Halloween

This surprise box office hit had a teeny-tiny budget of only $320,000, making it the most profitable independent film release ever at the time. Director John Carpenter skillfully staged the scares by recreating what he loved about scary carnival rides, with some touches of techniques introduced by Alfred Hitchcock for good measure. He particularly understood the key ingredient to making a villain so scary: never getting a good look at the attacker, which explains why Michael Myers continues scaring audiences to this day. Yet there’s another ingredient to his success as a villain: he’s not in faraway castles or mountains like Dracula or Frankenstein, he haunts an average American suburb.
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John Carpenter knew how to utilize these components to churn up some solid screams, and complemented them with an intense musical score he wrote and performed himself. These efforts ended up giving birth to the slasher film, which in full honesty may just be a bad thing because of the painful genre cliches they started. Not to mention the sequels that erupted afterward paved the way for a groan-worthy franchise that, like Michael Myers himself, refuses to die. Even then, Halloween made the necessary push by enlightening the concept of the horror movie monster, which at the time hadn’t been done for a while. Yet more importantly, this defining feature film of the Halloween season opened the door for many independent filmmakers who needed the push to get noticed.

R (DLSNV)
Horror
1 hr. 31 min.

Watch it for FUN.
​Watch it to feel AFRAID.