Something evil has escaped and is heading for your town. You can’t see it but you know it’s out there, hiding in the shadows and waiting for the appointed hour. Suddenly, it crawls out from the night and you scream and scream — but there’s no escaping Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” remake, which arrives in theaters today. Unscreened for critics, the few reviewers who have seen this monster are racing around the Internet like Donald Pleasence’s crazed Dr. Loomis in the “Halloween” series, crying, “Death has come to your little town! It is pure evil!” and leaving the rest of us with little choice but to cower in fear and await its arrival.

Since the 1950s, only the James Bond, “Star Trek,” “Godzilla,” “Friday the 13th,” and “Halloween” franchises have reached their ninth installments, and each tells us something about our changing society. James Bond maps modern masculinity; “Godzilla” chronicles our nuclear fears; “Star Trek” is a showcase for our optimism about the future; “Friday the 13th” explores the queasy border between sex and death. The “Halloween” movies, which began with John Carpenter’s 1978 original, carefully examine the nature-versus-nurture debate in child rearing and come down firmly on the side of … druids.

The original “Halloween” is an undeniable classic, the blueprint for a thousand slasher movies that followed. After watching his sister have sex, 6-year-old Michael Myers stabs her to death on Halloween and is committed to a psychiatric institute under the care of Dr. Loomis ( Mr . Pleasence). All we know about his treatment program is that it’s not very good, because exactly 15 years later, while being transferred to another facility, Michael breaks out and makes a beeline for home, where he targets babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Wearing an inside-out William Shatner mask (“The idea was to make him almost humorless,” the producer says), Michael kills dozens of teenagers before Dr. Loomis arrives and shoots him.

“Halloween 2” (1981) picks up seconds after the first film ends and begins to expand on one of the two major themes of the series: the dangers of adoption. The other theme is that it’s unwise to transfer insane killers on a rainy night when you’re understaffed. A traumatized Laurie lands in the hospital and Michael comes after her again because, it’s revealed, she’s his younger sister, raised by a foster family and ignorant of her past.

After being toasted like a marshmallow by Dr. Loomis, Michael is entirely absent from “Halloween 3” (1982), an ill-conceived movie that tells the tale of evil Irishmen killing children with cursed Halloween masks. But he returns for “Halloween 4” (1988), going after Ms. Curtis’s daughter, who has been placed with a foster family. Michael gets shot, falls down a mine shaft, and is blown up at the climax, but blood wins out and his 9-year-old niece rewards the kindness of her adoptive mother by sticking her in the neck with a pair of scissors. By the time “Halloween 5” (1989) rolls around, everyone’s chalked the whole thing up to a misunderstanding until Michael shows up again, only to be captured in a net made of chains by Dr. Loomis, who has got to be the hardest working therapist in show business. While waiting to be transferred to a more secure facility, Michael is freed by a machine-gun-toting druid who turns out to be part of a cult, which later kidnaps and impregnates Michael’s niece. We soon learn that their curse is the reason Michael went crazy in the first place.

But before real-life adoptive parents begin to screen their children for druidic curses, know that it takes a village to make a serial killer; in the case of the “Halloween” series, that village is Haddonfield, Illinois. The idea of an older brother relentlessly stalking and killing his sexually active sisters may have come from the mind of longtime series producer Moustapha Akkad, a devout Muslim who directed one of the only movies about the prophet Mohammad, and who had probably heard stories about honor killings. (Mr. Akkad died in an Al Qaeda bombing in 2005; his son, Malek Akkad, produced Mr. Zombie’s updated “Halloween.”) And Mr. Zombie may be trying to explain Michael’s bloodlust in the remake by giving him an abusive, backwoods childhood. But anyone who knows the “Halloween” series knows that Michael is a crazed serial killer because he’s from Haddonfield.

During the course of the series, Haddonfield teenagers pull over for hitchhikers, only to speed away cackling as the walkers approach the car; young children dance around bereaved classmates chanting “Your mommy’s dead! Your mommy’s dead!”; doctors show up for work drunk, and kids sit in the ER after eating Halloween apples full of razor blades. In “Halloween II,” when a woman’s screams are heard from a neighbor’s house, a nubile teenager sighs into the phone, “She always picks on her husband. I think he’s beating her now,” in a tone that suggests she wholeheartedly approves. Rarely has an entire town been this callous. When Michael shows up in “Halloween 4,” no one doubts for a second that evil walks Illinois in the shape of a man, and they instantly swing into action to destroy him. After all, they know he’s a hometown boy, and that their hometown of Haddonfield is the meanest place on earth.