There’s a few horror franchises that feel like they’ll absolutely never, ever end. A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, Friday the 13th, and perhaps the one with the greatest decline in quality: Halloween.
With thirteen releases to its name as of 2023, you’d be hard-pressed to name more than maybe three of them which are actually good. Like good good. The excellent John Carpenter original, the cult favorite Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and 2018’s Halloween soft reboot. Even then, there’s still huge splits in opinion about the Rob Zombie films and David Gordon Green’s trilogy.
With Halloween Ends now six months old, horror enthusiasts are finally taking some time to properly autopsy the charred, burnt corpse of the franchise and ask the one big question: Why is it so hard to make good Halloween movies?
Controversially, perhaps the franchise just never actually had anything in it to warrant a sequel. The original film is essentially a perfect, posh horror movie done in a minimalist way. Minimalism and excess don’t exactly go together, do they?
Succinctly put by one commenter is the studio desire to try and reinvent the franchise while not really changing much up. So many of its rivals have adapted over time and changed setting quite significantly, but not Halloween. If you look at Scream, each film is a different killer (albeit with the Ghostface mask) and it totally works for adding a whodunnit edge to an otherwise very meta and straight slasher.
As for the Green trilogy, they might not be the greatest ever but they’re a long, long way from some of the shocking lows this series has seen. If anyone even attempts to say Halloween Ends is the worst one, you can easily remind them of Halloween: Resurrection with Busta Rhymes.
Well worth noting is the original intent of Halloween being an anthology series, an idea which was born and died within just one film – Halloween III. The smart money now might be to rediscover this, but there’s probably too much baggage associated with the franchise now.
Halloween Ends is available to stream on Peacock.
Published: Feb 16, 2023 11:45 pm