ABSTRACT
This chapter offers an overview of the Halloween franchise. The film’s 1981 sequel, Halloween II, created a brand name out of Halloween, but 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch broke with the brand to tell an unrelated story, derailing the franchise. Michael returned in the late 1980s with Halloween 4 and Halloween 5, both of which featured a preadolescent protagonist. 1995’s convoluted Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers featured three generations of youths, revealing the franchise’s mise en abyme of youth, that is, its endless recurrence of youth characters. The franchise caught the post-Scream wave of ‘teenage soap’ horror with 1998’s hit Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. After 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, director Rob Zombie rebooted the franchise with his 2007 remake. Possibly the most contentious remake of the 2000s, Zombie offered an extended look into a Michael’s nightmarish preadolescence in an abusive socioeconomic background. Zombie’s bizarre 2009 sequel was a miss. The franchise returned to blockbuster status with the hit Halloween (2018), which brought back Laurie Strode and returned to the mise en abyme with its multi-generational depiction of Laurie, her daughter, and her granddaughter. The chapter concludes that Halloween films generally fare well when the market for youth horror is healthy and that the franchise has produced a rich and varied array of youth characters from all generations.
