Reviewing the ‘Halloween’ Franchise: A Statement of Purpose

Well, it’s getting to be that time of year again. If your house is anything like mine (or, more accurately, your wife anything like mine), there have been Halloween decorations up for weeks now, maybe months (it’s bordering on months at this moment).

For the past two years, I’ve spent the weeks leading up to Halloween digging through the major slasher franchises of the 80s. First was A Nightmare on Elm Street (the latest of the three to premiere its first film), then it was Friday the 13th (which was admittedly a ripoff of Halloween to start). Well, it kind of feels like I’m going backwards here, it seems, to the original slasher franchise (not the original slasher, I know that, just the franchise, Black Christmas never got a sequel).

So, I’ve reviewed a couple of these before, including John Carpenter’s original, but I haven’t seen too many more of the rest. I think through the fifth original installment and then the first two of David Gordon Green’s legacy sequels. So, it’s probably the most familiar with a franchise going on out of the three.

Am I expecting high art? Well, from Carpenter but not much else. Still, I hope there are some silly thrills to be had. We shall see.

This franchise is…all over the place. And I’m going to say something seemingly controversial: the only person who understood it on the same level as John Carpenter, the ideas, the kind of horror Michael Myers represented, was David Gordon Green. His trilogy is the best thing to happen to that franchise since John Carpenter and Debra Hill birthed it in the late 70s. Everything up to that point had been…misguided at best.

The problem was the timing. Halloween essentially birthed the slasher due to its surprise popularity (it wasn’t the first, but its success was the thing that really kicked things off), so when it started ramping up for a sequel, its thunder had already been stolen. Friday the 13^th and its sequel had already come out before Halloween II got to theaters in October of 1981. The Jason-led franchise, in its infancy, had already moved the slasher from a place of tension to a place of exploitation, and Halloween ended up playing catchup.

It then went down the route of trying to explain the central monster, in similar ways that became easy for Nightmare on Elm Street because Freddy Kreuger was actually a character, something that Michael Myers never was. Everyone who took on the mantle after Carpenter left the franchise during pre-production on 4 found Myers himself boring, needing to make him interesting with backstory that never really mattered.

And then Rob Zombie gave us his slathering of white-trash paint to everything before Green came along and approached the material seriously for the first time probably ever. He probably took it more seriously than Carpenter did on the first film, and what he created was a trilogy of films that franchise fans generally don’t like that much. I can’t say I’m terribly surprised. They don’t come to these things for ideas. If there are ideas, they need to be stupid and obvious, easily explained in exposition before getting on to a bunch of stabbing of stupid teenagers.

Anyway, that being said, get ready for the inevitable ranking of a largely stupid franchise.

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Originally published here.