10 Dumbest Moments In The Halloween Series

It put the slasher sub-genre on the map, launched Jamie Lee Curtis's career and introduced the world to a Shatner-faced killer who is now a horror icon.

John Carpenter's seminal murder fest Halloween stalked its way into cinemas way back in 1978, FORTY YEARS AGO and had a generation of film fans jumping at shadows and sleeping with one eye open for many nights to come.

Michael Myers was an instant hit with horror hounds and his killing spree across the sleepy town of Haddonfield left them screaming for more.

To say they got their wish is putting it lightly as Halloween spawned numerous sequels and the series has since been rebooted more times than that third-hand Dell computer you picked up on the cheap at the local car boot sale. Although the original is regarded as a low-budget horror classic, its follow-ups are mostly known for being, at best, guilty pleasures, and at worst a complete waste of time and celluloid.

Like most long-running slasher franchises, the Halloween series has produced almost as many gaffes and facepalms as satisfactory jump-scares and epic kills over the years, and these egregiously dumb moments are almost on the same level as the decision to flee from the killer through the doggie door in the first Scream movie.

Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode is a kickass horror heroine. When the audience was introduced to her in Halloween, she seemed fragile and unassuming, but after a certain masked killer came to town, we soon learned she's made of tougher stuff.

Laurie is every inch a scream queen, capable of holding her own against her psychotic brother. This wasn't some action heroine whose sole purpose is to provide eye candy for the male demographic, she's traumatised by the events of the first movie, but had the strength to hold it together.

That said, Ms Strode is also prone to the odd horror cliche, and in the case of the original Halloween, it's failing to check whether the killer is really dead after you've put them on the deck. During the movie's final act, Laurie hit 'The Boogeyman" with a knitting needle to the neck, sending him reeling, but she failed to press home her advantage.

At this point, Curtis's protagonist was armed with a butcher knife that she discarded without checking whether the knitting needle stabbing proved fatal. This is the kind of lapse in judgement the Scream series would poke fun at years later, and it allowed Michael to do further damage before his fateful appointment with Doctor Loomis, which famously concluded with a prescription of hot lead to the torso.