The Halloween Franchise

[Tank]

I generally rewatch at least a couple of these every October. It' one of the most convoluted continuities out there, and one of the most sequel-heavy franchises there is with eleven films. I've always preferred Michael Myers over Jason. Obviously I have a soft spot for Leatherface, and Freddy is my favorite of all the vintage 80s icons... but the vibe of the Halloween films has always been the best.

For funsies, a few months back I made a graphic to explain the continuity (attached). In case you're reading this and didn't know, there's basically FIVE different continuities:

1. The original continuity, which covers Halloween 1 and 2, then 4, 5, and 6.

2. Halloween 3, which is a spin-off in its own little world, and you see the original Halloween playing on a TV at one point.

3. The H20 timeline, which consists of Halloween 1 and 2, then H20, then Resurrection.

4. The Rob Zombie directed reboot series, which has a remake of the original Halloween, then a sequel.

5. The more recent series, which consisted of the original Halloween, then the new Trilogy of Halloween 2018, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends.

 

Here's my preference:

Halloween (78)

Halloween 4

Halloween II (81)

H2O

Halloween (18)

Halloween (07)

Halloween Ends

Halloween Kills

Halloween 3

Halloween 5

Halloween 6

Halloween II (09)

Halloween Resurrection

 

Anyone else into these films? Or casually watching the in October?

[Tank]

Wow, does Nightly ever compress the crap out of images...

[Darth Krawlie]

I’ve seen Halloween! But only the first one. The idea of all these continuities blows my mind

[Zathras]

The only ones I watch are 1, 2 and 3.  I don't have much use for the rest.  

[Tank]

43 minutes ago, Darth Krawlie said:

I’ve seen Halloween! But only the first one. The idea of all these continuities blows my mind

This is what happens when the guy who owns the IP will continually just license it out to studios. Somebody makes a set of movies, then when their lines expires, he sells to somebody else. In the last one made, from last year, they literally put

Michael Myers through an industrial shredder and turned him to chunky salsa

and yet last week, Miramar landed the IP to make more.

[Tank]

42 minutes ago, Zathras said:

The only ones I watch are 1, 2 and 3.  I don't have much use for the rest.  

Aw, #4 is peak 80s slasher fun times! Lots of the other ones have some great bits.

[Jacen123]

I’ve seen most of not all of the original series.  I just sadly don’t remember much about the later ones in it.  I am partial to II because I happened to see it first somehow, but clearly the original one is great.  I wish they had continued to make the series an anthology after III since there are just diminishing returns with Myers to me, but oh well.

I liked Zombie’s first movie when I saw it soon after it came out, but the sequel was just such a complete bummer.  I don’t know that I care to go back and watch it again to see how it holds up to me now.

[Tank]

I rewatched Zombie's movies recently, the first one isn't bd at all. It IS weird that he uses the actress who played Laurie's daughter in 4-5 in a new role as one of Laurie's friends, complete with nude scenes. It's all legal-- just odd that you bring back a little girl from older films as an adult and get her naked. Her choice, but it always weirded me out hahaha. But yeah, his follow up was trash. Even he says it's a terrible movie and only did it to get out of doing a third because the Weinsteins were so abusive toward him.

[Jacen123]

Interesting.  I hadn’t heard that about the second one.  I remember thinking it had a few alright ideas, such as showing how much the events of the first movie messed up Laurie, but I also recall everyone in it being miserable and downright terrible. I don’t think I have seen any of Zombie’s more recent movies even, despite liking House of a Thousand Corpses and Devil’s Rejects.

[Tank]

Everything since Devil’s Rejects been pretty awful. 

[Lord Darth Hunter]

I just attended the Halloween 45 convention in Pasadena. Got to see all the panels, including the “surprise, John Carpenter decided to pop in and do a panel” one. I love 80’s slashers. I will never get tired of watching the original Halloween I-III,  Friday the 13th 2-4 and Elm Street 3 and 4.

Halloween III is way underrated. It’s got the same style, tone and look as the first two, not surprising since most of the same crew worked on the first three Halloween films, including the great Dean Cundey. Carpenter’s music is just as good in 3 but because it wasn’t Michael Myers it’s been forgotten.

My preference:

Halloween II (1981)

Halloween (1978)

Halloween III

Halloween Kills

Halloween 2018

Halloween 4

Rob Zombie’s Halloween and H2 

…and I can’t stand the rest. The Thorn Cult crap, the Busta Rhymes karate crap, H20 just being a Scream knock off and the Corey as Michael Halloween Ends crap. 

[Lord Darth Hunter]

12 hours ago, Tank said:

I rewatched Zombie's movies recently, the first one isn't bd at all. It IS weird that he uses the actress who played Laurie's daughter in 4-5 in a new role as one of Laurie's friends, complete with nude scenes. It's all legal-- just odd that you bring back a little girl from older films as an adult and get her naked. Her choice, but it always weirded me out hahaha. But yeah, his follow up was trash. Even he says it's a terrible movie and only did it to get out of doing a third because the Weinsteins were so abusive toward him.

Rob Zombie said he wanted for the first movie to have been two films. Had he gotten his way, Halloween 2007 would have been all about young Michael Myers as he kills his family and then goes through the years in Smith's Grove. The film would end the night he escapes. Then his Halloween 2 would've followed up on the Laurie story. In watching what we got, you can see how he would've incorporated his ideas into the films - adult Michael in his head still talking to his dead mother in his child state, discussing how he "found boo" (his name for Laurie) and his mom saying they could be together again. This also explains why Halloween '07 feels rushed. We get the young MIchael story, his escape from Smith's Grove and suddenly we're already at the point where he's killing Laurie's friends.

I can see why the studio balked at this idea. They wanted Michael Myers and RZ was offfering up a story of a kid in a mental hospital. But in hindsight I think this would've been better than what we got.    

[Tank]

I was at that convention too! I do most of the haunted/monstery stuff in LA...

As for RZ, to be honest, I always assumed doing the young Michael stuff was so there would be a meaty party for his wife hahaha. Her entire career is his movies. That said, I wouldn't have minded it... maybe... I've always gone back and forth on how much I want to know about Michael. Carpenter prefers to think of him as the embodiment of evil, but also clearly established him as a young boy that then grew up. The Akkad's saw Jason become an unkillable monster, so they made Michael supernatural. It wasn't;t totally off from what Carpenter was saying... but they definitely over-explained it with the body-swapping and cult of Thorn stuff.

Halloween Ends actually had a cool idea in it, that was ruined because they tried to do too much in one movie. That movie gave us a new kid that was turning evil-- like Michael was winding down, so Haddonfield made a new Boogeyman. I like that idea. I also like they idea that he falls in love with Laurie's grand-daughter, one of the last survivors of Michael Myers... but Laurie's presence and closing threads from the previous two movies over-inflated all of it.

But I like the idea that Haddonfield makes EVIL, and it latches on to somebody and sort of burns their personality out and turns them into a monster.

[Lord Darth Hunter]

Not only that, but he makes his wife a stripper, LOL! I liked the idea because it was a remake. If it had been a sequel to the previous films then I would've hated it too (thus why I hate the Thorn cult stuff, trying to explain too much.) But since he was starting over with his own timeline, sure go ahead and add something different without straying too much into nonsense. It's also why I did like some of the choices he made for part 2. Rather than just have Malcolm McDowell play Donald Pleasance, he changed up Loomis to be a greedy, fame-starved a-hole. Rather than being able to cope together, Annie and Laurie's trauma drove them apart.  

Someone in a H45 panel did specifically say that when it came time to bring back Michael for Halloween 4, they wanted him to be another Jason. Gone was the stealth, slender "Shape" in the shadows. He now was the large, hulking man ripping bodies with his bare hands and tearing through police stations like a Terminator. That's the one thing about that movie I didn't like. 

Halloween Ends was a good story if it had been the start of a trilogy, not the end of it. 

[Tank]

Agreed across the board!

[Quetzalcoatl]

Honestly, I think Halloween 2018 worked well on its own and was far more climactic than what we got in Halloween Ends.  Halloween 2018 should have been it. No need for a trilogy.

My head cannon is Halloween, Halloween 2, and H20. I’ve made watching these a Halloween tradition.  

 

[Tank]

As cringey 90s as h20 is, that's my preferred timeline too. 

I actually watched the original back to back with the 2018 sequel last night, and I really felt like there's cheating going on. Despite the continuity of these being direct, you still very much feel the weight of an entire franchise. On its own, it's a hard buy that Laurie is that traumatized 40 years later. I mean, sure she should have serious PTSD-- but after 40 years? There's people who've been through more that have recovered. Also, it' hard to buy Myers as some great evil when his crimes are killing four people forty years ago. In H20 Laurie made sense, she moved away, changed her name, and dealt with the trauma.

All that said, stylistically, I love the newest films. They have a great vibe and look. The problem with is that the first and last ones are trying to be too many things at once, while the second one tries to make an entire movie out of one beat.

[Lord Darth Hunter]

I agree. Laurie in H2018 acts like all the sequels did happen. They even have that scene with the granddaughter and her friends walking to school where the guy says something like, she got away, he's incarcerated and she's ok now. I don't remember the exact line but he was basically expressing this same sentiment of, why are we making a huge deal out of one guy who killed 4 people decades ago considering all the other lunatics who have come and gone in our society?

It's funny because the way she handled her PTSD in H20 was more believable than in H2018, yet in H20, Halloween II did happen. So she was doing better in H20 even though in that timeline not only were her friends killed, but she was attacked again after he murdered the hospital staff and was almost killed in the explosion herself.  

It gets funnier when you juxtapose H2018 with the other sequels. Laurie and Rachel (from H4) went through the same thing. Rachel the next year is doing just fine.  

[Tank]

Totally— that scene was added to try and roll over that very criticism… it’s also the scene where they dispel Michael and Laurie being siblings.

Honestly the hardest buy for me is that in Ends, Haddonfield is celebrating Halloween AFTER Michael killed a dozen people and vanished into the night! Like, you’d shut that shit down and have every cop on the streets.

[Lord Darth Hunter]

Yes, in the lead up to this movie all the interviews they gave and all the previews written made sure to let us know this trilogy was undoing the sibling connection. The randomness of Michael's stalking and killing was what made him scary. And as you said, that scene in H2018 between the teens was there to drive that point home to the viewers. 

And yet, Michael kills exactly the right people. All of the teens in that scene, all of Allyson's friends, end up falling victim to Michael. Not because he was stalking Allyson or Laurie and somehow they ended up getting in his way or he followed them to where they were going. He just miraculously found them all while they did different things in separate parts of town! When I first saw the film I remember thinking, what luck! Michael discovered the very house Allyson's friend is babysitting in.

At least in the other films they had a reason for how he ended up in places. In 1978, Laurie goes up to the Myers house, Michael begins stalking her and as he follows her throughout the day he ends up stalking her friends since they were all together due to hanging out with Laurie. In H4 he runs into Jamie at the store, follows her and as the day goes on he ends up killing everyone around Jamie. In H5 he returns to Jamie's house, Tina and Samantha show up there, so Michael starts following them...

 

[Tank]

Yeah the coincidence level always bugged the hell out of me. They tried to say later it was people living between Laurie's and the Myers house, but him crossing with Allyson and her friends was quite lucky.

Now that Miramax has secured TV rights I'm really curious to see what they are going to do next. They were legacy producers on the last 3 with their title card attached, but no one there really had any creative input. It was all in the Universal/Blumhouse camp. I've told my reps I'd love to pitch because why not, but I'm sure they'll want a Mike Flanagan or Bryan Fuller level person driving things.