Halloween Ends is supposed to be the final showdown between Laurie Strode (at least Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode) and Michael Myers. The bond between Michael and Laurie has stretched all the way from 1978 till now in 2022. At times Michael was Laurie’s brother. Other times he was just some random lunatic that happened upon her and her group of friends one Halloween night. Either direction you want to take, there is a lot of history between the two. Which stories are the best? Let’s rank the Halloween sequels and find out. This excludes Halloween: Season of the Witch. It’s not a sequel to the Michael Myers storyline.The Rob Zombie films are excluded too as they are remakes and not sequels to the original films.
Warning!!! There will be spoilers for the entire Halloween franchise!
This entry in the series is so bad that Laurie Strode had the good sense to die rather than be a part of it. A continuation of the H20 storyline sees Laurie in an asylum where we see in flashbacks that she accidentally killed an innocent EMT instead of Michael Myers. He shows up and dispatches with her before wanting to return to his childhood home. When he gets there, he finds a bunch of brats filming some reality web series when he gets there. He takes them out one by one so that he can get some peace and quiet.
This entry is famous for two things. 1) Trying to be hip by using the internet as a plot point. It never works. Also see Hellraiser: Hellworld. 2) Having Michael Myers face off against Busta Rhymes and not having him stab him over and over again. I guess he really was a ‘Busta”. So bad. Curtis would come back once again for a new Halloween trilogy. The upcoming Halloween Ends once again marks her departure from the franchise.
The latest in the Halloween franchise tries to go a different route than the usual sequel. We are shown that four years after Michael once again caused havoc on Halloween night, Laurie and Allyson have moved on with their lives and are at peace with what happened to them. Laurie has sobered up and bought a new house in Haddonfield. Michael disappeared after killing Karen, but that doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about. Meanwhile, the new guy Corey that Allyson is dating, who has a horrific past of his own, stumbles onto Michael just hanging out in the sewers. Corey then begins his own killing spree to get back at all the people who have wronged him.
The film feels really disjointed from any that are counted in its continuity, and the random events in the film bring Laurie and Michael into their final showdown. It’s disappointing and lackluster compared to where the filmmakers seemed to be taking the story after the last two films. If you told me that a new creative team was brought in and didn’t bother to watch the previous two films, I would believe you. A sad end AGAIN for Laurie’s final showdown with The Shape.
This is where most fans point out that the Michael Myers story started to fall apart. There were numerous problems during the film-making that we covered in a video on our YouTube page. Michael returns once again to look for his niece Jamie after the events of Halloween 4. She is stuck in a children’s home and is left mute. I see a weird pattern here. Let’s see if Halloween Ends has a returning character in a mental hospital.
She begins to have visions each time he begins a new murder. Dr. Loomis pushes the two into a collision so he can once again try and kill off Myers, which he has failed to do through four other movies so far. Shoehorned in is a mysterious man in black that does nothing but make the director of the next film have to find a reason why he exists in the first place. Oof. It’s not good.
And here we are. In order to explain why there was a mysterious man in black in the last film, a druid cult is added to Myers’ backstory. Sure, why not? This entry brings in a young Paul Rudd to play Tommy Wallace. He’s the kid Laurie was babysitting in the first film. Too bad he didn’t come back for Halloween Kills. Imagine Paul Rudd playing the Anthony Michael Hall role. Very different movie.
We find out that Michael kills because of a druid ritual and that he was marked from birth for this role. This helps to prove that any time you try and explain why our horror movie psychopaths do what they do, it ruins the character. The franchise was in such shambles that they had to completely reboot it to keep going.
Things got so bad and confusing (druids? Really?) that the whole timeline of Halloween had to be shifted just to keep the franchise going. The first time that Jamie Lee Curtis returned to the franchise, they decided to ignore anything that happened after Halloween II. Michael had been dormant for decades until Dr. Loomis’ home was broken into one night, and Laurie’s new identity was uncovered. They do tangentially mention that Laurie faked her death in a car accident which is mentioned in how she died in part 4. Leaving a child to fend for herself, Laurie? Tsk Tsk. If Laurie dies in a car crash in Halloween Ends I’m calling it an official trend.
While it’s not a perfect film, it did help right the ship for the franchise, even if it just rammed the iceberg head-on in the next film. It was fun to see Curtis back in the role that made her famous. The other Dawson’s Creek characters around her are fine and fit in with the slasher films of the time but haven’t aged overly well. At least they got rid of the druids and brought some sort of closure to the Laurie/Michael story, even if it was undone within seconds of the next entry.
After they tried to take the franchise in a different direction for Halloween III, they realized they had to bring Michael back in order to keep fans interested. Jamie Lee Curtis had moved on to higher profile movies, so it was decided that to keep the story moving, Laurie needed to have a daughter. It was explained that Laurie had died off-screen in a car accident. Now Michael begins to seek his niece to finish what he started back in 1978.
This entry into the series is pretty popular, and the character of Jamie Lloyd caught on with fans right away. Her young innocence in trying to deal with everything she had gone through really captured fans’ hearts. The surrounding cast was excellent, and Jamie’s adoptive sister Rachel worked really well as the teenage final girl. Fans quickly lost interest when she was unceremoniously killed off at the beginning of the sequel. A bright moment in the franchise that quickly burnt out.
The direct sequel to the first film had an interesting idea. It takes place seconds after the first one ends. Loomis shooting him six times (“I SHOT HIM SIX TIMES!”) didn’t stop Michael. He follows Laurie to the hospital and keeps his killing spree going. The hospital is sparsely staffed, but Michael still reaches quite a high body count.
Loomis spends most of the movie out looking for Michael. Not sure why he thought Michael wouldn’t follow her to the hospital to finish the job. It’s during this that we learn that Michael is, in fact, Laurie’s brother. She was adopted after he killed his other sister. Carpenter has admitted this was his worst mistake of the franchise, but he felt stuck on where to go with the story. The film’s only real drawback is that Laurie spends most of it drugged up and in her hospital bed. Other than that, it’s not a bad sequel.
The sequel to the 2018 reboot aimed to show how the Michael Myers tragedy affected the town of Haddonfield. We see the return of Tommy Wallace, played this time by Anthony Michael Hall, Lindsey, played once again by Kyle Richards, and Nurse Marion played again by Nancy Stephens.
Michael escapes the trap that Laurie had set for him. He then sets out to kill a LOT of firefighters. He then makes his way across town to return to his childhood home, slashing anyone that gets in his way. Laurie again is laid up in the hospital but witnesses the mob of Haddonfield lose their senses as they cause the death of an innocent patient. The town has lost its way in the fear of what Michael has unleashed upon them. In the end, he still escapes to kill again in Halloween Ends. Soon.
It’s weird to think that the franchise has three films called Halloween, but here we are. Once again, it was decided to scrap most of the series and say that only the first film counts in this sequel’s continuity. Even the plot point of Michael and Laurie being siblings has been scrapped.
Now we see that Laurie has been traumatized by the event that happened to her 40 years ago. It has poisoned her relationship with her family as she still believes Michael will escape one day. She’s proven right when he escapes from a prison transfer bus and returns to Haddonfield to continue his killing spree. Laurie’s family is on the line this time, and she will do everything she can to finish him once and for all.
It was fun to see Jamie Lee Curtis come back once again and try to tell a story about the Laurie that we saw at the end of the first film. Traumatized, hurt, and scared. That never went away over the last 40 years, but she has learned to protect herself and is ready for him. This time she is the shape. Audiences dug the film, and with Halloween Ends being the end of this new trilogy and Laurie for good, it should be interesting to see how it plays out.
What is your favorite Halloween sequel? Let us know in the comments below.