This review was updated on September 21, 2024
The slasher movie had been bubbling under for a while by the time John Carpenter co-wrote, directed and scored Halloween. Mario Bava’s Bay of Blood (1971) had birthed the whole series-of-inventive-kills plotline; The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) had added both the memorable (and marketable) masked killer aspect and given us our first ‘final girl’; while Black Christmas (1974) had brought not just the seasonal fun, but the teen-girls-in-peril angle. Halloween wasn’t even Carpenter’s idea: two independent producers, Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad, actually approached him, asking if he’d deliver them a low-budget horror flick about a killer who stalks babysitters.
But Halloween was still Carpenter’s baby, and the entire slasher subgenre that followed - one that, in the 2020s, shows no signs of flagging – would, for better or worse, never have existed without it. Penned by Carpenter and his then partner, producer Debra Hill, the script was written in ten days, and it shows: there’s nothing remotely superfluous here, just forward momentum and driving plot. It’s left largely to the cast to lend the film personality, which they do in spades: Jamie Lee Curtis’s casting was almost accidental (Carpenter wanted someone else) but the film might not have worked at all without her grounding, relatable presence (the fact that her mum was Janet Leigh from Psycho is just a great added Easter egg); meanwhile, Donald Pleasence adds a touch of old-school sparkle and scenery-chewing levity.
The entire slasher subgenre would never have existed without it
But it’s Carpenter’s direction that makes Halloween tick, and resulted in it becoming (still, possibly) the most successful indie film ever made. Utilising every inch of the frame, pioneering (though not inventing) the use of Steadicam to represent the killer’s POV and rooting the action in the most ordinary, domestic environment, he created a new and more intimate language for horror cinema, one where kitchen knives become murder weapons, kids’ bedrooms become killing grounds and every moving shadow could herald the approach of a remorseless assassin.
Find out where it lands on our list of the 100 greatest horror movies ever made.
What to watch next:
Psycho (1960); Scream (1996); X (2022)