than 50 minutes into the film. In fact, the film doesn’t even provide significant sustained violence until the last 15 minutes when Michael’s designs come to fruition. It’s a masterclass in how to create a slow-burn but still tense slasher story. And Carpenter does this without needing to rely on false jump-scares or fake-outs, as so many less confident and lazier slasher movies (even a couple in this franchise!) do so often to keep the audience interested. Carpenter instead has total confidence in his and Hill’s ability to create thinly sketched but still real-enough feeling characters to get the audience invested.
Another large part of what makes the Halloween franchise so resonant over the years is the score. The first one demonstrates how a very simple theme can be used over and over again with effectiveness. Indeed, the whole franchise’s soundtracks (with Carpenter and Alan Howarth being the primary contributors) make every entry stand out in some way, especially when Michael’s slasher peers don’t have themes that are nearly as instantly recognizable and iconic. The theme in the first is the first impression the viewer gets of the film, and it is the most lasting one.
The original Halloween encapsulates why the franchise has lived on for more than 40 years: it’s a straightforward story that works on one level as a simple slasher movie, another level as a suburbia-invasion story, another level as a time-capsule of a morality tale about teenage misbehavior, and yet another level as a meditation on the terrifying arbitrariness of evil and the responsibility of the strong to act even when futile. You can first encounter the movie at a Halloween movie night as a fun, tense, murder-filled romp. You can revisit later in life and see the universal terror posed by a figure as relentless as Michael Myers invading the security of the characters’ homes. Forget the curses and ancient druids; one of the primary reasons why the original Halloween endures is its horror is relatable to everyone who watches.
Good stuff, Graham! Very helpful for those of us who need some scary movie/horror movie gaps filled in.
I’ve watched only one Halloween movie in my life—and I’m glad that it was ranked No. 2 😂 A great read, man! Get started on your definitive Halloween franchise book.