How to Watch the 'Halloween' Movies in Order

Halloween changed horror movies forever and launched a franchise that spanned more than four decades.

John Carpenter's classic introduced Michael Myers — also called "The Shape" — and Jamie Lee Curtis as formidable final girl Laurie Strode to audiences in 1978. The film largely inspired the slasher sub-genre and established Curtis as a scream queen.

The original flick spawned 12 additional movies, and the franchise has made more than $1 billion and counting. To this day, the original 1978 Halloween is considered one of the best horror movies in history.

Curtis credits playing Laurie Strode in Halloween with not only with making her a star, but also with setting off a chain of events in her life that led to her marry Christopher Guest and eventually expand her acting horizons into comedy.

"As I write this, I keep connecting the dots," Curtis wrote in a PEOPLE essay in 2022. "If I hadn't been in Halloween, I wouldn't have met John Landis, the director who put me in Trading Places and showed the world I can be funny. That got me A Fish Called Wanda. That led to True Lies, which led to Freaky Friday. Dot connected, dot connected."

Connecting the dots of the actual Halloween movie timeline, however, can be a bit tricky. There are three different timelines for Curtis' arc as Laurie Strode in the Halloween franchise, plus Zombie's standalone films and another Halloween franchise movie that barely connects to the others at all.

Ahead, we break down how to watch the Halloween movies in order in each timeline, as well as chronologically in order of release date.

Halloween Movies in Release Date Order

• Halloween (1978)
• Halloween II (1981)
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
• Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)
• Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)
• Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)
• Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998)
• Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
• Halloween (2007)
• Halloween 2 (2009)
• Halloween (2018)
• Halloween Kills (2021)
• Halloween Ends (2022)

Halloween Movies in Chronological Order