Fellow writers, lend me your ears, I come not to bury bad horror movies, but to praise them. I am talking not about the horror movies that keep you up at night, but rather those horror movies you put on when you’re trying to go to sleep. Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan. Scream 4. Saw VI. Annabelle. Ouija. The stuff AMC puts on the week before Halloween at 2 am. The convoluted plots. The stale dialogue. The nonsensical resurrections. The monsters that somehow survive with an axe sticking out of their heads.

I’m not talking about horror movies like Troll 2 and Plan 9 from Outer Space, which are unintentionally hilarious. I’m talking about movies that are intentional cash grabs aimed at teenagers who want to see one more cheerleader get beheaded. Why do I like these films? I guess that I would have to say that I watch them for the same reason I listen to podcasts: it’s something to put on in the background, occasionally something interesting happens, it might be the debut film for a young director or actor who went on to better things, and maybe, just maybe, you find one you like.

Finding a film that everyone else agrees is a complete disaster, except for you, is one of the underrated experiences in consuming media. I thought the first Live-Action GI Joe movie was as bad as Hollywood gets, and most of the critiques agreed with me. Audiences loved it though. When the sequel came out, both critics and audience finally saw eye-to-eye and decided it was crap. Then I saw it, and I thought it was a lot better than the first movie.

Occasionally, your favorite bad movie gets a following, like Baseketball. Or more to my original point, Halloween III. I bring this up because on Twitter a few days ago, someone tweeted “Eight more days to Halloween. Who remembers?” I responded, “Silver Shamrock!” My fellow writer then posted a scene from the movie showing a flashing, neon pumpkin. Like two fishermen looking at each other on a lake in an early morning, there was a recognition there.

Halloween III is the Halloween movie best known for not having Michael Myers in it. You may wonder that such a movie exists because it seems contradictory, but this was the original plan. Halloween was not originally meant as a slasher series showcasing the same monster over and over again. It was originally meant to be an anthology horror series, but it was attached to the character of Michael Myers after the first two movies because the story written for the first movie was too long to be told in one film. When Halloween III came out, audiences came to the theater expecting to see everyone’s favorite knife wielding Shatner enthusiast terrorize small-town Illinois again, only to find a Myers-less story taking place in Northern California involving robots and murderous Halloween masks. They weren’t pleased, and Halloween III went on to be one of the most hated movies in horror history, as far as the general public was concerned.

The people behind Halloween got the message and dropped the horror anthology concept, making every movie since then about Myers, to the point of making sure his name is in the title. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers. Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers. Halloween 7: Michael Myers, Michael Myers, Michael Freakin’ Myers. Okay, that last one I made up, but you get the point. They brought Michael back in spite of the fact that the second movie killed Michael by literally blowing up his body. This trend continues today, with Halloween Ends, where Michael once again takes another stab at the town of Haddonfield. (And another stab. And another stab.) Clocking in with Rotten Tomato scores in the same range as congressional approval ratings, I’ve got to think that this dead horse has been beaten enough that when they call the film “Halloween Ends,” they’ve got to be serious about it. We all know that they aren’t, and that soon a reboot will be in the works. It keeps making money, so they’ll keep doing it.

It’s a travesty. Not only have they turned Michael Myers, a character that set the world ablaze in 1978, into a joke, they turned away from what could have been an interesting idea in the horror anthology concept, and Halloween III shows this. If you sit down and watch the thing without any preconception about what it should be about, Halloween III is a decent horror movie. It’s not a monster story. More of a cult story. It has a compelling protagonist who is good, but not so good that it irritates the viewer. We see him hitting on women in a way that wouldn’t be acceptable today but was probably a lot more normal in the early 80s, to say nothing of the day drinking and bad haircuts. The plan the antagonists have is truly horrific, and it has more than a few frightening scenes (particularly the one where we see what the masks actually do). The plan isn’t revealed until the third act, but the film makes sure not to start off slowly, beginning with a man being chased through a junkyard, who is later murdered in the hospital by a self-immolating robot. Behind it all is a message about exposing children to commercialism and advertising, in a decade where cartoons would be made for the explicit purpose of selling toys.

Audiences initially hated it, but Season of the Witch has developed a following over the years. Horror anthologies were a real thing in the late 70s, early 80s, with movies like Creepshow. A few years back, a series called “VHS” on Netflix brought back the concept through a found footage angle. I was a real fan. Alas, despite the following such movies had, it didn’t bring in the big bucks studios look for, so the trend died a second time. The effort-to-cash ratio of creating original stories every year compared to just throwing the same monsters at us over and over makes Hollywood interest fleeting. Hope springs eternal, however. Maybe if “Halloween Ends” bombs badly enough, someone will think “maybe we should take a risk this time.” Or maybe they’ll start talking about the next reboot.

EDIT: Originally, I said that the original Halloween was just too much for one movie. Since then, I’ve read that Halloween II was only created after the success of the first one and the original Halloween was meant to be a one off. I guess the temptation to reach for Mike Myers developed even faster than I thought.