Before long, we’ll be celebrating the fifty-year anniversary of the original Halloween, John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece. This low-budget movie began a franchise that now includes thirteen films, though not all of them are connected and the exact relationship that one film has with the others can be confusing to all but the most ardent horror fans. There are straight sequels, spin-offs, remakes, reboots, de-boots, a standalone film, and up to nine different timelines, depending on who you ask.
The undisputed star of the franchise is Michael Myers, but he doesn’t appear in one of the films, while the actress most associated with Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis, one of the strongest and most famous “final girls” in the horror genre, is featured in only six of the movies. And Laurie Strode, the character she portrayed, dies not once, not twice, but three times in the film series.
There are even two different Halloweens: Halloween (1978) and Halloween (2007); and two Halloween IIs: Halloween II (1981) and Halloween II (2009).
To complicate things further, it was Carpenter himself who, as a means to justify Michael’s continued pursuit of Laurie in the second film and beyond, conceived that Michael and Laurie were siblings. It is near the end of the first Halloween II when it is revealed that Laurie is Michael’s secret little sister. This invention would leave each of the future Halloween filmmakers with the choice of having the pair share a bloodline or not. So, there is really no simple “yes” or “no” answer to fans who want to know definitively if Laurie and Michael are brother and sister.
The expansion of Carpenter’s seminal work into what it has become today is a tribute not only to the famed director himself, but to the genre of horror whose fertile soil continues to produce crop after crop of talented filmmakers who share their unique visions of an iconic horror brand. While none of us, not even John Carpenter himself, knows exactly where Halloween might go next, we know where it has been. After thirteen installments, it’s worth looking back at the franchise’s evolution.
In any attempt to break down the franchise’s various timelines, we must begin with the film that started it all, Halloween (1978), followed three years later with Halloween II (1981). The sequel has been criticized as being predictable at best and uninteresting at worst. Carpenter himself called the film “an abomination and a horrible movie.”
When Michael Myers and Dr. Loomis are killed in a fiery explosion at the end of the sequel, the first timeline shift occurs with the 1982 release of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. Clearly, this movie takes the audience in entirely new direction. The concept and the film was nt bad, it just didn’t have Michael Myers. Not surprisingly, the film was a flop, resulting in the long-awaited Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988).
Michael and Dr. Loomis came back to Haddonfield for Halloween 4, but Jamie Lee Curtis did not. Her character, Laurie Strode, was said to have died in a car accident prior to the events in that film, so Michael pursues Laurie’s young daughter, whose name just so happens to be Jamie.
This film along with the following two, Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), are collectively referred to as the Thorn Trilogy, and represent a storyline all their own with the insertion of a supernatural cult element that seeks to explains what made Michael a killer.
These three films were not without their own controversy. Many fans simply could not embrace the supernatural element assigned to the legend of Michael Myers. What made The Shape so terrifying in the early films was not knowing what made him evil. The Curse of Thorn plot turned him in a victim, a mere puppet forced to kill at the behest of a malicious entity that infected his soul. The whole concept just seemed contrived and unnecessary.
In 1998, the thorn trilogy was uprooted with the reboot film Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, which saw the return of Jamie Lee Curtis. H20 is a direct sequel to Halloween II and completely dismisses everything that happened in the previous three movies. In this film, Laurie Strode is now known as Keri Tate, having changed her name after faking her death in order to escape her past and Michael. But of course, that doesn’t happen, and in the end, Laurie decapitates Michael. At least that’s the way it appears until 2002, when Halloween: Resurrection comes along. What audiences were subjected to in this film was a widely unpopular “retcon” in which Laurie did not actually decapitate Michael but instead lopped the head off a paramedic who Michael had dressed up to look like him. Resurrection, a direct sequel to H2O and the eighth film in the Halloween canon, finds Laurie Strode so guilt-ridden for the murder of an innocent man that she has been institutionalized. Michael finds her again and kills her early in the film, stabbing her and throwing her to her death.
Five years later, Rob Zombie’s reboot of Halloween (2007) and Halloween II (2009) came along and created a whole new timeline. Carpenter gave Zombie permission to make the film his own, and Zombie did just that, creating original content while still sticking close to the original story. However, there is a director’s cut of Zombie’s Halloween II that presents an alternate version of the film, following yet another slightly different path than the theatrical version with an entirely different ending. While some would contend that this version doesn’t necessarily create another timeline, it still alters the series of events we were presented with before.
Zombie’s Laurie Strode was played by Scout Taylor-Compton in his two iterations, and her fate depends on which version you watch. In the theatrical cut, Laurie is taken to a psychiatric hospital after stabbing Michael to death. However, in the director’s cut, Michael stabs Loomis and is later shot by the police, while Laurie picks up Michael’s knife and is shot to death by police while walking over to an unconscious Dr. Loomis. Although she’s later seen in the same psychiatric ward from the theatrical cut, Laurie’s death is left open for interpretation.
And so now we arrive at the current timeline; Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2022). This trilogy, created by David Gordon Green, follows directly from the 1978 original only, disregarding all the other films.
With Michael’s body being ground to pulp in Halloween Ends, it appears that the Halloween franchise has come to an end, but confusion and debate continues to rage about which films in the franchise should be considered canon and which ones are not. Purists might claim that the only movie that is 100% canon without an argument is John Carpenter’s 1978 original classic. The one that isn’t considered canon in any timeline is Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The fact remains that determining what is canon and what is not canon depends on each individual filmgoer. But in the end, does it really matter when the films continue to be enjoyed by millions of fans around the world.
With thirteen Halloween movies made so far, it’s hard to imagine that the franchise has truly come to an end. Halloween Ends is really only the conclusion of Green’s trilogy, and while he seems to have left no room for ambiguity in his interpretation that the storyline for Halloween is over for good, there will always be a public anxiously waiting for Michael Myers to return somehow.
Jason Blum has revealed that despite the death of Michael in Halloween Ends, he would be happy to continue with the franchise.
“We had a three-picture marriage with Michael Myers,” Blum has said. “I would love to extend it.”
Blum gave no hint as to how this would work, whether it would be a new timeline, another reboot, or a follow-up to the original idea of a Halloween anthology movie series. John Carpenter, the man who started the franchise, had the most practical view of whether there would be more Michael Myers after Halloween Ends.
“If you take a dollar sign and attach it to anything, there will be somebody who wants to do a sequel,” Blum said. “It will live. If the dollar sign is not big enough, no matter what, it will not live.”
Published 10/30/25