10 Horror Franchises That Spectacularly Bounced Back

Granted, the franchise has certainly suffered a further slump in the aftermath of Halloween H20, but that 1998 Steve Miner picture was a glorious high point for a series which had sadly become a source of mockery for its previous few films.

Yes, John Carpenter's 1978 original is an all-timer, a revolutionary movie which helped usher in the slasher boom and reinvigorated the wider horror genre, but some of the features which followed that first Halloween were extremely ropey.

Halloween II is one of the most underrated sequels in horror history, Halloween III: Season of the Witch has thankfully been reappraised as a sci-fi horror classic in recent years, and Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers has a monumental shocker at its close, but the fifth and sixth Halloween films left the franchise down and out.

Of course, those films - Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers - undid the impressive work of Halloween 4 and sent the series in the dreaded Cult of Thorn direction which explained how Michael was under a curse that forced him to kill his own family on Halloween.

Ignoring the events of everything bar the first two Halloweens, H20 was a breath of fresh air, bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode for one more battle with the Shape, featuring some of the franchise's best kills, and concluding with a shocking decapitation.

Well, that is until Halloween: Resurrection rolled around four years later and sank the franchise again, which itself was followed by Rob Zombie's opinion-splitting Halloween films, and then David Gordon Green's likewise opinion-splitting trilogy.