Halloween Shouldn’t Be A Horror Franchise

They’re not all bad, either. Halloweens 4, H20, and Kills are great fun. Rob Zombie’s Halloween 2 is brutally nihilistic, beautifully ugly, and just plain underrated. And yet, none of them serve any purpose. I mean, in an abstract sense, all movies exist to entertain, and those movies fit the bill. But in a more specific sense, they exist to expand a franchise that should have no lore past the original Halloween.

You see, Michael Myers has no lore past “went crazy when he was six, killed his sister, got locked up, broke out when he was 21, and stalked some random teenagers.” That’s it. There’s no motivation, no secret sister he’s trying to finish off, no child abuse, nothing. There’s just the shape.

Michael Myers is only scary because he’s such an enigma. That pale white mask works because it’s a blank screen on which to project our greatest fears. Michael is evil for all the reasons in your head and for none of them. The only real way to kill Michael Myers is to explain him. Enter the Halloween franchise.

It’s with a heavy heart that I must cast the first stone in John Carpenter’s direction. Carpenter was the one who first made Laurie Michael’s sister, and he even pulled a George Lucas and shot new scenes for the television version of the original Halloween that showed Michael and Laurie’s familial bond. Laurie, being Michael’s sister, gave other writers carte blanche to add lore to the Halloween franchise.

Lore, such as an ancient druid cult controlling Michael like a zombie and sending him out to do their murderous bidding. How did we get from random psycho creep obsessed with babysitters to occult brainwashing? No wonder the Halloween franchise has five different timelines.

I’m not against sequels, especially when it comes to slashers. Slasher movies are the only horror subgenre specifically built for repeat outings. The most successful slasher franchises usually don’t get good until a few films in. Jason didn’t get his iconic hockey mask until Friday the 13th: Part III. Even then, he didn’t become the indestructible zombie we know and love until Part VI.

Meanwhile, Chucky didn’t get good until everyone finally embraced the camp inherent in a murderous My Buddy doll. Backstories, too, are a calling card of most great slasher franchises. Freddy Krueger’s death at the hands of Springwood’s parents, for instance, is an integral part of the character.

Even the more grounded franchises like Scream are just a string of sequels with increasingly more outlandish lore. So why is the Halloween franchise different?

It started with a work of art. I hate how pretentious that sounds, but I don’t know how else to say it. Halloween is a near-perfect movie from beginning to end in a way no other slasher has ever matched. Friday the 13th was a cheap Halloween ripoff tossed off quickly to capitalize on the burgeoning slasher trend. A Nightmare on Elm Street has that goofy Home Alone sequence at the end, and Scream is too clever for its own good.

Every other slasher franchise started out with flaws, making it easier for the sequels to match or surpass the originals. The Halloween franchise, however, started at a 10. Where can you go from there but down?

John Carpenter wasn’t trying to make a masterpiece. He wanted to rip off Black Christmas and make a quick buck with a “teenage girls in peril” flick. Heck, he originally called the film The Babysitter Murders.

However, Carpenter was just too talented for his own good, and he accidentally made a movie recognized by the National Film Registry as “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant.” That means it’s not just me calling Halloween a work of art; the U.S. Government thinks so, too!

All joking aside, Halloween is just plain different from all the other slashers out there. The rest of the Halloween franchise isn’t, and that’s the problem. Michael Myers is the shape, the boogeyman, and you can’t mass-produce the boogeyman. I mean, you can, and they did, but he loses everything that makes him special in the process.

The bottom line is that John Carpenter stumbled into greatness with Halloween and created an entire genre in the process. Everything else in the Halloween franchise will always be a pale imitation of the original, no matter how hard they try. So why try? The Akkad family needs to leave all the ripping-off to the other slasher franchises and let Michael rest once and for all.

It’s time for the Halloween franchise to put a giant kitchen knife through its own chest, and I will die on that hill.