THE Halloween franchise has seen multiple sequels, spinoffs, reboots and remakes since the original Halloween in 1978 made by director John Carpenter at the start of the slasher era of films.
Though the slasher era more or less ended by the late ‘80s, with some stragglers in the ‘90s and early 2000s, no franchise has quite endured the way Halloween has.
Unlike other franchise’s feeble attempts to make a return, the Halloween films are the only ones that successfully recaptured the imagination, beginning with 2018’s Halloween.
Ignoring some of the other films in the franchise, let’s take a look at the main films that revolve around the Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, which the new film is focused on.
Birth of evil
Carpenter created a horror icon with Michael Myers in Halloween, and all it needed was a hulking man wearing a cheap William Shatner mask creeping around white suburbia and killing civilians with a butcher knife.
The film itself – when watched today –might seem slow for modern audiences, and unlike other genre films that currently exist, Carpenter’s Halloween was more about building tension and atmosphere, compared to jump scares and abrupt loud noises.
Carpenter’s film resulted in a sequel, Halloween II, which takes place right after the end of the first film, with Myers continuing his pursuit of Strode, who is revealed to be his sister. This revelation was unnecessary, and so was the sequel.
Divergent timelines
Seventeen years after Halloween II, two more films featuring Strode were released: Halloween H20 and Halloween: Resurrection. These films take place during a different timeline to the sequels which were released after Halloween II, and has Strode living under an alias after surviving Myers in both films.
But as expected, Myers returns, and wrecks havoc on Strode, her son, and their friends, before he finally kills her in the opening of Halloween: Resurrection.
Yet another version of Strode (not played by Curtis) appears in two Rob Zombie-helmed remakes in 2007 and 2009. These films attempted to give a background to Michael Myers and explain the reasoning behind his madness. Zombie is a decent visual director, but he lacks the intelligence to write anything with nuance, as can be seen with the clunky “introspective” look into his version of Myers.
He also doesn’t understand that what makes these psychopaths great, is that there is no method to the madness.
Evil dies tonight
David Gordon Green’s 2018 film Halloween once again follows a different timeline compared to the previous films, by taking place 40 years after the events in the very first Halloween.
Curtis returns as Laurie Strode, who in this timeline, is suffering from PTSD from her encounter with Myers, and has been living as a survivalist waiting for the inevitable return of the serial killer.
The film didn’t make much sense, as Myers, canonically the age of a grandfather, went around killing people with the kind of spring in his step that a 20-year-old has. Meanwhile, Curtis’ Strode was nearing the age of 60 – and actually is a grandma in the film – and behaved like a 40-year-old soldier.
This first entry in the new trilogy wiped the slate and made the Halloween films fun again, and one of the most celebrated aspects in the film was the long take – an unbroken sequence of Myers going house-to-house killing as many unsuspecting occupants as possible.
The 2018 film was followed by the sequel, Halloween Kills in 2021, which was miraculously worse than the previous film. Kills was marketed as the end of the new Strode timeline, and the end of Myers reign of stabbings.
Repeated often throughout the film by various characters – and an entire mob – is the phrase “Evil dies tonight”, because Myers (an evil man) was going to die that night, as also dictated by the film’s marketing that said evil would die that night.
In the end, Myers did not die that night, as the film turned out to be nothing more than sequel bait. This phrase was then elevated to meme status in film circles and on the internet.
Halloween Kills will be followed by the final sequel, Halloween Ends, where Myers will once again face off against Strode.
Will the Halloween-themed killer finally sink his butcher knife into Strode? Or, will evil – finally – die that night?
Halloween Ends releases in cinemas nationwide today.
