Every Halloween Series Timeline Ranked From Worst To Best

Which Movies? Halloween (1978), Halloween II (1981), Halloween 4: The Return Of Michael Myers, Halloween 5: The Revenge Of Michael Myers, Halloween: The Curse Of Michael Myers

For many old school Halloween fans, this is the definitive series (and it's certainly the Halloween timeline that went on the longest). That does also mean that it inevitably suffers in the way that any other long-running horror series does: it starts strong, becomes formulaic, and ends terribly.

The switch from Roman to Arabic numerals for the fourth instalment marks the point at which series creators John Carpenter and Debra Hill tapped out, along with lead actress Jamie Lee Curtis. So, in some ways, The Return Of Michael Myers represents a soft reboot to the series, a sequel with none of the original participants, all of whom felt that they'd taken Halloween as far as they wanted.

As a result, the later films wrote an offscreen death for Curtis' Laurie in a car accident and centred the story instead on her young daughter Jamie. Danielle Harris does a decent job as the new child protagonist, never entirely clear whether Jamie is a victim of Michael, his potential anchor to become more human, or is about to take after him and become a psychotic killer herself.

Nevertheless, Halloween 4 and 5 are never anything more than generic, workmanlike slasher flicks with their extra flourishes (Jamie develops a psychic connection with her murderous uncle) only serving to make them sillier rather than more interesting.

Things take a sharp turn for the worse in the final part, The Curse Of Michael Myers, which eliminates Jamie and switches attention to a pre-fame Paul Rudd as Tommy Doyle (the kid Laurie babysat in the first movie) and attempts to retcon the whole series as a story of druidic black magic. It doesn't work.