Halloween earns its greatest scares when the person watching Michael Myers matters as much as Michael himself. Our pick remains John Carpenter’s 1978 original, followed by Halloween H20: two films that make Laurie Strode’s decisions central to their suspense.
Autostraddle’s feature “Two Lesbians Rank Every ‘Halloween’ Movie” provides an occasion to revisit the series through questions of identification, vulnerability, and survival. The ordering below is our own critical judgment, not a reproduction of that feature’s choices. [Autostraddle’s feature listing](https://www.autostraddle.com/page/48/)
Major spoilers follow for the franchise. This ranking covers the 13 films from Halloween through Halloween Ends. It weighs suspense, character development, and whether violence changes the people experiencing it. The sequels occupy different continuities; their versions of Laurie should not be treated as one uninterrupted biography. [Franchise overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_%28franchise%29)
The weaker entries: when survivors become expendable
13. Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
Bringing Laurie back only to kill her near the beginning makes this sequel feel emotionally bankrupt before its main story starts. The subsequent internet broadcast from Michael’s childhood home offers an intriguing premise: participants believe they control how fear becomes entertainment. Yet the film rarely makes their ambitions compelling enough to sustain that idea. Its playful vulgarity occasionally entertains, but the franchise’s most important survivor becomes disposable setup.
12. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
The theatrical version buries human stakes beneath explanations of Michael’s connection to a cult. Jamie Lloyd’s fate is especially dispiriting after earlier films invested in her vulnerability. Kara Strode supplies a more promising center: a woman whose domestic circumstances already make home feel unsafe. Unfortunately, mythology repeatedly takes priority over her perspective. Explaining evil does little for suspense when the explanation crowds out the people threatened by it.
11. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
Jamie’s psychic connection to Michael should make this a nightmare about intimacy without consent: she cannot simply look away from him. Instead, the film too often reduces her to a warning system. Loomis’s treatment of the child also makes his obsession increasingly uncomfortable. That discomfort could sustain a sharper film about adults failing a survivor, but the erratic storytelling struggles to develop it.
The official franchise synopses establish these sequels’ central reversals, family relationships, and supernatural developments. [Official film guide](https://halloweenmovies.com/films/)
The divisive middle: ambition without enough control
10. Halloween (2007)
Rob Zombie’s remake commits to showing Michael’s childhood rather than preserving his blankness. That creates a structural problem: the audience spends substantial time understanding the killer before Laurie can establish an equally vivid presence. The brutality has weight, but the later stalking feels constrained by the earlier explanation. Michael becomes more legible while the world around his victims becomes less interesting.
9. Halloween Kills (2021)
“Evil dies tonight” becomes a chant that substitutes certainty for thought. The hospital mob sequence gives that substitution a devastating consequence when a frightened man is mistaken for Michael. It is the film’s strongest idea: collective fear can manufacture another victim. But repeated declarations and spectacular killings overwhelm the people meant to embody that argument. Laurie’s confinement to the hospital further weakens the emotional continuity. [Plot and production overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Kills)
8. Halloween II (1981)
A hospital should offer Laurie safety; instead, its corridors extend the original night’s isolation. Her physical exhaustion gives the pursuit an effective imbalance. The problem is how much time she spends sidelined while the film expands the mythology, including the revelation that she is Michael’s sister. That connection personalizes the threat but narrows the original’s disturbing possibility that an ordinary person might be targeted for no comprehensible reason.
7. Halloween Ends (2022)
Corey Cunningham’s presence makes this an unusually risky finale. While Laurie attempts to live beyond fear, a younger outsider becomes entangled in Haddonfield’s appetite for blame. The contrast is productive: recovery requires a future, while the town keeps assigning people permanent identities. Yet Corey’s story and Laurie’s final confrontation compete for ownership of the movie. It is more interesting as a troubled character study than as a neatly balanced conclusion. [Universal’s synopsis](https://www.universalpicturesathome.com/movies/halloween-ends-2022)
The strongest sequels make fear personal
6. Halloween II (2009)
Zombie’s sequel is abrasive, but its abrasiveness has a purpose. Scout Taylor-Compton’s Laurie is not simply waiting to become an inspirational survivor. Her distress spills into relationships, and the film refuses the comforting assumption that escaping an attack restores ordinary life. Its nightmare imagery can feel overinsistent, yet the emotional ugliness distinguishes it from sequels that reset their characters between murders. [Film overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_II_%282009_film%29)
5. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
This standalone story trades Michael for a sinister mask manufacturer and gives Dr. Daniel Challis a different nightmare: recognizing a catastrophe he may be unable to stop. The frightening scale grows beyond what one resourceful protagonist can manage. Its characters are less finely drawn than Laurie, but the ending makes helplessness brutally concrete. An urgent warning is not the same thing as rescue.
4. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
Jamie and her foster sister Rachel give Michael’s return a relationship worth protecting. Rachel’s responsibility grows from obligation into active care, making their escape more involving than a succession of isolated confrontations. Jamie’s eventual attack on her foster mother makes the ending especially cruel: reaching home has not restored safety. The film earns that shock by first making the child’s need for belonging matter. [Film synopsis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_4%3A_The_Return_of_Michael_Myers)
That emphasis on responsibility also informs our discussion of survival and improvised cooperation in Green Room. Escape becomes more involving when characters must account for someone besides themselves.
3. Halloween (2018)
Laurie’s preparations make sense to her and impose costs on her family. Karen has experienced protection as control; Allyson inherits a conflict she did not create. Their eventual cooperation works because it emerges from this disagreement. The fortified house becomes an expression of Laurie’s thinking: ingenious, restrictive, and organized around an anticipated intrusion. The climax offers satisfaction without erasing the damage that preceded it. [Film overview](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_%282018_film%29)
2. Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
Laurie has changed her name and built a life as a school administrator, but her son John experiences the restrictions of that life. Their conflict gives the film its emotional leverage: her fear is justified without making every protective decision fair. When she turns toward Michael, the movement expresses a choice the story has prepared. The film’s compactness helps; it understands whose confrontation we came to see. [Official H20 synopsis](https://halloweenmovies.com/films/halloween-h20-1998/)
1. Halloween (1978)
Laurie begins with ordinary obligations: school, friends, babysitting. Jamie Lee Curtis makes her watchfulness feel like temperament before it becomes a survival skill. Carpenter lets danger accumulate around routines rather than announcing an elaborate destiny.
Brackett’s observation that “everyone’s entitled to one good scare” captures the neighborhood’s mistaken confidence. Loomis’s warning, “Death has come to your little town,” belongs to an entirely different understanding of the same streets. Laurie occupies the space between them, gradually discovering that familiar surroundings offer no guarantee of help. [Official synopsis and dialogue](https://halloweenmovies.com/films/halloween-1978/)
Her resourcefulness matters because she remains frightened. Courage never requires her to become invulnerable, and the film’s restraint lets small decisions carry enormous weight.
What this ranking reveals about Halloween
A queer reading of these films need not assign an unstated sexuality to Laurie or pretend lesbian viewers share one response. It can instead examine who belongs, whose fear receives recognition, and whether family creates safety or enforces confinement. Those questions illuminate the series without replacing what actually happens onscreen.
Like the uneasy freedom explored in our analysis of The Graduate’s final escape, surviving Michael does not automatically explain how to live afterward. The best Halloween films preserve that uncertainty. Their deepest horror is the possibility that a person can escape the immediate threat and still organize an entire life around its return.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: November 1, 2026 at 01:06:56 PST (Los Angeles time)
