Trick or treat?

Michael Myers.

It’s an ordinary name, with no particular connation or implication. Nothing menacing or peculiar. The kid next door.

Which is what Michael Myers was – in “Halloween,” the low-budget 1978 thriller that reintroduced horror movies as “slasher” flicks – and is again in a reinvented “Halloween,” opening today.

Like most films not produced and distributed by name-brand Hollywood studios, the first “Halloween” – originally titled “The Babysitter Murders” – was expected to meander its way around the country on the drive-in and grindhouse circuits.

That was before critics recognized that it was more artful and frighteningly efficient than your everyday exploitation movie.

The film’s inventive director, John Carpenter, and his producer, companion and co-writer, Debra Hill, were savvy enough to realize they had a potential hit on their hands.

With their financiers, they designed a strategy that involved pre-screening “Halloween” in every market large enough to have a newspaper movie critic, then marketing it with quotes that essentially said: “This is what Hitchcock might be making if he weren’t old and working for the Hollywood studios.”

The new “Halloween,” directed by shock-rocker turned filmmaker Rob Zombie, is not being screened in advance for critics. According to press notes, it adheres to the original story while filling in the events that led to where Carpenter’s movie begins.

In case you haven’t been watching closely – or if you just want to relive every stab of terror – join us in a trip through the life of Michael Myers and his “Halloween” horror saga:

1978: The beginning

Myers is a trick-or-treating 6-year-old who, after apparently being traumatized by the sight of teenage sister Judith and her boyfriend having sex, murders her with a butcher’s knife while still wearing his clown mask.

After 15 years in a mental institution – where he has his case anonymously documented in a book by child psychologist Dr. Sam Loomis (played in the original film and “Halloween II” by the late Donald Pleasence, and in the new film by Malcolm McDowell) – he escapes and returns to Haddonfield, Ill.

Myers’ new target is his younger sister, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis). After dispatching a number of fornicating teenagers, Myers, wearing a crude but more fearsome mask, finally hones in on Laurie, but she outsmarts him and presumably stabs him to death.

Then, when he rises to finish her off, Loomis appears and shoots him point blank, causing him to fall off a second-story balcony. But moments later, his body has disappeared, all but assuring a sequel.

1981: Death by flames?

“Halloween II,” also directed by Carpenter, was intended to wrap up the story. It picks up minutes after the first film, with a police search for Myers and Laurie being sent off to a hospital.

There she pieces together that the killer is in fact her brother. In the middle of a statewide manhunt, Loomis is informed of the connection, and knows where the killer is headed.

Loomis arrives with the cops to discover a dark hospital littered with corpses. He again shoots Myers, with no success. But he gets to Laurie before her brother does, and arms her in time to shoot Myers in the face.

When that doesn’t stop him, she unleashes oxygen, Loomis lights his lighter and Myers is engulfed in flames.

1982: No Myers at all

As proof of his death, “Halloween III” didn’t feature Myers at all. With Carpenter out of the picture, the plan was simply to release an original horror film exploiting the title on every holiday.

But that plan died a lot easier than Myers, who eventually came back again.

1988: He’s free again

In 1988’s “Halloween 4,” Myers finally gets star billing in the subtitle, “The Return of Michael Myers.”

After surviving the previous carnage in a coma, he again escapes while being transferred from a hospital back to his old home of Smith Groves sanitarium, after learning he has one surviving relative, a niece named Jamie. (Laurie has died – or has she?)

After hacking and strangling his way through the usual assortment of teens (as well as a family dog), he finds Jamie and her older adoptive sister, who kills him.

But somehow, in the process, Myers has transferred what we will learn two films later is, in fact, a family curse. Jamie is seen at the end of the film, in the clown outfit, murdering her foster mother.

1989: A family reunion

From here, Myers’ saga gets seriously skewed, but he is reunited with Jamie in “Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers,” where they even share a tender moment: He removes his mask to reveal his twisted face.

1995: He’s cursed

In “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers,” it is finally explained that he was in fact cursed and given amazing powers of strength and regeneration by a secret cult of Druids. At this point, even fans who had forgiven the inconsistencies and contrivances were nodding off.

1998: Sis returns

The series was revived with “Halloween H20” (to mark its 20th anniversary) with nothing less than the return of Laurie (Curtis, her movie career having hit the skids), who had only faked her death and changed her name.

Myers goes through a number of teenage victims before getting to his sis. With some regret – he is her brother, after all – she finally does him in. Or not.

2002: Dead again?

“Halloween: Resurrection” reveals Laurie had actually killed the wrong guy, an impersonator. She’s arrested and institutionalized, and devises an elaborate trap for her brother, but the tables are turned, and this time Laurie is killed for real (or so we can hope).

Myers is killed too, but his eyes flip open at the end, so there’s always hope.

2007: Unraveling the mystery

Except for “Halloween H20” – which strived for a respectability that the other sequels have not – all the follow-ups have been successively gorier, keeping up with the looser standards of the day.

Director Rob Zombie, who cut his teeth on the horror genre’s nastier, meaner exercises, can be expected to take the new “Halloween” in some gruesome directions. (His previous two films were subjected to deep cuts to avoid an NC-17 rating.)

But his real challenge is preserving the mystery of Michael Myers. By going back to reveal the true source of Myers’ psychopathy, Zombie is attempting to make him understandable.

It proved to be a major mistake and potential franchise killer for Hannibal Lecter, when his horrible childhood experiences were revealed to be the source of his unthinkable sadism in the flop “Hannibal.”

And even Norman Bates, the original “Psycho,” became something less iconic after “Psycho 3” and “Psycho 4” ill-advisedly, and often contradictorily, detailed the events that led him to release his savage impulses.

The Boogey Man is diminished when subjected to analysis, when we feel anything except the strong desire to hide under the bed or in the closet.

The last thing anyone should want is to see another icon made human.