In Hollywood there is nothing more terrifying than an original idea. It’s a fear born from the unknown, fear that audiences won’t get it, fear that it won’t do ‘good business.’ For nervous studio executives, both the movie franchise and the remake are a reassuring comfort blanket. These are movies that already have a guaranteed audience and producers can relax in the knowledge that the same idea has made money before.

Rob Zombie’s Halloween (2007) is in the rare position of being both a franchise movie and a direct remake of John Carpenter’s 1978 classic. That Zombie’s film raked in a massive $30.6 million on its opening weekend is hardly surprising. Nor should it be surprising that the film is a mess – lacking originality, insight, and, worst of all, scares.

But fans of the original have little reason to complain. Over nearly three decades and seven sequels the franchise has already been beaten to a bloody pulp. For the most part these sequels are borderline remakes anyway and stick rigidly to the template laid down in by Carpenter’s original.

On Halloween night murderous bogeyman Michael Myers returns to his home town of Haddonfield, Illinois to wreak bloody retribution on the town’s sex crazed teenager babysitters. With each passing sequel, as the body count rises, the presence of new material dissipates, washed away in a sea of human blood.

The more Myers is resurrected and destroyed (he’s been shot, blown up, stabbed, beheaded – he’s like Wile E. Coyote with a butcher knife) the more ridiculous he becomes. Any damage done to the original’s good name was done long before Zombie showed up – and some of it by Carpenter himself.

Both he and producer/co-writer Debra Hill claim it was contractual obligations that made them return for Halloween II (1981.) Early 80s cinema was filled with cheap (but occasionally effective) Halloween rip-offs like Friday the 13^th (1980) and Prom Night (1980.) Having ignited the slasher boom, Halloween financers Mustapha Akkad and Irwin Yablans knew a sequel would hit pay dirt and called upon Hill and Carpenter to resurrect their masked killer.

The film picks up directly after part one, with psychiatrist Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) blasting Michael Myers out of a second story window, only for his bullet ridden body to disappear. “Was that the boogeyman?” asks victimised babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis.) “As a matter of fact,” replies Loomis, “it was.” In a deep trauma, Laurie is taken to Haddonfield Memorial Hospital – only for Myers to follow. Prowling the empty wards, he savagely butchers unsuspecting attendants, searching relentlessly for both Laurie, and the family secret that unites them.

Despite co-authoring the sequel’s script with Debra Hill, Carpenter was unwilling to return as director, the task instead falling to newcomer Rick Rosenthal. Utilising Part 1’s cast, Carpenter’s creeping score and Cinematographer Dean Cundey’s stalking stedi-cam, Rosenthal’s aim was to match the original’s style exactly, allowing audiences to view the two films as one continuing story.

The moonlit hospital setting is suitably eerie and the panavision frame is once again filled with places to hide a killer. But Rosenthal lacked his processor’s skill with suspense. After viewing a weak initial cut, Carpenter shot some gruelling inserts of bodily carnage (a syringe piercing an eyeball, a throat getting slit, a security guard’s head getting caved in by a hammer) to give the film a more visceral bite (The very thing he had avoided in 1978.)

With Carpenter’s tinkering, Halloween II is noticeably more chilling, but he would never forgive himself for interfering in another director’s work:

“It was not my proudest moment. I did something I didn’t believe in… It was an evil thing to do.”

Yet the movie’s biggest flaw lays in his and Hill’s own screenplay. In part 1 Myers was an unstoppable supernatural force; terrifyingly without fear, pity and motive (“what was living behind those eyes was purely and simply evil.”) For part 2, despite an interesting subplot involving Samhain and the occult roots of All Hallow’s Eve, the sequel humanises its monster.

Myers is given a clearer motive. Laurie, it turns out, is his sister and he is looking to punish her for the crimes of the older sibling he murdered in part 1. By giving the devil a human agenda, he becomes just another of film’s Freudian lunatics. In 2007 Rob Zombie would make the same mistake, only deliberately:

“I was trying to detract from the boogeyman-ness of him because I thought that had been done to death,” Zombie has said.

Recycling the brother/sister dynamic (something Carpenter claims to have dreamed up at 2am in the morning over a six pack of beers) Zombie’s remake spends the first 40 minutes justifying Myers’ psychosis. We learn about his troubled childhood (an oedipal relationship with his stripper mom/ an abusive father,) we see him grow up in Smithgrove Mental Institution and learn that his mask allows him to feel emotionally detached from ordinary society.

It’s a bold attempt to offer a character study of an archetypal movie killer, but Zombie isn’t skilled enough to pull it off. His previous films -House of 1000 Corpses (2003) and The Devil’s Rejects (2005) – lack humanity and are full of sickly caricatures; people who are at best detestable, at worst, the human equivalent of puked up stomach lining. Without the talent to insightfully peer behind the mask, and without the occult mystery of Carpenter’s film, Halloween 2007 is depressingly flat. Zombie’s movie is intended as a reinvention, a chance to breathe fresh life into a stagnant franchise. Back in 1982, Carpenter had the idea to do the same for Halloween III, but with an altogether more radical approach.

“I suppose that the time is over for the kind of movie that Halloween is. It’s time to move on, to tell other stories,” said Carpenter.

Abandoning Myers in favour a new story and characters, Hill and Carpenter sought to turn the saga into a big screen anthology series based around October 31^st. The intent was to release annual 90 minute horror movies with only that date in common, turning Halloween into cinemas equivalent of The Twilight Zone.

Based on a story by British writer Nigel Kneale (The Quatermass Experiment), Halloween III sees demonic Irish toymaker Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy) attempting to drag Halloween (or Samhain in its original Celtic) back to its pagan routes (where, “the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children.”) Creating a mask which reduces the wearer’s head into a festering pile of snakes and crawling insects, Cochran unleashes it onto the American public and watches as it becomes a seasonal best seller.

Directed by Carpenter protégée Tommy Lee Wallace (production designer on the original Halloween) Halloween III: Season of the Witch is closer in tone to the paranoia of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) than a slasher picture. As the film’s alcoholic, doctor hero (played by the ever likable Tom Atkins) closes in on an industrial society completely under Cochran’s control; it becomes harder to tell who to trust. Particularly when the toymaker can create clockwork replicas of any one he chooses.

Halloween III has the wonderful feel of a technological fairytale. Cochran is like a malevolent witch dreamt up by the Brothers Grimm, but one who uses microchips and wind up robots to trap his victims instead of sweets and gingerbread. Carpenter, Hill and Wallace gave audiences something new, and cinemagoers were far from happy at being treated so fairly. The film was a commercial failure – fans, disappointingly, wanted Michael Myers.

“We found that the audience didn’t want different stories. What they wanted was just the same old thing over and over again,” stated Carpenter. “[The producers] got mad because they thought I’d destroyed their franchise. They took it out of my hands and I was done with Halloween.”

1988s Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers gave them exactly what they’d demanded. Scrambling together a lame plot involving Myers in a 10 year coma and a psychic niece, the film quickly gets down to knifing sex-crazed teens. Barring the return of Donald Pleasence as Dr. Sam Loomis (despite being blown up in part 2) the film has little to recommend it. Pleasence is delightfully unhinged and obsessed, admirably making the best of the film’s feeble dialogue, “He’s evil…on two legs!” he proclaims.

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers followed in 1989 – again starring Pleasence – and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers trundled along in 1995 (Notice that old franchise trick of abandoning the film’s number in order to hide the fact that recycling the same idea yet again.) Curse is poor, but made much worse by director Joe Chappelle’s decision to edit out many of Pleasence’s scenes because he found the actor “boring.” Hmmmm.

These films should have put Haddonfield’s favourite babysitter killer in the ground for good. So empty are they, so vacuous and devoid of ideas and creativity that they belong in some kind movie graveyard, never to be dug up again. Yet in 1997, Scream happened.Scream’s post-modernist take on the slasher movie proved a hit with fans who openly enjoyed quoting the rules of the genre – don’t say you’ll be right back, don’t investigate the strange noise outside, never ask “who’s there?” etc. The movie’s effect on the slasher was two fold: Firstly, it made films like Halloweens 4-6 appear painfully outdated, and secondly, it revived interest in the genre.

Halloween 7 was better than it had any right to be. Borrowing Scream’s hip self-referentialism and displaying a genuine affection for the Carpenter film, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) is the most successful of the Michael Myers sequels. Bringing back Jamie Leigh Curtis to the role that made her famous and conveniently ignoring parts 4-6, the film offers a sincere study of a character dealing with emotional trauma.

Executive produced by Scream’s Kevin Williamson and based on an idea by Curtis herself; H20 sees Laurie Strode still haunted by the events of Halloween night 1978. Having faked her death and changed her name, she is now head teacher at an affluent private school. A “functioning alcoholic” Laurie is fragile and paranoid, seeing Myer’s reflection wherever she goes. But this is Halloween, and 20 years later, Myers is indeed back, this time for her 17 year old son (Josh Hartnett.)

Containing a neat cameo from Curtis’ real like mum and Psycho star Janet Leigh (“we’ve all had bad things happen to us,” she tells Laurie) H20 manages to be in-jokey without reneging on the suspenseful terror. Director Steve Miner (Friday 13^th Part 2 (1981)) lets the film build slowly, gradually generating a foreboding atmosphere and allowing us time to care about the characters before Myers begins to pick them off.

The film also brings resolution to the Myers/Strode story arc. Curtis is the film’s linchpin, bringing a wounded yet resilient quality to her performance. As she moves from fleeing victim to axe wielding aggressor, she remains convincing and reminds us why she is, and always will be, the genre’s definitive heroine.

One more sequel, Halloween: Resurrection, followed in 2002. The less said about that the better. What the Halloween franchise shows us is that even before the recent flux of horror remakes, the genre has always relied on replication and self regurgitation. Horror is generally cheap to produce and within the hands of executives looking for a ‘sure thing,’ the result is often safe and disappointingly mundane.

But in the hands of serious craftsmen and women like Carpenter, Debra Hill and Jamie Leigh Curtis there can still be interesting stories to be told within even the most pedestrian and narrow of movie serials. Genre fans must remain sceptical but open minded. As for Halloween, Miramax executive Bob Weinstein has stated that another movie is unlikely. Yet whilst there’s still blood to be drawn from the franchise, I doubt we’ve seen the last of Michael Myers. For now at least, babysitters everywhere can rest easy. But for how long?