Behind the Couch

Dir. Rob Zombie A year later, and a traumatised Laurie still struggles to come to terms with the bloodbath that resulted when her psychotic brother Michael Myers escaped from an asylum and came to find her, killing everyone who got in his way. Her worst fears are soon realised when Myers, who has been in hiding ever since, returns on Halloween night to finish what he started a year ago… I first wrote about Rob Zombie’s follow-up to his remake of Halloween when it came out in 2009. You can read that review here . After burning out while making Halloween , Zombie was initially hesitant to helm the sequel. After thinking about it though, and recognising the chance to continue with the story, he decided to film the follow up, imbuing it with the same squalid, dingy and bleak tone as its predecessor. My thoughts on the film haven’t really changed. I still think it is a flawed, but beautifully filmed work. I appreciate that the focus is on Laurie and her struggle to repair her life...

Dir. Rob Zombie After massacring his family on Halloween, disturbed 10 year old Michael Myers is committed to a mental institution. 17 years later, he violently escapes and heads back home to Haddonfield to find his baby sister Laurie, brutally murdering anyone who crosses his path. In November 2005, Halloween producer Moustapha Akkad and his daughter, Rima Akkad Monla, were killed at a wedding party when Al-Qaeda bombed the Grand Hyatt in Amman, Jordan. As the champion of the series since its inception, his tragic death was a blow for the future of the franchise. This, coupled with Dimension Film execs realising (maybe) the error of their ways with Halloween Resurrection , looked set to see the end of the Halloween films. However, following a trend of remaking old horror films from the Seventies and Eighties such as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Black Christmas, Dawn of the Dead, The Hills Have Eyes, The Amityville Horror and When A Stranger Calls , producers recognised that H...

2002 Dir. Rick Rosenthal Four years after mistakenly killing a man she thought to be her brother (really, Dimension Films? Really ?), long-suffering Laurie Strode is eventually hunted down by her actual not-really-dead brother, the murderous Michael Myers. Making his way back home to Haddonfield, Myers discovers the crew of an online reality show has taken over his house (!) to broadcast a Halloween special featuring a group of teenagers dared to spend the night in the infamous house. Naturally he goes on yet another killing spree. And it's all caught on camera and broadcast online for all to see. Yes, all of this actually really happens. It really fucking happens. The silent stalker of the original Halloween is a distant memory - Myers is now the reluctant star of an internet reality show.  Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later did not warrant a sequel. It was initially intended as a twentieth anniversary celebration of John Carpenter's classic chiller . It also broug...

1998 Dir. Steve Miner With a new name and life in California, Laurie Strode still can’t escape the ghosts of her past and is haunted by the memories of her bloody ordeal 20 years ago, when her deranged brother Michael Myers tried to kill her. Working as the headmistress of an exclusive boarding school, she spends her days ostracising her son John, and her nights swilling booze and tranquilizers in an effort to forget her traumatic past. Since she faked her own death and went into hiding to escape her maniacal brother, she lives in constant fear of him ever finding her. It’s now Halloween 1998, and the waiting is finally over… With the twentieth anniversary of John Carpenter’s classic slasher movie approaching, and Michael Myers AWOL amidst a dirge of increasingly cumbersome sequels involving druids, curses and constellations (oh my!), it was left to actress Jamie Lee Curtis to pitch the idea of an anniversary film to both Dimension Films and the director who she credits for ...

1995 Dir. Joe Chappelle Six years after she and her psychotic uncle Michael Myers were abducted from the Haddonfield police station by the mysterious Man in Black, Jamie Lloyd and her newborn baby go on the run again with Myers’ in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, relatives of the family that adopted Laurie Strode have moved into the old Myers house and befriended Tommy Doyle, whose obsession with Myers’ leads to the discovery of a family curse that drives the killer to violently eradicate his bloodline – which is bad news for the Strodes. Teaming up with Dr. Loomis, they set out to stop Myers and the cult that protects him once and for all. With Miramax having purchased the distribution rights to the Halloween franchise, it was their intention to give the flailing series something of a reboot and to release further instalments through its newly established genre arm, Dimension Films. Following in the wake of the leaden Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers - complete with its amb...