Halloween

Credited, rightfully, as the film that kickstarted the “slasher” subgenre, Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween is a masterwork of building tension, an exercise in mood and suspense that takes its cues from Hitchcock, unlike most of the 80s gorefests it would inspire. The film’s key innovation – besides the indelibly terrifying image of the blank-faced “shape” aka Michael Myers – is setting it in an innocuous American suburb; there’s nowhere, not even a nice middle class home, where the viewer is safe. Jamie Lee Curtis makes her scream queen debut as one of several babysitters being stalked by a masked, escaped mental patient on Halloween night, her only savior being the patient’s maniacally driven doctor, played with gusto by the great Donald Pleasance. But the secret weapon of Halloween is the score – composed by Carpenter himself – a tinkling, off-meter piano figure that continues to haunt long after the final unsettling frame. A Halloween season perennial.