Every Halloween Series Timeline Ranked From Worst To Best

There can be few film franchises with a more torturous timeline than Halloween. Or should that be timelines?

The latest in the series - released this month in time for its eponymous holiday on the fortieth anniversary of the night Michael Myers first came home - is the eleventh in the franchise, kicking off the series' fifth new timeline, and confusingly is the third of those simply to be titled Halloween.

But which of these multiple continuities is worth your own time? If you're only just coming to the series fresh and don't know your Jamie Lloyd from your John Tate or your Shatner mask from your Silver Shamrock mask, what should be your Halloween viewing order of choice?

Let's take a trip back to Haddonfield and find out. Going through the pros and cons of every one of the different mini-franchises that exist under the Halloween name, we'll see whether it's better to be enjoying the Season Of The Witch or suffering the Curse Of Michael Myers.

Which Movies? Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009)

Why would you bother with this one? The only timeline to replace the original 1978 classic with an unsubtle reimagining that replaces tension with graphic violence, it's only really for audiences raised on torture porn gore with no patience for 1970s slow burn pacing.

To be fair to director Rob Zombie, he's obviously a fan of classic horror in general and the original Halloween series in particular and this is, for him, a labour of love. The White Zombie frontman has always been a better horror enthusiast, though, than he has been a horror filmmaker.

Halloween has always been at its best when not trying to over-explain Michael Myers, a creature of pure evil instinct and an almost literal boogeyman. Zombie's films take the opposite tack, far more interested in Myers' psychology and his familial connection to sister-cum-perennial-victim Laurie than any film before.

To its credit, Zombie's first Halloween, awkwardly half-prequel, half-remake, handles giving Myers more backstory and personality relatively reasonably. The prequel half, in which Malcolm McDowell (no Donald Pleasance, but a decent choice for a psychiatrist with an obsessive streak barely more sane than his patients) attempts to treat and connect with Michael, works well enough. The second half, a lightweight retread of the original completely disinterested in making us engage with any of the victims, is much worse.

Zombie's Halloween II, meanwhile, is completely disposable, doubling down on the Michael-Laurie family stuff to suggest that she might be prone to the same streak of madness (hardly an original direction to go, as we'll see). It's not worth your time and, to be honest, neither is the reboot timeline as a whole.