Halloween:
A Guide to All 13 films

The Night He Came Home!

“I watched him for fifteen years, sitting in a room, staring at a wall; not seeing the wall, looking past the wall; looking at this night, inhumanly patient, waiting for some secret, silent alarm to trigger him off. Death has come to your little town, Sheriff. Now, you can either ignore it, or you can help me to stop it.” —Dr. Sam Loomis, 1978

For decades, movie monsters had been men in silly rubber suits. In 1978, John Carpenter’s “Halloween” hit all the right buttons with audiences and led to a whole new genre: the slasher film. There had been a few slasher films in the past, such as “Psycho,” “Peeping Tom,” and a handful of others, but none really brought together all the elements of pure terror and adrenaline-pumping fear of Michael Myers vs. Laurie Strode in Haddonfield.

Trying to capture lightning in a bottle, there was a sequel. Then there was a wholly unrelated film, Halloween III, and then a return to the storyline of the first two films, but with a different lead character, and then it just started getting a little silly with cultists and reality TV shows. A reboot of the first film followed these films. Then the reboot was thrown out, and there was a sort of alternate timeline that only followed some of the original material, and… are you lost yet? Yeah, it’s easy to get lost. That’s one thing this book can help with.

The book covers all thirteen (so far) “Halloween” movies. It explains the various timelines and reboots. Each film has a complete synopsis, including spoilers, so you can read along and get caught up even if you missed some of the films. Each one then has our commentary, opinions, and some trivia about each film.

Did you miss a few of these somewhere down the line? I did when they were released. But now I’ve seen them all. This is your chance to catch up on the whole series and make sense of the multiple timelines and reboots!

“I met him, 15 years ago; I was told there was nothing left; no reason, no conscience, no understanding in even the most rudimentary sense of life or death, of good or evil, right or wrong. I met this… six-year-old child with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and… the blackest eyes – the Devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him, and then another seven trying to keep him locked up, because I realised that what was living behind that boy’s eyes was purely and simply… evil.” —Dr. Loomis agai