Quentin Tarantino Slams This Famous Horror Franchise as “Awful”

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Quentin Tarantino thought about working on a Halloween movie at one point, but he ultimately didn’t like how the sequels turned out.

The director discussed his plans for a sequel to the 1989 film Halloween 5: The Curse of Michael Myers in a 2019 interview with Consequence.

Tarantino described his idea for a scene where the Man in Black appears and Michael Myers is momentarily stopped. He envisioned the first twenty minutes focusing on Lee Van Cleef’s character and Michael Myers traveling together, stopping at places along the highway. At each stop, Michael Myers would kill everyone present, leaving a string of bodies along Route 66.

After the success of Reservoir Dogs and selling the script for True Romance, Quentin Tarantino was asked to write a Halloween movie. He considered it, but ultimately decided to direct Pulp Fiction instead. He also shared what he thought of the previous Halloween sequels.

He strongly disliked the sequels, explaining that the plot twist in Halloween II – revealing Michael Myers and Laurie Strode as siblings – ruined the series. He felt it created an illogical connection, like ‘fruit from a poison tree’.

The real horror isn’t what’s happening in Haddonfield, it’s actually her. It feels like the writers just came up with a random idea and then tried to justify it by creating a reason for a sequel.

The Halloween movies started in 1978 and center around Michael Myers, a killer who breaks out of a mental institution to haunt the town of Haddonfield, Illinois, every Halloween.

The series centers around Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and Dr. Samuel Loomis, portrayed by Donald Pleasence. The first film, directed by John Carpenter and produced by Debra Hill, drew inspiration from classic thrillers like Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho and Bob Clark’s Black Christmas, and it played a key role in establishing the slasher film genre.

Since the original, twelve more Halloween movies have been released. However, Halloween III: Season of the Witch stands apart as it doesn’t follow the story of Michael Myers or connect to the other films. The series continued with sequels and reboots throughout the 1980s, 1990s, and into the early 2000s.

The Halloween film series was rebooted in 2007 with a new movie directed by Rob Zombie, and continued with another film in 2009. The series then returned in 2018 with a sequel to the very first Halloween movie. Two more films followed – Halloween Kills in 2021 and Halloween Ends in 2022 – and a television series is now being planned.

The Halloween movies have received very different reactions from critics. The first film from 1978 was highly praised and is now a horror classic. Later sequels, however, were generally met with mixed or negative reviews, often because the stories became confusing, the timelines were messy, and characters weren’t consistently developed.

The 2018 sequel was generally well-received for feeling like a return to the series’ original style, but later films didn’t fare as well, with critics finding them disjointed. Forbes contributor Scott Mendelson described the franchise as a horror version of “Choose Your Own Adventure” because of its complicated timelines and many different story paths.

The film series has been a major financial success, earning over $884 million worldwide. When adjusted for inflation to 2018 dollars, it’s the highest-grossing American horror franchise at the domestic box office, proving that audiences keep coming back despite mixed reviews.

As a huge movie fan, I always found Tarantino’s take on the Halloween sequels really interesting. He was clearly bothered by where they went with Michael Myers, feeling like some of the story choices actually hurt the character’s scary, mysterious vibe. He had some pretty different ideas for the franchise himself, but what struck me was that he really wanted to focus on building suspense and genuine fear, rather than getting bogged down in Myers’ backstory. It’s all about the atmosphere for him, and I get that.

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2025-12-22 13:45