I have unintentionally started an October tradition for myself. For the past few Octobers (except last year, for obvious reasons), I have watched or rewatched a horror series and ranked it on Letterboxd. In 2024, I visited Camp Crystal Lake and watched all of the Friday the 13th movies; in 2025, I strolled down Elm Street with the “Nightmare on Elm Street” series, and this year, I traveled to Haddonfield, Illinois, and tried to escape Michael Myers on Halloween. These three are the unholy trinity of movie slashers, and to celebrate All Hallows' Eve (yes, I realized this was published on Nov. 1; cut me some slack here), I wanted to discuss these three series and which killer has the best movies.Friday the 13th-Jason Vorhees
The Friday the 13th series has 11 movies, and they go to some interesting places; Jason ends up in Manhattan, goes to Hell, and even kills people in space in “Jason X.” The original has none of the classic Jason iconography: the tall, machete-wielding guy in a hockey mask. In fact, the movie's big twist is that Jason isn’t even the killer. It’s his mom on a mission of revenge against the camp that let her son drown in Crystal Lake. It is not until Part 2 that Jason Voorhees becomes the killer. The movies get pretty ridiculous (remember the whole Jason in space thing?), but they can be pretty fun; Jason X and Jason Goes to Hell rank pretty high on my list for their more absurd moments.As a series, I would rank this as the second best of the big three, but as individual movies, they are probably the worst. The series did try to do something different and took the character out of Camp Crystal Lake more often than, say, “Halloween” did with Michael Myers. That's what makes “Jason Takes Manhattan” so disappointing: it promised Jason would be killing people in Manhattan, and it took forever for him to get there, and it’s only for the last 30 minutes or so. That’s a big reason I enjoyed “Jason Goes to Hell” and “Jason X” so much, even though the movies are bad: they promise a lot of fun and deliver.A Nightmare on Elm Street-Freddy Krueger
This is my favorite of the three series. “Nightmare on Elm Street” is a very good movie, but the third movie, “Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors,” is even better. It is my favorite of the seven movies in this series. This movie takes place at a psychiatric hospital where Freddy invades the dreams of a bunch of teens, but they learn to harness their dreams and fight back. It is what I wanted all the movies to be: interesting dream imagery, creative kills, and a genuinely interesting story. Of the big three slashers, Freddy invading dreams is the most unique and leads to a visually interesting movie, and these movies take advantage of that.This would be the series I am most likely to revisit. As for individual movies, these are the best of the big three, with the weakest being the second and the fourth. Part 2 is just so weird; Freddy takes over the main character's body, and Part 4 is a huge letdown compared to the greatness of “Dream Warriors.” Then there is the remake, where the only redeeming thing is that Freddy has a connection to the teens he is going after. They also made it more explicit that Freddy abused children, which is the part of the original movies that fans tend to ignore when they say they love Freddy. The best movies lean into Freddy’s dark sense of humor and use the dream elements in interesting ways.A Nightmare on Elm Street Ranking
Halloween-Michael Myers
Michael is the father of the other two. The first “Halloween” came out in 1978, with “Friday the 13th” in 1980 and “Nightmare on Elm Street” in 1984. Jason Voorhees is rocking a very Michael Myers-inspired look (mask, jumpsuit, and bladed weapon). Michael has the strongest first movie, but the worst series overall. The slasher genre owes a lot to Michael Myers and “Halloween.” The silent, masked killer who stalks teens (usually) is very hard to kill and keeps coming back no matter what is done to him at the end of the movie. Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Stoude is the quintessential “final girl.” The girl who gets beat up, almost killed, and just generally traumatized, and somehow gets the better of the killer in the final act of the movie. It is hard to overstate how important a movie “Halloween” is, not just in the history of horror movies, but in movies overall.That is why it pains me to say that this is the worst series. My biggest issue is that none of the movies try to do anything interesting with Michael Myers as a character. I am not saying they should have brought him to space, but the movies barely try to do anything the first film didn’t. We don’t get any more analysis of Michael as a character or why he became a masked killer. Laurie isn’t even in most of them, so we don’t get much of a look into what happens to the final girl after the movie ends. The other thing about the series is that it is a mess. Rob Zombie remade it in 2007, with a sequel in 2009, which would be fine if it weren't for all the retcons the series does. "Halloween H20" from 1998 erases everything after "Halloween" and the series gets retconed again in 2018 with “Halloween.” It ignores every movie after the original including "H20" which had already ignored most of the series. Now, I don't like most of those movies, so I am fine with it, but it shows how messy this series is. I haven’t even mentioned “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch,” a movie that doesn’t even have Michael Myers in it. It was trying to set up the series to be an anthology, but use “Halloween” as the brand to tell the stories. One thing that the 2018 “Halloween” does, which I love, is show the generational trauma of a “final girl.” Laurie has a very strained relationship with her daughter and lives in a fortified cabin in the woods. It ended up being a very good movie (I rank it just below the original), and its sequel, “Halloween Kills,” is also way up there for me, but the last movie, “Halloween Kills,” is actively bad, and I hate it.Freddy, Jason, and Michael are three of the most famous killers in movie history, and I hadn’t seen most of the movies they starred in. It was really interesting to fill this void in my horror movie knowledge over the past few years. There were some very good movies, but sadly there were also a lot of very bad ones. For a lot of these, Freddy and Jason in particular, you need to embrace the cheesy badness of some of their movies. Whatever the quality of these movies, these three will stand the test of time as horror icons.