Which halloween movie is the scariest

Ad — content continues below. There are also Halloween movies that are visually nastier and more unpleasant than The Curse of Michael Myers. And its explanation is ludicrously dumb. Talk about defanging your monster. One step forward, and 39 steps back. That seems to be the real curse of Michael Myers.

Take Halloween: Resurrection , for example. So Halloween: Resurrection begins by unconvincingly retconning the last one—it was a medic in a Bill Shatner mask that Laurie beheaded! But how could you not egg him on as he slashes his way through a reality TV series set in his house?

There, he imagines himself as still an eight-year-old boy talking with the ghost of his mother Sheri Moon Zombie awkwardly shoehorned in here while wearing a white sheet and eating dogs raw in the real world. Loomis, turning the character into a caricature. Get the best of Den of Geek delivered right to your inbox! That gripping film brought Jamie Lee Curtis back as an aged Laurie, whose ongoing trauma from her first encounter with Michael has affected not just her life but that of her daughter Judy Greer and granddaughter Andi Matichak.

Dismissing all the other sequels, it was a simple yet effective tale of grief, guilt, memory, and ultimately empowerment. While the attack isn't fully shown on screen, the screams and shadows seen as well as the flashing lights lead the viewer to imagine the carnage, which in many cases leads to a much scarier outcome. This shows that Michael can never be fully controlled, which many fans point out while scary, goes against the entire rest of the film. A major plot point involves the sinister Silver Shamrock mask company.

Kids all around wear their masks and excitedly sit in front of their televisions on Halloween night. The mask essentially turned their heads into insects, adding a different kind of horror than what was portrayed in other Halloween films.

A popular trope in slasher films is the final girl discovering all of the bodies the killer has accumulated before the final showdown. One of the earliest instances of this, and perhaps the scariest, came in the original chilling Carpenter classic. Laurie Strode naively babysat as her friends meet Michael.

After she fails to reach them, she decides to investigate for herself, where she discovers his homecoming party. She finds her friends dead and displayed for her to find, right before she finds the man himself. This sequence is absolutely terrifying, as the audience knows what happened while they watch Laurie have to find out for herself. The audience puts themselves in her shoes, imagining what it would be like to find their own friends, adding a personal level of terror.

The film Halloween 4 typically ranks modestly against the other films. The film features a shock twist ending that implied Michael would no longer be the killer moving forward. After he is defeated once again, his niece Jaimie and the other survivors feel they can rest easy.

That is until a familiar POV shot seems to kill Jaimie's mother. The film then reveals the assailant isn't a returning Michael, but his young niece sporting a clown costume similar to the one worn by Myers when he killed his sister. Related Stories. The 25 Defining Works of the Black Renaissance.

Already a print subscriber? Go here to link your subscription. Need help? Visit our Help Center. Go here to connect your wallet. He performs acts of strength like tipping over a car with his hands or stomping a head with his foot that make him resemble a giant in a touring circus.

Loomis, portrayed here as an obnoxious celebrity and true-crime book huckster, can't escape the freak-show either. By the time Zombie stages his Western-like shoot-out finale, complete with an emotionally devastated sheriff played by Brad Dourif, you'll either be completely disgusted or you will have fallen under this odd movie's sinister spell. Halloween III: Season of the Witch is an enormously entertaining fusion of paranoid science-fiction and occult horror tropes, but it also represents an alternate path for the Halloween series.

Following Halloween II , which John Carpenter famously called in interviews "an abomination and a horrible movie," the director and his Halloween co-writer Debra Hill produced this third entry in the series, the first to not feature Michael Myers, the town of Haddonfield, or a member of the Strode family.

Beyond the title and a flash of a trailer for the original on a television in a dingy bar, there are practically no connections to the previous movies. In the context of wildly successful TV anthology series like American Horror Story and True Detective , the decision to ditch your main character doesn't seem that wild, but it didn't sit well with audiences, who mostly rejected this stylish genre pastiche about a doctor Tom Atkins investigating the bizarre murder of a patient.

Soon enough, the good doctor finds himself in Santa Mira, a small factory town in California run by the mask-making Silver Shamrock Novelties. They have a great jingle , too. No, these aren't white Michael Myers masks either. Writer and director Tommy Lee Wallace, assisted by another excellent score co-written by Carpenter, is up to something far stranger.

Sadly, the movie was not a hit and the anthology model was ditched. By the time Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers came out, the film's producers put Myers' name right in the title so there wouldn't be any confusion. But a loyal army has formed around Halloween III: Season of the Witch and with good reason: It sustains a completely unique, transfixing mood of dread for its minute runtime.

A fearful Dr. Loomis describes the appeal of this movie early on. That's what we're dealing with here. The breathless, deserving praise heaped on John Carpenter's original Halloween for the last 40 years often focuses on the "pure" and "simple" elements of the movie—the lack of backstory, the chilling piano theme, and the long tracking shots—but there's a density and complexity to what this movie actually accomplishes that also deserves to be celebrated.

Like most great artists, Carpenter makes it look easy, but that doesn't mean it is easy. The same could be said of the cast, from series stars Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasence to peripheral figures like P. Everyone does their part. From the opening, which follows an act of murder from the eyes of the perpetrator, to the ending, which cuts to exterior shots of a barren Haddonfield to imply evil could be anywhere, the movie is constantly toying with your expectations and switching perspectives.

The roving camera isn't completely bound to Laurie Strode or Michael Myers; it's bound to the demands of a given scene. Like the brainy teenagers in Wes Craven's Scream , these characters watch genre films, including Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World , and the imagery clearly displays a reverence for Alfred Hitchcock; but Carpenter is not here to wow you with his knowledge or impress you with his taste.

He's looking to surprise and to evoke terror. Unquestionably, he succeeds. Halloween: Resurrection Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers Halloween Kills Halloween H 20 Years Later Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers Halloween Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers Halloween II Dan Jackson is a staff writer at Thrillist Entertainment.

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