I’ve been a fan of this franchise since I was young enough that I probably shouldn’t have been watching it yet, and I’ve stuck with it through every triumph and every genuine mess it has produced along the way. That’s a strange thing to admit about a series that has, at various points, retconned its own history at least three separate times and once abandoned its own villain entirely in favor of a movie about cursed Halloween masks manufactured by a company plotting to kill children with Stonehenge magic. But that’s Michael Myers for you. The franchise is nearly as hard to kill as he is.
Michael Myers wasn’t the first masked killer in movies, and he wasn’t even the first slasher icon of his own decade. What he was, and still is, is the purest version of an idea that horror had been circling for years: a killer with no motive, no personality, and no humanity left to appeal to. Just a shape in coveralls, walking, never running, always somehow already there. Understanding why that idea has survived nearly fifty years, five separate timelines, and more than one full creative reboot means understanding both what made the original film work and how badly some of its sequels misunderstood it.
The Shape That Started It All
John Carpenter’s Halloween arrived in theaters on October 25, 1978, on a budget that was somewhere between $300,000 and $325,000, depending on which account you trust. It was shot in twenty days. Donald Pleasence, the film’s biggest name, was paid $20,000 to play Dr. Sam Loomis. A nineteen-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis, making her film debut as Laurie Strode, was paid $8,000. Nick Castle, the actor who spent most of the film silently stalking Curtis through the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, was paid a reported $25 a day. This was independent filmmaking in the truest sense, put together by people who had no idea they were about to invent an entire subgenre.
The mask itself might be the single greatest piece of horror movie trivia there is. Production designer Tommy Lee Wallace needed something cheap and unsettling, and he found two options at a costume shop on Hollywood Boulevard called Bert Wheeler’s: a sad clown mask and a William Shatner Captain Kirk mask, left over from a batch made using a life cast of Shatner’s face from his Star Trek days. The clown mask was tested first, as a nod to the costume young Michael wears while killing his sister in the film’s opening scene, but the crew ultimately went with Kirk. Wallace widened the eye holes, removed the eyebrows and sideburns, teased out the hair, and spray-painted the whole thing white. What emerged barely resembled Shatner at all. It resembled nothing human, which was exactly the point. Shatner himself didn’t learn his face had become the most famous mask in horror history until years later, in an interview, and he’s said his first reaction was somewhere between disbelief and being flattered.
That blankness is the whole engine of the film, and it’s why Halloween still works when so many of its imitators don’t. Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill made a deliberate choice to strip Michael of interiority. He doesn’t taunt his victims. He doesn’t monologue. He tilts his head sometimes, almost curiously, like he’s studying something he doesn’t quite understand about being alive. The film credits him only as “The Shape,” and that’s the most accurate description anyone has ever come up with. On a budget that wouldn’t cover craft services on most modern productions, Halloween grossed around $70 million and became one of the most profitable independent films ever made, a title it held until The Blair Witch Project came along two decades later.
The Sequel That Complicated Everything
Halloween II picked up literally minutes after the first film ended, following Laurie to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital while Michael continues hunting her through its empty corridors. Carpenter and Hill wrote it, though Carpenter has said he was reluctant to extend his involvement past the original film and mostly did it out of a sense of obligation. Released in 1981, the sequel introduced the twist that would define the franchise’s mythology for the next two decades: Laurie Strode is Michael’s younger sister, and he’s been hunting her specifically all along rather than stalking a random babysitter.
Carpenter has since expressed regret over that reveal. It gave Michael a motive, even a thin one, and part of what made the original film so effective was that it refused to give him one at all. Once Michael became a man hunting his sister instead of an incomprehensible force targeting whoever crossed his path, the character lost a piece of what made him frightening. It’s a tension the franchise has never fully resolved, and you can trace almost every subsequent creative decision, every reboot and every retcon, back to filmmakers either leaning into that sibling mythology or trying to strip it away and get back to pure, motiveless dread.
The One Without Michael
Here’s where the Halloween timeline starts to earn its reputation as one of the most confusing in horror. In 1982, Carpenter and Hill released Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and it has nothing to do with Michael Myers at all. No Laurie Strode. No Haddonfield killer. Instead, the film follows a doctor investigating a conspiracy involving a novelty mask company plotting to murder children through cursed Halloween masks embedded with microchips and a stolen piece of Stonehenge.
This wasn’t a mistake or a licensing dispute. Carpenter and Hill genuinely wanted Halloween to become an anthology series, with each new film telling a completely different Halloween-themed story the way something like The Twilight Zone rotated premises episode to episode. They only agreed to stay involved with a third film on the condition that it not be a direct Michael Myers sequel. Audiences, unsurprisingly, showed up expecting the boogeyman and left confused. Season of the Witch became the lowest-grossing film in the series at the time, earning around $14.4 million, and the anthology idea died along with it. Michael was back for the fourth film in 1988, and he’s been the franchise’s gravitational center ever since. Season of the Witch has aged into a genuine cult favorite in the decades since, but at the time, it nearly ended the franchise’s willingness to experiment with anything other than its own villain.
The Thorn Trilogy and the First Retcon
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, along with its two direct follow-ups Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, shifted the story to Laurie’s young daughter Jamie Lloyd and introduced an entire mythology around a mystical cult called the Cult of Thorn, which explained Michael’s resilience as something closer to supernatural possession than simple human stubbornness. This trilogy is not well remembered. The later entries in particular suffered from studio interference and reshoots that left their plots barely coherent, and the Cult of Thorn material is generally considered one of the more misguided creative swings in the franchise’s history.
So in 1998, screenwriter Kevin Williamson, fresh off Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer, was brought in to help engineer the franchise’s first real retcon. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later brought Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode and quietly discarded the entire Thorn trilogy, along with Jamie Lloyd, treating the story as a direct continuation of only the first two films. It worked, more or less. H20 gave the series a genuine sense of closure, ending with Laurie decapitating her brother once and for all. That closure lasted exactly one movie. Halloween: Resurrection arrived in 2002 and immediately undercut it, revealing that Laurie had actually killed a paramedic whose clothes Michael had swapped with his own, and that Michael had been alive the whole time. Resurrection was not well received, and it also killed off Laurie Strode herself early in its runtime, effectively ending that timeline for good.
Rob Zombie’s Detour
By the mid-2000s, the franchise needed another reset, and it got one in the form of writer-director Rob Zombie, who remade the original film in 2007 and followed it with Halloween II in 2009. Zombie’s approach was almost a direct rebuttal to Carpenter’s original philosophy. Where Carpenter kept Michael a blank void, Zombie gave him an extensive, grim backstory rooted in childhood abuse and a broken home, spending nearly half of his first film on young Michael’s life before the killings even begin. It’s a legitimately different take on the character, and reasonable horror fans disagree about whether it works. Zombie’s Michael feels less like an inexplicable force of nature and more like the product of a specific, damaged upbringing, which some viewers find more tragic and others find far less frightening. What’s less disputed is that Zombie’s films exist in their own self-contained timeline, disconnected from everything that came before or after them, one more branch on a franchise tree that had already split more times than most viewers could track.
The Legacy Sequel That Reset the Board Again
Forty years after the original film, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride pulled off a trick that had already worked once for this franchise and somehow worked again. Their 2018 Halloween, again starring Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode, ignored every single sequel since the 1978 original, including H20, and even undid the sibling reveal from Halloween II. In this timeline, Michael and Laurie are simply not related. He’s just an evil that fixated on her one October night for no reason anyone can articulate, which is a very deliberate return to the original film’s central idea that Michael doesn’t need a motive to be terrifying.
The gamble paid off in a big way. The 2018 film grossed roughly $260 million worldwide against a $10 million budget, making it the highest-grossing film in the franchise’s history and one of the best-reviewed Halloween movies since the Carpenter original. It also imagined Laurie as a woman who had spent four decades preparing for Michael’s return, turning her home into something closer to a fortified compound with panic rooms built into its walls, which gave Curtis one of her richest performances in the role. Two sequels followed to close out the trilogy: Halloween Kills in 2021, which widened its focus to the town of Haddonfield itself and the mob mentality Michael’s return provokes in its residents, and Halloween Ends in 2022, which finally, definitively, concluded Laurie and Michael’s story after forty-four years. Between them, the trilogy grossed close to $500 million worldwide, proof that audiences will still turn out for this character even after a decade of diminishing returns before the reboot.
Why He’s Still Standing
After five distinct timelines, three separate retcons, one full-scale reboot, and one movie that abandoned him altogether, Michael Myers is still, somehow, one of the most recognizable figures horror has ever produced. Part of that is simple economics. Michael is cheap to produce relative to the box office he reliably generates, and horror franchises with a bankable, costume-based villain rarely go away entirely as long as there’s still an audience willing to buy a ticket.
But the real reason goes back to that mask on Hollywood Boulevard in 1978. Every version of this franchise that has worked, the original, H20, and the 2018 legacy sequel, has understood that Michael is scariest when he’s a blank space rather than a fully drawn character. Every version that has struggled, the Thorn trilogy’s cult mythology and even Zombie’s more sympathetic backstory, has done so partly by trying to explain him. The Shape doesn’t need a reason. He needs a mask, a knife, and a town that thinks it’s finally safe again.
Fifty years on, that’s still the scariest idea the franchise has ever had, and it’s the reason a nineteen-year-old babysitter running from a killer in a repainted Star Trek mask turned into one of the most enduring stories horror has ever told.
What’s your relationship with this franchise? Team original Carpenter purist, Zombie backstory defender, or all in on the Green legacy trilogy? I’d love to hear where you land, and which entry you think deserves more credit than it gets.
