We watched all eight Halloween movies so you don't have to
With Run The Series, A.A. Dowd examines film franchises, studying how they change and evolve with each new installment. Fair warning: Spoilers are inevitable.
When it comes to horror franchises, familiarity doesn’t breed contempt; it breeds boredom. Is there any creature so terrifying that it can’t be defanged through repetition, its power stolen by one too many return engagements? Some of cinema’s scariest creations, from Boris Karloff’s monster to Norman Bates to the hungry leviathan of Jaws, have been rendered ineffectual by a string of sequels. (Universal Studios, as those examples illustrate, was especially guilty of beating its undead horses.)
But the Halloween franchise holds a special place in the history of diminishing scares. Here’s a series that started in peak form, with a near-perfect specimen of the genre, and then proceeded to bleed its premise dry over and over again. Has pure dread ever been this thoroughly, systematically diluted, one unnecessary installment at a time? Over the course of six lesser sequels—No. 3 doesn’t count, for reasons I’ll get into later—series producer Moustapha Akkad transformed his ultimate bogeyman, the masked maniac Michael Myers, into a run-of-the-mill threat. Were the films better, the damage might be less, but all are pale imitations of the John Carpenter original, trotting out its familiar components—the escaped lunatic, a last-day-of-October timeframe, that iconic score—while jettisoning much of what made it uniquely unsettling.
A shoestring shocker that singlehandedly turned the spectacle of teenagers being slaughtered into a foolproof box-office draw, Halloween tweaks one of Jean-Luc Godard’s most famous theories: All that’s required for a movie, as this one proves, is a girl and a long kitchen knife. The plot, conceived by Carpenter and his longtime producer (and sometimes writing partner) Debra Hill, is simplicity itself. The night before Halloween, a mute psychopath busts out of an insane asylum, returning to his (fictional) hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, where—15 years earlier, as a young boy—he stabbed his older sister to death. Hot on his trail is Dr. Loomis (a hammy Donald Pleasence, in his first of five appearances as the character), who decided years earlier that his patient wasn’t disturbed, but simply and purely evil. That theory gains credence once the killer begins stalking and murdering a group of teenage babysitters, eventually setting his sights on virginal wallflower Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, in her first film role).
From this skeleton of a premise, Carpenter works his black magic. Reviewing Halloween for The New Yorker, legendary critic Pauline Kael wrote, “The film is largely just a matter of the camera tracking subjectively from the mad killer’s point of view, leading you to expect something awful to happen. But the camera also tracks subjectively when he isn’t around at all.” Kael meant this observation as a slight, but it neatly sums up the vague, persistent menace of the movie. Carpenter is always watching, his camera creeping in on the actors at all times, and this gives the mundane events of the first half—in which Laurie and her doomed girlfriends wander around town, chatting about boys—a charge of perpetual unease. Halloween is hardly the first slasher movie; depending on whom you ask, that distinction belongs to everything from Black Christmas (1974) to Twitch Of The Death Nerve (1971) to Michael Powell’s 1960 masterpiece Peeping Tom. But in its purity of execution, its absolute efficiency as a scare machine, it remains the pinnacle of the subgenre.
Made for just $325,000, Halloween went on to gross $47 million in the U.S. alone; by percentage, it’s still one of the most successful independent films of all time. Carpenter’s predatory approach quickly became a model. Many of the holiday-themed knockoffs released in the years that followed swiped his lurking, leering camera moves. (The lengthy POV shot of the prologue, a murder scene filmed through the eyes of the murderer, is basically the template for the entire Friday The 13th series.) Condemned by some cultural critics as puritanical, Halloween also popularized new rules of engagement: Good girls live longer than bad (or promiscuous) girls—though later additions to the slasher genre more plainly underline this sex/violence connection, increasing the misogyny considerably. Curtis, a fine scream queen who quickly graduated to less “disreputable” fare, epitomizes what writer Carol J. Clover would later dub “the final girl”—a heroine whose virtuous nature, more pronounced when compared to the loose morals of her friends, qualifies her to take on the villain in the final reel.
Less influential, alas, was Halloween’s patience and restraint. A few critics at the time of release, the autumn of 1978, were hip enough to make Alfred Hitchcock comparisons: Carpenter shares the master’s voyeuristic tendencies, but also his command of cinematic space and his privileging of suspense over violence. For all the heinously gory pictures it inspired, Halloween contains scarcely a drop of the red stuff. (It doesn’t need blood to chill ours.) And, all told, only five characters die over the course of the film, one of whom Michael Myers kills offscreen. After the opening set piece, it’s nearly an hour before the next casualty; Carpenter masterfully racks up the suspense in the interim, delaying the inevitable carnage for as long as possible. The following clip demonstrates the director's defiance of expectations, his ability to create tension and deny release.
Dubbed simply “The Shape” in the credits, Michael Myers is introduced as an almost abstract threat. Loomis builds him up this way in the opening scenes, ranting about evil in human form, and the movie smartly allows that reputation to precede his rampage. (For a long stretch, Carpenter keeps him on the periphery, filming him only from a distance or chopping off his head with the top of his frame.) “He’s not a man,” Loomis eventually says of this silent, relentless assassin. But the scary thing about Myers is that he’s both man and not man, his face wear—a Captain Kirk mask painted bone-white along with other alterations—suggesting a blank, unconvincing approximation of human features. Like Steven Spielberg’s shark, Carpenter’s killer is an uncaring creature, as terrifying offscreen as on. And like the zombies of Dawn Of The Dead, that year’s other great horror movie, he’s the familiar made unfamiliar, returning by instinct to a place from his past.
Of course, by the time Halloween II hit theaters on Devil’s Night 1981, there was nothing so unfamiliar about Michael Myers anymore. Not only had the character become iconic, his rubber visage available in costume shops across the country, he had been widely imitated, too. Movie theaters were filthy with copycat killers; a slasher parody, Student Bodies, opened just two months earlier, proving that the dead-teenager craze had reached critical mass. It’s no wonder, then, that Carpenter seemed intent on yanking audiences back to 1978, before Friday the 13th, Christmas, Valentine’s Day, New Year’s Eve, graduation day, and prom night received their own murderous mascots. Co-written (with Hill), but not directed by Carpenter, Halloween II takes place literally moments after the events of its predecessor, with Laurie hauled off to the hospital while Loomis continues searching for his escaped patient, who disappeared into the night at the conclusion of Halloween.
Some of the creeping dread of the original survives, particularly in security-camera footage of Myers prowling the perimeter of the Haddonfield hospital. By functioning as a continuation, the film also sustains a steady level of urgency; its fleet 92 minutes are divided between a desperate manhunt and the systematic disposal of the hospital staff. (Unlike the other sequels, part two wastes almost no time on rehashing an old plot or setting up a new one.) Yet in other ways, Halloween II feels like a poor substitute. Beginning with a fantastically unintuitive soundtrack selection—Pat Ballard’s cheerful pop confection “Mr. Sandman,” rendered creepy by context—the movie quickly revives Carpenter’s effectively primitive piano melody, one of the most memorably spare themes in movie history. Only this time, it’s been played on a synthesizer, which essentially robs the score of its minimalist menace. Also missing is Carpenter’s widescreen craftsmanship: His replacement, Rick Rosenthal, mimics the subjective POV, but not the glorious tracking shots, of the first film.
But restraint is the true casualty here. Made for about seven times as much as the original, Halloween II begins with a car exploding and ends with a man doing the same. To keep up with its slasher contemporaries—including the first two Friday The 13th movies—the film amps up the graphic violence. The body count leaps from five to 11, with Myers employing inventive, elaborate new means of dispatching the innocent. Why just stab or strangle unsuspecting victims when you can fracture their skulls with a hammer, burn their flesh off with boiling sauna water, and jab their eyes with syringes? Surprisingly, it was Carpenter, not Rosenthal, who shot the film’s goriest sequences; he added them later, as a means of appeasing assumedly desensitized genre fans. Only the most vicious offenders could compete in the arms race that was early-’80s slasher cinema.
In her last appearance in the franchise until H20, Curtis spends most of Halloween II bedridden and heavily sedated. She has very little dialogue, possibly because the filmmakers recognized how much the actress had changed during the three-year gap between movies. (She both looks and seems older, which one could charitably blame on her character having gone through an intense trauma that night.) In a sense, however, her role in the film is pivotal, as Carpenter and Hill add a rather momentous narrative wrinkle—and the first of the series’ many continuity cheats: Laurie Strode is Michael Myers’ other sister, adopted by another family when she was young. This twist reinforces the impression that the Halloween films are about the dirty secrets of suburbia, and that Myers is the ultimate black sheep, acting out against his neglectful parents. But it also, regrettably, provides a psychological rationale for the fiend’s actions. He’s now a dysfunctional, estranged brother working his way down the family execution list. Isn’t it much scarier, much more disturbingly mysterious, if he’s just a force of pure, unmotivated malevolence?
Perhaps aware that they had stretched their bare-bones premise as far as it could go, Carpenter and Hill deviated from a successful formula the next year with the in-name-only sequel Halloween III: Season Of The Witch. Imagine the confusion and anger fans must have felt when they sat down for another Myers/Strode title fight and were instead treated to the unrelated, somewhat muddled tale of a mask manufacturer attempting to sacrifice the nation’s children to ancient druid gods. (Or something.) Essentially a riff on Invasion Of The Body Snatchers—much of the action takes place in Santa Mira, the fictional town the pod people invaded in that 1956 classic—Halloween III was Carpenter’s attempt to reclaim his franchise, attaching the Halloween brand to what he hoped would be a series of stand-alone stories. Had the strategy worked, part four would have supposedly been a ghost story, but both critics and audiences reacted venomously to this strange blend of horror and science fiction.
Cursed with bad acting and some rather momentous plot holes, Season Of The Witch is nevertheless a fascinating oddity—and for this writer, the most interesting of the Halloween sequels. Admittedly, the villain’s master plan, which involves the theft of a Stonehenge rock and a complete disregard for television time zones, makes very little sense. That said, writer-director Tommy Lee Wallace, who went on to helm the TV adaptation of Stephen King’s It, manages some memorably grotesque imagery: crushed faces, blown-open faces, and one face that explodes into a teeming pile of vermin. The film’s biggest claim to fame is probably its earworm-catchy jingle, set to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down” and repeated ad nauseam throughout. It plays a starring role in the climax, an admirably bleak ending that nods again to Invasion.