The High Holiday’s knife-wielding icon will be slashing his way across the big screen once again on Friday, October 19th. This will mark Michael Myers’s tenth appearance in the Halloween film series (every installment except Halloween III: Season of the Witch). To celebrate his murderous return, I have put together a list–presented here in reverse chronological order–of my choices for Michael’s most frightening moment in each of the preceding nine films:

 

9. Halloween II (2009)

“Trick or Tree.” The embodiment of hulking brutality, Michael has never been more savage in his attacks on the hapless populace of Haddonfield than in Rob Zombie’s sequel to his own series reboot. But for all his raging rampage, Michael arguably is at his most frightful in one of his stealthier moments: the scene where he materializes seemingly out of nowhere, stepping out from behind a shadowed tree to surprise and strangle the policeman posted in front of the Brackett home. Unnerving in and of itself, the kill is also chilling because it forebodes that the sun is about to go down for good on Annie.

 

8. Halloween (2007)

“Ahead of His Time.” Young Michael’s first-time donning of his mask gets the nod here. The sight of this creepy, oversized head perched on a child’s clown-costumed body is strangely disorienting, making the subsequent slashing of sister Judith that much more unsettling. This giant, adult mask might be mismatched here, but Michael is destined to grow into it and make it a perfect fit.

 

7. Halloween: Resurrection (2002)

“No More Laurie.” The acting of Jamie Lee Curtis (“I’ll see you in hell!”) is at its worst, as is the plot logic (the idea that Laurie would have the time or the means to set up a booby-trap for Michael on the rooftop of a psychiatric facility is ridiculous). But there’s no denying the shock value when a backstabbing Michael finally succeeds–after a quarter century and four previous cinematic attempts–in getting the best of his sibling nemesis. If Halloween‘s original final girl can meet her demise in this film’s opening, then all bets are off.

 

6. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)

“Dumbwaiter Outsmarting.” From our first glimpse of it in the campus mess hall kitchen, we all know that the dumbwaiter will come into later play, but nevertheless it is put to unsuspected use. For one thing, Michael never comes jump-scaring out of it (although one of his victims, Charlie, is discovered stuffed inside by the boy’s horrified girlfriend Sarah). When Sarah attempts to escape Michael by ascending in the mechanized contraption, Michael saws through the trailing rope but does not simply bring Sarah crashing back down. Instead he catches her as she is about to exit on the next floor; she does not suffer some graphic decapitation, but only has her leg injured by the plummeting dumbwaiter. From here, Michael climbs leisurely upstairs, and when he proceeds to press his boot down on the neck of the bleeding/pleading girl and hack away with his blade, we see just how methodical and merciless he can be.

 

5. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

“Fear Window.” Admittedly, there’s not a helluva lot to choose from in this wretched entry (which makes a mishmash of the Michael Myers mythos). So I’ll go with the scene when heroine Kara Strode is on the phone with Beth and watches (through telephoto lens, in an upstairs bedroom directly across the street) Michael sneak up on the unsuspecting teen and deliver his sharp brand of post-coital punishment. To make matters even more terrifying, when Kara pans down, she sees her young son Danny crossing the street and heading straight towards the kill zone.

 

4. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

“Out of the Closet.” As if it wasn’t painfully obvious already, Michael reveals his orientation as a violence-minded voyeur in this early scene. A police sweep of Rachel’s house has deemed it empty, but Michael is in fact hiding in the closet. We first see (via an effective I-camera shot) Michael’s hand reaching out from behind Rachel’s wardrobe; the scene then cuts to an interior view of Michael as he watches the naked, vulnerable, and oblivious Rachel throw a sweater over her head. The emphasis here is on simmering suspense, but Michael’s eventual exodus from his hiding spot makes for a nice pairing with his closet break-in scene in the original Halloween.

 

3. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

“Michael-plicity.” Characters Sam Loomis and Jamie Lloyd have been experiencing respective visions of Michael throughout, but here in this scene they both (along with Rachel and Sheriff Meeker) see not one, not two, but three different Michaels surround a squad car. Their collective reaction to the trio suggests that this is no mere hallucination. The would-be slashers are soon revealed as costumed imposters (punk teens playing a Halloween prank), but for a brief moment it seems as if the franchise has taken a bizarro turn.

 

2. Halloween II (1981)

“Hallway Stalking.” Thinness of plot is made up for by unity of setting in this hospital-focused follow-up to the John Carpenter classic. Michael cuts down almost the entire staff of Haddonfield Memorial, but his scalpel-stabbing of nurse Jill constitutes the most frightening kill of all. Jill calls out to a wounded, drugged Laurie stumbling down the hallway, who turns back only to watch Michael step out behind Jill and impale her. Jill is no wicked fornicator (unlike her nurse counterpart Karen, who sneaks off while on duty for a tryst in a hydrotherapy tub) doomed by the conservative sexual politics of the slasher film, and so her murder proves especially disturbing. Jill’s death sentence is poignantly punctuated when her shoes slip off her feet and clatter to the floor as she is held aloft by Michael.

 

1. Halloween (1978)

“Exercise in Terror.” The extended climax (Michael’s pursuit of Laurie) is a textbook frightfest, but its signature moment occurs when the Shape gets back in shape via a single sit-up. Like Count Orlock emerging from his coffin in Nosferatu, the presumed-dead Michael rises up stiffly into sitting position. The maneuver brings dramatic irony to its height, as Laurie is completely unaware of Michael’s resurrection behind her. Also, for the first time, the audience must wonder if Michael is no run-of- the-mill serial killer but somehow supernaturally enhanced. Even before Laurie famously inquires at film’s end, the question crosses the viewer’s mind: is this the Boogeyman?