!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd">

With the Halloween franchise ostensibly coming to a close with the release of Halloween Ends this weekend, we're re-running this epic deep dive into all the most skinsational moments from the saga's forty-plus year history!

While many slasher genre tropes were invented in earlier films, 1978's Halloween crystalized them in a way, bringing together all of the various disparate elements introduced in other films, to make them all definitive beats any slasher film needed to hit. Initially intended to be an anthology series, the Halloween movies attempted to move beyond unstoppable killer Michael Myers with 1982's Season of the Witch, but that film's failure to connect with audiences brought Myers back in the late 80s. The ensuing sequels introduced a complicated mythology involving the "Curse of Thorn," granting Myers supernatural abilities, though they eventually jettisoned all of that in the late 90s.

Although there's no direct correlation between sex and death in these films the way there is in Friday the 13th, sex and nudity are all over the franchise and, almost always, are a precursor to a character's death. Let's look at the many lives of the Halloween franchise and the numerous nude scenes across 4-plus decades!

Halloween (1978)

There isn't much to be said about John Carpenter's 1978 horror masterpiece, originally titled The Babysitter Murders, that hasn't already been said in countless think pieces and video reviews. The film's opening sequence is incredible emblematic of the time period in which it was made, as the horror landscape was rotten with evil children movies like The Omen and The Bad Seed. Thankfully this turns out to be a prologue only and the underage murderer unmasked just prior to the opening credits will be a fully grown adult the next time we see him.

While the Friday the 13th franchise definitively exploited the link between promiscuous teenagers and the killer's murderous appetite, it's less pronounced in the Halloween series and more open to several different interpretations as a result. The film's opening minutes are mostly seen through the eyes of the murderous Michael Myers, who was only a six-year-old child at the time he killed his sister Judith (Sandy Johnson). We see her sitting topless at her vanity when Michael enters her room and stabs her to death...

The film then jumps ahead 15 years to Halloween 1978, as Michael escapes while being transported to court and ends up wreaking havoc in the town of Haddonfield, IL once again. Teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) is stalked by Myers throughout the day before things come to a head that night as Laurie is babysitting. Her friend Lynda (P.J. Soles) sneaks off to have sex with her boyfriend Bob, but afterwards, he meets with a grisly end, getting stabbed to the wall. Michael then dons a sheet and Bob's glasses to fool Lynda, who ends up getting choked to death with the phone cord, but not before we see her breasts...

The film was a monster hit, grossing around $70 million on a budget of $300,000—in today's money, that would roughly equate to a $275 million take against a budget of $1.18 million. This would of course lead to sequels, but two roads lay ahead of the film's producers. They could continue down the road that had made them tons of money or they could stick with their original plan to anthologize the series. It took them three years to make up their minds, but they finally did...

Halloween II (1981)

While John Carpenter and producing/writing/life partner Debra Hill had always envisioned the Halloween series as an anthology series, with each film set around the titular holiday with a different antagonist. Following the tremendous success of the first film, however, they decided to table the anthology idea and make a direct sequel to the first film.After bringing the Michael Myers/Laurie Strode narrative to a close, Carpenter and Hill likely figured they could move on to their anthology idea, but as we'll soon find out, that wasn't going to be as easy as they once thought.

Though made three years after the first film, 1981's Halloween II is set immediately after the events of the first film. The biggest narrative change for the Michael Myers saga this time around is the introduction of the notion that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis, returning to the franchise for the second of five times) is his long lost sister. Although this idea was originally floated in a scene that would end up being deleted from the first film, it didn't become canon until the release of this film—though this and all of the subsequent sequels and storylines were jettisoned by last year's Halloween.

Looking to keep costs down, relative to the first film, Carpenter and Hill eventually settled on the story taking place almost entirely within the confines of a hospital as Laurie recovers from her injuries and Michael Myers returns to finish what he started. Though Carpenter and Hill remained on the production as writers and producers, Carpenter handed off directorial duties to Rick Rosenthal—who would return to the franchise with 2002's Halloween: Resurrection.

Confining most of the action to a hospital is both the film's biggest strength and biggest weakness. While the vast majority of horror films take place in one central location, Halloween II seems to squander the potential in the set-up by introducing a never-ending litany of doctors, nurses, and cops who are all, essentially, dead meat. Laurie and Dr. Loomis are the only characters with any sort of depth to them, making the whole thing feel like a short film stretched to feature length through extensive padding.

One of the dead meat characters we're introduced to is Nurse Karen, played by the sensationally stacked Pamela Susan Shoop! After being reprimanded for arriving late for her shift, she slides into a hot tub with an EMT played by character actor Leo Rossi, revealing her amazing rack...

In the end, Loomis sacrifices himself to blow up the hospital with Michael inside, presumably bringing closure to Michael's story while also leaving Laurie alive. Carpenter and Hill may have thought they were done with Myers, but after their first Myers-less sequel, reevaluations were necessary.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Carpenter and Hill finally got to realize their original vision for the franchise with the following year's Season of the Witch. Clearly audiences were unprepared for this early stab at a meta-take on the shared cinematic universe in which the first two Halloween films exist as films within the framework of Halloween III. While Halloween II had been the first film to introduce a supernatural element to the world of the series, tying Michael's seeming immortality to the Celtic festival of Samhain, this film digs deeper into that mythology to reveal a sinister corporate plot to kill the children of the world.

Horror legend Tom Atkins stars as the boozy Dr. Dan Challis, who is dragged into a mystery involving mysterious disappearances, namely of the father of a young woman (Stacey Nelkin) he'd like to lay some pipe in. Like the proverbial rummy conspiracy theorist, the good doctor's story becomes more and more far-fetched as he digs deeper into the nefarious dealings of the Silver Shamrock corporation and its CEO Conal Cochrane. Cochrane's plan involves the distribution of high end Halloween masks embedded with microchips that, when worn by children in front of the television during a special broadcast on Halloween night, cause the children to evaporate into a puddle of snakes and bugs.

It's an absolutely bonkers movie whose reputation has been sullied by years of being referred to as "the one without Michael Myers." As we'll see, the inclusion of Myers alone does not a good Halloween sequel make, and this film's hard-to-root-for protagonist and pitch black ending have made it a cult classic among fans of the franchise. There is one nude scene in the film as well, courtesy of Stacey Nelkin, who briefly flashes bush while in the shower getting ready to get down with Atkins...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988)

And here's where Carpenter and Hill depart the franchise and producer Moustapha Akkad becomes the main man to bring back Michael Myers and more or less steered the series for the next decade. Akkad rejected Carpenter and writer Dennis Etchison's pitch for the fourth film, wanting to get the franchise back to basics: Masked killer stalks horny teens in suburban setting. He also wisely brought back Donald Pleasance's Dr. Loomis back, though they also hamper him with some ridiculous burn makeup to explain away his survival at the end of Halloween II.

The script, written by Alan B. McElroy, unceremoniously kills Laurie Strode in an off-screen car accident, but also gives her a daughter, Jamie, played as a pre-teen by Danielle Harris. Jamie is now the central focus of the series—for the next two and a third movies, anyway—and though this is probably the best of the non-Carpenter-involved Halloween sequels, it's also one of only three films in the series with no nudity.

The beautifully big breasted Kathleen Kinmont has a very romantic sex scene with her boyfriend—played by Sasha Jenson, the senior in overalls from Dazed Confused—and though Kinmont has gone nude on screen before, they opt to cheat us out of a reveal...

Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989)

For the first time since Halloweens II and III were released in 1981 1982, we got Halloween films in back to back years when Halloween 5 followed 1988's Halloween 4 in 1989. The series also begins adopting the same action-verb-subtitling system as the Pink Panther series, with Revenge of Michael Myers and Curse of Michael Myers both following Return of Michael Myers, as they do in Blake Edwards' comedy series. This flick is a direct continuation of the story started in 4, with Jamie still serving as the series' protagonist after surviving the events of the previous film, though they clearly hinted at Jamie becoming the killer moving forward.

Not wanting to once again deal with removing Myers from the equation, he reappears and finds himself nursed back to health by an old hermit, in much the same way Frankenstein's Monster benefited from the charity of the blind man in Bride of Frankenstein. Granted, that's giving these movies an awful lot of credit they don't deserve, but it's clear that producer Moustapha Akkad viewed Myers in the same league with the classic Universal monsters. This is a pretty rotten entry in the franchise with lots of groan inducing moments.

It does, however, give us multiple nude scenes in a flick since the first go-around. The first nude scene comes early on when Jamie's foster sister Rachel (Ellie Cornell) is in the shower, giving us a great glimpse of her bush and buns...

Not long after killing Rachel, Michael begins to stalk Rachel's friends Tina (Wendy Foxworth) and Sam (Tamara Glynn). He catches up with Sam and her knob of a boyfriend Spitz getting busy in a barn, giving us a quick look at her left breast as they're murdered...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

Soon enough, Michael also finds Tina, chasing her through the woods, which allows her left breast to be visible for the briefest of moments as she runs...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995)

Following the relative box office disappointment of 4 5, franchise producer Moustapha Akkad pumped the brakes on the franchise, hoping to give the creative team some time and space to come up with a new story that would unite the many different directions in which the franchise wandered over the years. Dimension Films head Bob Weinstein purchased the rights to the franchise, bringing it under the controlling but also generous umbrella of Miramax Pictures, which was becoming a powerhouse in the indie world.

The Weinsteins also had a reputation for releasing chop jobs, often recutting films themselves after poor test screenings or sometimes just to spite a director. While the prospect of bringing the franchise into the 90s with the studio that most represented the 90s was appealing, it wouldn't be until the next sequel that the marriage of material and studio would actually pay off. As it stands, The Curse of Michael Myers remains another mid-90s studio chop job of a horror sequel.

The nudity in the film is as strange and gratuitous as Halloween 4's nude scene was strange and chaste. Again it's teens having sex by firelight, this time provided by candles. Mariah O'Brien plays Beth, the girlfriend of the protagonist's brother, who bares her breasts briefly in this tender moment before shock jock DJ Barry Sims is scheduled to bring his entire radio program to the house...

While there were many ambitious plans for the franchise coming out of this film—from Tommy Doyle becoming the series' new Loomis to Jamie's child becoming the new Michael Myers—but they were all scuttled when the film underperformed relative to the other films in the series. The latest reboot of the series was on the horizon and despite the Producer's Cut of this film being more watchable and less an incoherent mess, it doesn't save the film from being really poorly crafted. A scant three years later, Dimension would breathe new life into the franchise and send it in a new direction with 1998's Halloween H2O.

Halloween Resurrection (2002)

With the franchise now embedded at Dimension and following the success of the 1998 quasi-reboot Halloween H2O, the franchise had some new life in it for the first time in a long time. Unfortunately, like all bad Halloween sequels, this one tries to undo the ending of the previous film and ends up falling flat on its face. In the film's cold open, we learn that Laurie did not in fact kill Michael at the end of H2O, but rather a paramedic that Myers put his mask on before making a quick escape. Faking psychosis in a mental hospital, Laurie waits for Michael to come get her and though she manages to trap him, while trying to unmask him, he stabs her and she falls to her death.

The film then abruptly changes course, focusing on a reality competition series called Dangertainment run by Busta Rhymes—in the leading role, I might add. The hook for the latest episode of Dangertainment is that competitors will spend the night in Michael Myers' childhood home in Haddonfield, completely unsuspecting of the killer's return. The major, overarching problem with Halloween: Resurrection is its insistence on utilizing a streaming video technology that wasn't even remotely within the realm of the internet's limitations at the start of the new millennium.

Even putting that to the side, the film is full of ridiculous moments from the disgraceful way they handled Jamie Lee Curtis' return to the absurd conclusion wherein Busta Rhymes defeats Michael Myers with kung fu. Perhaps the only highlight of the film is the brief topless scene from Daisy McCrackin as Donna, one of the dead meat Dangertainment contestants before she discovers a hidden tunnel out of the home and ends up impaled on a spike by Myers...

Halloween (2007)

Following the relative success of his first two films, House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects, Rob Zombie was offered the chance to reboot the franchise. Zombie reached out to John Carpenter before the news went public and Carpenter encouraged Zombie to "make the film (his) own" which, for better or worse, he certainly did. Zombie was clearly interested in the inner psyche of Michael Myers: Why did he snap? What were the circumstances that brought him to this heinous act of murdering his entire family? How did he get this way?

If this doesn't interest you, then Zombie's films are likely not going to do much for you. Rather than casting Myers as an unknowable boogeyman, Zombie brings you inside the mind of the monster. Sort of. Zombie hedges his bets a bit too much, not wanting Myers to become a completely sympathetic character, but also not doing much to demonize him as a person. They're far from the worst this franchise has to offer, but they're not wholly successful in the way as Carpenter's original.

One area in which Zombie outdoes all previous Halloween films is in the skin department! Hanna Hall plays the doomed older sister of Michael, Judith Myers, and meets with a grisly end not long after having sex with her boyfriend...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween FranchiseA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

In a scene that mirrors P.J. Soles' topless scene from the first film, Myers disguises himself in a sheet with glasses to fool Kristina Klebe's poor, unsuspecting Lynda into thinking that he's her boyfriend Bob. Unlike Ms. Soles, however, Kristina goes the whole nine yards, showing off some fantastic full frontal...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

Zombie's other cheeky move in the casting department was to bring back Danielle Harris, who was unceremoniously fired from the series prior to reprising her role as Jamie in part 6. Here she plays Annie Bracket, daughter of Brad Dourif's sheriff, and while getting topless to hook up with her boyfriend Paul, she ends up fleeing for her life from the murderous Michael Myers...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween FranchiseA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

Halloween II (2009)

I only wish that 2018's Halloween or 2021's Halloween Kills had nudity so that we could close on a high note rather than on this flick. Far from the worst film in the franchise—in fact, I think it's better than Zombie's first go around—Halloween IIcranks up writer/director Rob Zombie's hellbilly instincts to 11. Zombie goes his own "Curse of Thorn" route with a thread of vaguely Native American mysticism running through the film, symbolized by Myers' mother Deborah appearing to him in visions beside a white horse.

Much like the original Halloween II, this series' Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) discovers that she is Michael's sister, but unlike that first sequel, Zombie allows Laurie the catharsis of killing Michael herself. Yes, it obviously damages her and will have huge repercussions for her as a person moving forward, butat the very least, Zombie's series ends with a sense of closure for Laurie.

As far as nudity goes, there's not as much here as there was in Zombie's first flick. B-movie babe Sylvia Jefferies had a much longer, fully nude scene that was cut from the theatrical film but was available in both the Unrated cut and as part of the original DVD release's bonus features...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween FranchiseA SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

Danielle Harris also returns, though unlike the first time around, she doesn't make it out alive, briefly showing her breasts as she's bloodied on the floor...

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Halloween Franchise

There are far worse films in this franchise, but honestly, even the bad ones are better than your average non-Halloween related low budget horror movies from the same time period. This franchise endures while others that followed have begun to disappear from the collective conscience entirely, and it's likely due to it being the first kid on the block with all the new, cool, shiny toys. There's something about an organic franchise like this one that's infinitely more charming than your average studio attempt to create an iconic new horror franchise.

After 40 years, we've proven that we like being scared by Michael Myers, no matter his backstory, mythology, or lack thereof. These movies are fun and my only hope as they continue is that they can work some nudity back into the mix. That is, after all, part of what makes this franchise so great.

Check Out the Other Franchises in Our SKIN-depth Look Series

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Nightmare on Elm Street Franchise

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Friday the 13th Franchise

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of Comic Book Movies

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Species Franchise

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Death Wish Franchise

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the National Lampoon's Theatrical Features

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the Porky's Trilogy

A SKIN-depth Look at the Sex and Nudity of the James Bond Franchise

A SKIN-depth Look at 25 Years of the NC-17 Rating