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♪Three more days till Halloween♪
♪Halloween, Halloween♪
♪Three more days till Halloween♪
♪Silver Shamrock Ad Space♪

Yes, All Hallow’s Eve will soon be upon us, and I thought, what better way to celebrate than by looking at the trailers for every film in the Halloween series?

Well, I’m sure there are better ways, but we’re still gonna be doing this one. We’ll start, of course, with the trailer for the 1978 original.

This is a damn effective trailer. The clips of Dr. Loomis are a bit awkwardly inserted, but otherwise it does a fantastic job creating a mounting sense of dread. That iconic Halloween theme is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, sure, but the editing of it is also top notch. I especially love how it ends by cutting to the titles, but with us still hearing Laurie calling for help. Plus, “The night he came home” is one hell of a tagline.

The folks making the trailer for Halloween II obviously agreed that the first movie’s trailer was aces, since this is pretty much just a copy of that. A lot of sequels are retreads of the original, but this one is especially blatant about promising exactly that – right down to the tagline “More of the night he came home.”

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is one of the most divisive films in the series, on account of having nothing to do with any other film in the series. No Michael Myers, no Dr. Loomis, no Laurie Strode, no white fright mask, no Haddonfield, no slasher movie formula. It’s a completely unrelated horror movie except that it also happens to be set at Halloween.

While calling the flick Halloween III was a bit deceptive, you at least can’t say the trailer was trying to hide the truth. It makes no attempt to have this look like the previous Halloween entries, instead putting its differences front and center, and only throwing in the Halloween title and a variation on the tagline at the very end.

Well, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers pivots in the exact opposite direction. They want to be very, very clear that this is a return to the world, characters, and style of the first two movies. If having “The Return of Michael Myers” in the title wasn’t enough, they have Narrator Guy explicitly reference the events of the first two films, and then recreate many famous moments from the original … with the addition of more explosions, car chases, and gunplay, because we’re deep into the 80’s at this point, and that’s just what you do.

This one makes me kinda sad. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers is my favorite Halloween movie, even though it’s nobody else’s, and it bums me out that at this point, enthusiasm for the series was at a low enough ebb, it only got this little thirty-second trailer. There’s a longer Halloween 5 trailer out there, but it doesn’t appear to have been a theatrical trailer – rather something Starz media created later for home video promotion.

This one … well, I get a laugh out of how one of the most widely disliked films in the franchise, the entry that bombed so hard the series would reboot after this, has its trailer open with someone wistfully recalling the days when Halloween was fun and scary.

The big selling point in the trailer for Halloween: H20 (the first of several reboots of the series) is obviously that they’ve got Jamie Lee Curtis back as Laurie Strode, for the first time since 1980. However, the trailer is also (perhaps unintentionally) reflective of the experience of watching Halloween: H20. By that I mean, we’re gonna be spending a lot of time on Laurie and some other characters going about their lives before Michael Myers starts doing stuff, which the movie will try to make seem interesting by throwing in a bunch of fakeout jump scares.

This is another trailer I’ve gotta give credit for being honest. It gives you exactly what Halloween: Resurrection provides: a random thriller about an unscrupulous, low-budget reality show, but halfway through Michael Myers shows up and starts killing people. Like, people hate this movie, but you can’t say the promo department didn’t warn them.

Once again, the series has been rebooted, and once again, I gotta give props for truth in advertising. This trailer gets across very well that this film is gonna be a retelling of the original Halloween through the lens of Rob Zombie: a louder, grungier, exploitation-heavy affair where most of our characters are gonna be assholes.

I like this trailer’s sense of humor. It spends half its running time making it look like this will be a remake of the original Halloween II the same way the previous film was a remake of the original Halloween, what with Michael Myers following Laurie to the hospital on the same night as the original rampage. But then it goes, “Psych! Just a dream sequence. We’re gonna be doing something different.”

Now we get to the third, count it, third reboot in the series. This trailer can’t help but give me a superhero comic book vibe, where it wants to be very clear about what it considers to be canon (in this case, nothing but the first movie), and wants to sell itself as the ultimate showdown between hero and villain. Like, it probably has as much footage of Laurie with a gun as it does Michael with a knife.

I got a big laugh out of how this one begins. After the previous film billed itself as a final showdown between Laurie and Michael, opening this trailer with shouts of, “No, no, no, no, no! Let it burn!” … feels like someone behind the scenes was maybe working through something.

To make up for that, the trailer for the next Halloween is about how this one is really for really reals the last one. Not giving many clear ideas about what will happen in the movie beyond Michael & Laurie squaring off (again), but with some self-aware dialogue about how this feels like the end. Plus, y’know, the title Halloween Ends.

…

I give it eight years, max, before we get another Halloween movie.