While many claim that the Halloween series underwent a truly gruesome and Michael Myers-worthy death in later installments, it would be wise to remember that the better-received earlier installments were what drew first blood.
- The original series is seen as having lost its edge by stripping away the killer Michael Myers' mystique, with later films attaching him to an ancient Celtic curse in order to explain his Implacable Man nature and why he kept targeting the Strode family. It eventually got bad enough that the producers had to declare everything after the second film to be non-canon when they made Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later.
If they really wanted to eliminate this series-derailing problem, then they should've retconned out the second film as well, because that was where it started.note In the 1978 original, Michael had no explanation beyond him being an escaped mental patient returning to his hometown to kill again, with Laurie Strode and her friends having no connection to him beyond circumstance. It's also left up in the air whether Michael is supernaturally evil or just extremely tough; while Dr. Loomis's final linenote leans towards the former, that's presented as merely the opinion of one man. The second film, on the other hand, not only revealed that Michael and Laurie were brother and sister, it also implied that Michael's seeming indestructibility was related to the occult. Later films continued piling on new pieces of backstory, enough that the script for the reboot-necessitating sixth film drew heavily from writer Daniel Farrands' Epileptic Trees about the prior films. In other words, that film merely took trends that had been going on unchecked for over a decade to their logical conclusion. John Carpenter, looking back on the franchise he created, stated
that its downfall came the moment it started giving Michael motivation and Character Development, with this being a big part of the poor opinion he has towards his work on the second film's script."... Michael Myers was an absence of character. And yet all the sequels are trying to explain that. That’s silliness — it just misses the whole point of the first movie, to me. He’s part person, part supernatural force. The sequels rooted around in motivation. I thought that was a mistake." - As for the remake continuity, one of the most polarizing things about it was in how it gave Michael a definitive origin story explaining why he became a killer, revealing it to stem from having Abusive Parents and growing up in a broken home. Many who disliked the film saw it as a return to the Original Sin and a misunderstanding of what made the first film great, though there were also those who enjoyed the new spin that Rob Zombie put on the series and how it drew from real-life Serial Killer mythos.
- The much greater physicality of Michael Myers in Zombie's films also drew criticism. The stuntmen who played The Shape in the first two films, the 5' 10" Nick Castle and the 5' 8½" Dick Warlock, were fairly normal-sized men who didn't have much of a height advantage over the 5' 7" Jamie Lee Curtis; their subtle-but-imposing presence came down in large part to both men being strongly built and great at playing an Implacable Man, which made them seem bigger than the majority of Michael's victims (especially in the first film). Zombie, on the other hand, cast the mammoth 6' 8" Tyler Mane in order to make Michael more directly imposing and threatening, especially when paired with the 5' 3" Scout Taylor-Compton as Laurie and the five-foot Danielle Harris as Annie, which a number of fans felt took away from his seemingly normal image and turned him into a clone of Jason Voorhees. This trend towards making Michael bigger actually began with the fourth film, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, which cast the 6' 2½" George P. Wilbur as Michael; every future Michael would be at least 6' 1". It was even more jarring in this case, as it created canonical issues with how Michael grew so much taller between the second and fourth films* — and when the sixth film tried to answer that question, it became a major Voodoo Shark moment and a big part of the reason why the producers hit the reset button with H20. The fact that Zombie's films had Michael be outright gigantic and paired him with much shorter actresses playing his victims simply put a much greater spotlight on the issue. Again, the 2018 film defied the trend, putting Nick Castle back into the role, though the stunts were done by the 6'3" James Jude Courtney.
- Another point of criticism many had with Rob Zombie duology is how Dr. Sam Loomis had been flanderized into a self-absorbed Jerkass by the second film. The thing is, it can all be traced back to the fifth film where Loomis had become desperate (and delusional) enough to stalk Jamie Lloyd and even use her as a bait to trap Michael. Some even take it further to the second film where Loomis caused an innocent person's death by confusing him for Michael. But the Ben Tramer incident was a clear case of Poor Communication Kills because Loomis had a solid reason to mistake him for Michael (wearing a similar mask, no audible response, trying to flee instead of explaining the situation), as well as Tramer's death being entirely accidental by being hit with a patrol car driven by another person entirely. The fifth film, despite his flaws, still tries to paint Loomis as a Well-Intentioned Extremist who gets better in the following film. As for the second Zombie film, it feels out of character for Loomis and when he does have a Jerkass Realization, it's a bit too little, too late. Just like many cases above, the second reboot trilogy reduced Loomis's appearances to flashbacks while still trying to paint him as less sociopathic and more pragmatic person while still maintaining his likeability.
- On a more minor level, Halloween: Resurrection got a lot of flak for, among other things, its Stunt Casting of Busta Rhymes as a cool, street-wise Action Hero who manages to put down Michael Myers — twice (once verbally without even realizing who he really was, and once physically) — and live to tell the tale. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later also featured a rapper in a prominent part, but LL Cool J's role was substantially smaller and less over-the-top than Busta's, and not nearly as controversial as a result.
- More broadly, there was a time when Halloween was seen as this for the horror genre in general. The Slasher Movie genre was very unpopular with contemporary critics, who saw them as little more than "dead teenager movies" (Roger Ebert's famous description of them) that swapped suspense, characters, and plot for graphic violence, nudity, and strangely reactionary attitudes towards such. As such, when slashers took over horror in The '80s, those critics directed their ire back at Halloween, blaming it for unleashing all of the worst trends of the decade's horror. Halloween itself was a comparatively bloodless film, however, and Carpenter relied heavily on the old-school tricks to get viewers on the edge of their seats, tricks that fell by the wayside in the '80s as later slashers, including many of its own sequels, instead emphasized the carnage. As for its politics, Carpenter himself acknowledged how the film came to be seen as having injected into horror a moralistic conservatism in which teenagers were killed for smoking pot and having premarital sex, saying in a 2000 interview for IFC's documentary American Nightmare that "if I ended the sexual revolution, I apologize." As Carpenter's quote suggests, it was unintentional, and Laurie's lack of participation in her friends' drunken sexcapades is used to paint her less as a "good girl" (she gives in and smokes a joint in one scene, only to immediately start coughing) than as a bookish, socially awkward nerd. Opinions started to turn around in The '90s, however, with the broader critical reappraisal of the slasher genre, such that these criticisms of Halloween have largely fallen out of fashion.
- A common opinion on Halloween III: Season of the Witch, the oddball of the series with no connection to any of the other films, is that it would have received a better reception if it had been Halloween II: Season of the Witch instead. John Carpenter's plan to make Halloween a Genre Anthology series, its stories tied together only by their connection to the Halloween holiday, ran into the problem of the fact that the second movie followed on directly from the first, turning Halloween into a more traditional film series with its own running plot and characters to follow. There was no going back from that, and Season of the Witch trying to do just that met a natural backlash.
