Every Halloween Movie Ranked From Worst To Best
The slasher series that started it all...
While opinions vary as to which film really created the slasher (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Psycho? Peeping Tom?), there can be little debate that the horror subgenre really took off in the wake of Halloween. Every post-1978 stalk-and-stab chiller featuring a masked maniac giving chase to hormonal adolescents owes a debt to John Carpenter's classic, which inspired countless of those imitators in the decades since.
However, while the legacy of the original Halloween is beyond question, what of the sequels it spawned? At present, the Halloween series numbers ten films, with an eleventh - the first in nine years - due in October 2018 from director David Gordon Green.
Co-written with Danny McBride, Green's take on the material was enough to lure Carpenter back to executive produce and provide the score, marking his first direct involvement in the series for 35 years. It was also enough to get Jamie Lee Curtis back in the Halloween business for the first time in 15 years.
Intriguingly, this as-yet-untitled sequel is said to be following on directly from the original and ignoring literally everything in the interim: hardly the most positive reflection on the Halloween franchise.
But is there really nothing of value to be found from any of the nine Halloween sequels?
10. Halloween: Resurrection
2002's eighth entry may have brought back two series veterans in Jamie Lee Curtis and Rick Rosenthal (director of 1981's Halloween II), but it's almost certainly the dumbest Halloween movie, and - despite being only 15 years old at the time of writing - it's arguably aged worse than any other film in the series.
Everything feels wrong from the get-go, with a silly, unconvincing explanation as to how Michael Myers survived the finale of previous film Halloween H20, then a brief return for heroine Laurie Strode - only for her to finally be killed off. Curtis, who'd spent years shaking off her 'scream queen' label, was reportedly under contractual obligation to appear in Resurrection, and only agreed to do so on the condition that it would be Laurie's end. However, given she has signed on for David Gordon Green's new sequel, it would seem she agrees this film was not the most fitting of send-offs.
And we haven't even gotten to the worst of it, as once Laurie's out of the way, Michael goes strolling right into Reality TV world, where a loathsome ensemble of fame-hungry nitwits head into his childhood home with cameras rolling. The original has a timeless quality, but there's no mistaking Resurrection as anything but a product of the early 2000s, and - as this film stands to demonstrate - that wasn't necessarily the best time for mainstream horror.
And as if all that wasn't bad enough, four more words: Busta Rhymes Kung Fu.