FRIDAY THE 13TH VS. HALLOWEEN VS. NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET: A TRIPLE FRANCHISE COMPARISION (ROUND 1)

With Halloween approaching I thought I'd attempt to directly compare each installment in the Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween franchises side by side (as far as possible). Quite simply, each entry is scored either 1,2 or 3 points, with 3 points awarded for what I consider to be the best of the three entries in each round. What follows is far from scientific, completely personal, and totally unobjective. 

Full disclosure - my favourite franchise of the three is (or so I thought) the Friday the 13th series. However, as you will see, there were some very surprising scorings and the result wasn't quite as expected... 

So, just for fun, and with deep (heavy menacing) stalky breaths, here we go with each respective franchise's original feature...

Round 1

3 points

2 points

1 point

"Halloween is the perfect machine movie. Its only message is 'boo!'...Then came Friday the 13th (1980), and psycho movies started to go nastily wrong." (Kim Newman, 'Nightmare Movies').

[Whilst I don't particularly agree with Kim here as I like the trashy slashy sub-genre, in terms of genuine cinematic quality however, I understand completely where he is coming from]. 

Very tough opening call this first round as I regard all three 'classics' within the annals of the slasher and sub-slasher genre.

Halloween terrified me when I first watched it alone on late night TV as a young teen. Friday the 13th left me wide-eyed and gobsmacked when I first saw it at the ABC Edgware Road cinema in the early 80's (I was 13 years old) double-billed with Part 2. And I still remember the tangible frisson of unease throughout the circle at the Leicester Square Theatre cinema when Nancy pulled Freddy's fedora out of the nightmare...

But, John Carpenter's suspenseful seminal slasher which gave us the actual boogeyman (as a matter of fact) in Michael Myers narrowly edges out Wes Craven's surrealist, scarred dream stalker Freddy Krueger to take the opening rounds' 3 points. No disrespect to Betsy Palmer's iconic 'Mrs Voorhees' however, I love Sean Cunningham's grindhouse summer camp bloodbath too. In fact, whilst it's inarguably the less technically proficient of the three, it's the flick I'm more often inclined to revisit. (Perhaps this comparison lark wasn't such a good idea after all...)