Every Halloween Series Timeline Ranked From Worst To Best

Which Movies? Halloween (1978) and Halloween (2018)

This brings us to today and the latest attempt to reboot the Halloween timeline.

David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, the talents behind mediocre medieval stoner comedy Your Highness, weren't exactly the obvious choice to direct a reflective reboot of Halloween that ignored every different sequel permutation to make a movie that considers in a new light Michael, Laurie and Haddonfield and all that might have happened in the forty intervening years.

This was, however, the first Halloween movie in decades to have Carpenter's creative involvement, not just as producer but also as a "creative consultant" as well as composing a new variant on his classic score. And, indeed, with Carpenter on board, Green and McBride have made a Halloween film that really feels like a true successor of the original.

Initially pitched, like H20, as a story that would ignore the Jamie Lloyd-era (and H20 itself) but pick up from Halloween II, the 2018 Halloween ultimately did well to go one further and also ignore the revelations of the second part (specifically the idea of the Michael and Laurie sibling relationship that provided so much fuel for the earlier sequels and reboots, but doesn't make much sense in the context of the original movie).

Halloween 2018 is not perfect, its horror is often more efficient than tense or shocking, but it does return its series and its killer to their simpler, clearer roots, while giving Curtis' Laurie - now around 60 and having lived her whole life in the shadow of the events of the original movie - her most interesting characterisation and storyline of any film in the series.

Taken together Halloween 1978 and Halloween 2018 make an appealing pair of companion pieces, the latter reflecting effectively on the former. Now, let's just hope that they don't screw it up Resurrection-style with another sequel.