And finally…

John Carpenter‘s Halloween set the gold standard for the late ’70s-’80s slasher subgenre. While Hitchcock’s Psycho and Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre no doubt inspired Carpenter’s film, Halloween is really the ultimate extension of the “˜maniac with a knife slaughtering teenagers’ genre. The film builds tension through the constant suggestion that something horrible lurks just out of Laurie’s (and the audience’s) view.

By shifting to the killer’s point-of-view, the audience is forced to embody the psycho-slasher – peering through Michael’s mask, seeing the victim cowering in fear (or unaware of his presence) and hearing Myers’ steady, haunting breath. With a peerless score by Carpenter himself and a strong “Final Girl” in Jamie Lee Curtis, Halloween is the ultimate horror film – managing true terror with very little bloodshed.

Halloween invented its own subgenre, spawning so many rip-offs it’s impossible to name them all: Friday the 13th, April Fool’s Day, Prom Night, Happy Birthday to Me, Graduation Day, My Bloody Valentine – all films that assured us that terrible things are happening on specific dates because of psychosexual anxieties in the guise of masked killers.

Halloween: Blu-ray | DVD

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