The Science Fiction Horror and Fantasy Film Review
Halloween is an annual event in Western countries – in North America in particular – celebrated on October 31st. Children and adults dress in scary costume and tour neighbourhoods trick-or-treating where they are usually rewarded with candy at the houses visited.
On screen, Halloween was typified by the exploits of Michael Myers in Halloween (1978), the first slasher film. This was followed by various other films about killers stalking people on Halloween Night. Other films concern people often unwittingly venturing into haunted locales, enacting rituals or stirring up spirits on Halloween.
Halloween is also the time when assorted creatures come out to play. In the 2010s, a number of films have concerned themselves with Halloween haunts (haunted house attractions) with killers lurking amidst the make-believe.
There has also been a tradition on various tv shows and movies conducting a Halloween special or episode. For more detail and an overview of the genre see the Theme Essay Films About Halloween.
From the director of the Terrifier films, a horror anthology in which a babysitter and kids sit down to watch a mysterious videotape on Halloween night. The first screen appearance of Art the Clown
Michael Paul Stephenson of Best Worst Movie fame makes a documentary about people who turn their homes into Halloween haunts. While lacking the freakshow aspect of Best Worst Movie, this is a likeable effort that follows its subjects in perfecting their art
Despite the title, this is no relation to tv’s Bates Motel or the Psycho franchise but a slasher film set around a famous Pennsylvania Halloween haunted house attraction. The film otherwise displays a general but unremarkable competence
The Long Halloween Part One was one of the best DC animated films in some time, now comes the concluding chapter, which alas fails to fulfill the promise that the first film showed
After 36 years and several abortive attempts, Tim Burton, Michael Keaton and Winona Ryder reunite to make a sequel to Beetlejuice, but the essentials that fired up the young Burton now feel as they come by the numbers
Tyler Perry is an accomplished impressionist but his two Halloween comedies appropriate elements of the horror film while having no interest in the genre. Here all the horror elements only serve to deliver a lecture on child rearing
I don’t dislike the Tyler Perry film – the performances are skillfully accomplished. Here however Perry attempts to make a Halloween comedy while displaying almost zero interest in any of the genre elements
An animated film produced by Guillermo Del Toro that draws on his Mexican heritage and Day of the Dead mythology. An amazingly colourful and happy film with one of the most unique design schemes ever
Average slasher film that is nothing standout about teens being stalked in the midst of a Halloween prank. Jennifer Tilly turns up in a campy performance.
Charlie Charlie was supposedly an oracular game that made headlines when a satiric site claimed that teenagers were being killed playing it and some news sites took this seriously. This is a pathetic and feeble film made exploiting the game’s five minutes of notoriety
An incredibly eerie and haunting killer clown film from Victor Salva. This is one of the few films that capture something of the spooky suspense of John Carpenter’s Halloween
A horror film produced by Seth Rogen that gains some really creepy effect as a boy finds something is living in the walls of his home
David Slade seemed a promising directorial name several years ago with works like the charged Hard Candy, before making Twilight films and being lost in tv. Here he returns with a film set around a small town’s deadly Halloween rituals
The fourth of Jim Varney’s Ernest P. Worrel comedies. This pits Ernest in a series of knockabouts routines against a troll that is resurrected on Halloween
The second film spun off from R.L. Stine’s popular horror stories promotes the wonderfully evil ventriloquist’s dummy Slappy to principal nemesis. The rest of the film is predictable but Slappy deserves his own series
A bizarre film involving Halloween killings and devil worship that seems to have been made without a clear script. Everything is wrecked by a astonishingly awful performance from Hy Pike
John Carpenter’s all-time classic, the film that created the slasher film and has been much imitated, not to mention multiply sequelised and remade. None of these however come anywhere near recapturing Carpenter’s eerie spookiness
Another inferior entry in the mid-00s fad remake of 70s/80s horror films. Whereas John Carpenter gave us Michael Myers as evil incarnate, Rob Zombie gives us Michael Myers as a misunderstood and unloved kid
40 years later, Jamie Lee Curtis returns to pay homage to Halloween in what is a direct sequel to the original, erasing the continuity of every other sequel. This fails to conjure what made the original a classic
The first sequel to Halloween, with Michael Myers pursuing Jamie Lee Curtis through a hospital. John Carpenter’s suspense is replaced by slasher hackery but in retrospect this is a lot better than the subsequent sequels
Rob Zombie’s follow-up to his Halloween remake is a better film and closer to what the previous film should have been but his approach is still based on callous brutality than John Carpenter’s eerie suspense
Unrelated to the Michael Myers saga, John Carpenter tried to use the Halloween name to launch an original horror series. The plot is a baffling mix of Celtic magic and hi-tech but Tommy Lee Wallace creates some way out effects scenes
Following John Carpenter’s departure from the Halloween series, the sequels begin their progression into a series of interchangeable slasher films in which Michael Myers is inevitably released to kill anew
The fourth of the Halloween sequels where the series is by now is no more than a crudely directed slasher film, a far cry from John Carpenter’s eerily suspenseful original
David Gordon Green and Jamie Lee Curtis return to round out their highly underwhelming Halloween reboot trilogy. By now, this feels like a Halloween film in name only
The seventh Halloween film, made for the original’s twentieth anniversary. This erases continuity to the other sequels and has Jamie Lee Curtis alive and pursued by Michael Myers again. Better than most of the other sequels.
Sequel to the 2018 reboot/sequel to Halloween from David Gordon Greene, this is more scrupulous about paying homage to the original and recapturing something of John Carpenter’s original stylism
The eighth Halloween film. This tries to throw in some novelty by combining Michael Myers with a reality tv show being filmed in his family home but is still the same uninspired thrills of the other sequels
The sixth of the Halloween films, the fifth with Michael Myers. By now John Carpenter’s original eerie suspense has been reduced to crude slasher movie payoffs. This tries to add some nonsense about druidic cults
A painfully unfunny endurance test created by star Kevon Ward centred around the deformed, imbecilic hillbilly he played at Halloween shows. The film is little more than people playing morons in silly voices
A directorial outing from the screenwriters of A Quiet Place produced by Eli Roth set around a Halloween haunt. This avoids the pitfall of other Halloween haunt films and creates some effective games of reality and illusion
A low-budget film about a university hazing in a haunted house that goes wrong. This overspills with genre tropes to eventually arrive at an appealing ridiculousness
We have had several horror films set around Halloween haunts in recent years. This effort produced by Gale Anne Hurd is well above average and generates quite a degree of tension
The return of director of Pontypool should be anticipated. But this kills a near-foolproof premise – masked children come after a heroine on Halloween night wanting her unborn baby – with a pink lighting scheme
As part of their attempt to sell everything including the family silver, Disney make a sequel to their witch comedy, bringing back the three original actresses who are now looking a lot longer in the tooth
A Disney live-action film that engenders no believability in its basic premise. Much of the show is regarded as an opportunity for Bette Midler to steal the limelight and play to over-the-top excess
A Found Footage film with a camera crew searching Halloween attractions for the most extreme haunt only to find something else. The film has a certain effect where we are not entirely sure what is real
Sequel to The Houses October Built with the same group touring Halloween haunts encountered sinister figures beneath the masquerade as everything starts happening all over again
Classic Halloween tv special. As with most of its ilk, it places the focus on a light-hearted treatment where the monsters are no more serious than Halloween revelers
A Halloween horror from a director with a reasonable genre association, this establishes its genre bona fides but then shoots itself in the foot
Another pointless remake of an 80s horror film. The original was a cheap Evil Dead ripoff driven by cheesy effects; this provides more professional effects but only becomes a slickly produced assemblage of cliches we have seen dozens of times before
An effective slow burn film that settles in with the promise of being a standard entry with a babysitter being stalked on Halloween night. However, this proves to turn all your expectations on their head
Tim Burton and Henry Selick combine on this stop-motion animated fantasy made in Burton’s characteristcially eccentric style, a beautifully stylised and dark fantasy in which assorted Halloween denizens invade Christmas
Nicolas Cage has never had a good relationship with the horror genre – remember The Wicker Man and Vampire’s Kiss? This gives all impression it was designed for the 50c bargain bins, in which Nic tries to save his missing son in what amounts to a supernatural version of Taken
From Jeff Lieberman, a wonderfully malicious film where a young kid befriends and ends up aiding a serial killer on Halloween
A horror film set around a haunted house attraction that is made with near-total amateurishness. The film seems to have multiple plots happening all at once and becomes impossible trying to figure out what is happening
Well produced but otherwise unfunny comedy about a group of bumbling Martian invaders who turn up on Halloween, following a rebroadcast of the Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio show
An anthology of Halloween-themed horror tales, all from different genre directors, including some interesting high-profile names. The results are uneven with the film providing a couple of amusing segments but nothing truly standout
A variation on the killer clown film that does rack up quite a degree of tension and pushes the material for something edgy. A popular hit that has produced two sequels.
Terror Train starring Jamie Lee Curtis was one of the classics of the original slasher film fad. This is a remake
In an era where horror has become safe and mainstream, where content is specifically marketed to PG-audiences, this film about a killer that strikes on Halloween comes with a ferocious gore-drenched enthusiasm
From the heyday of the slasher film, an effort about a babysitter stalked by an escaped maniac on Halloween Night, which draws great influence from classics of the era such as Halloween and When a Stranger Calls. Nothing standout but what a great supporting cast
Disappointing Bryan Singer produced horror anthology set around Halloween where its potential is frequently dragged down by over-emphatic direction
Halloween film for children from the pen of horror author R.L. Stine of Goosebumps fame. The children’s horror story (and tv movie) is filled with many insipid and formulaic entries but this is a decent one that is not unafraid to scare people