“It’s Halloween. I guess everyone’s entitled to one good scare.”
John Carpenter’s Halloween is no easy (or advisable) act to follow. Heaven knows many have tried. Over forty years, all manner of reverent pretenders, well-intentioned imitators, and outright thieves have approached the throne, even a couple bearing Carpenter’s own tacit seal of approval. The now-eleven official Halloween films feed into a self-writing narrative concerning the blight and bloat of horror’s most lucrative, long-running franchises, and Halloween sits comfortably alongside Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street at the top of any list of genre royalty, whether as the target of praise or scorn. Though, outside of scattered moments in the first movie and its 2018 “sequel”, Halloween has always taken itself with the utmost seriousness, the franchise’s chronic issues with continuity, motivations, and common sense have become something of a running joke. Continue reading “Ranking, dissecting the “Halloween” series”