Pumpkins are the last thing you'll find Michael Myers carving

John Carpenter may not (scratch that, did not) invent the heavily exploited & milked to death slasher genre. For that matter, his 1978 benchmark classic Halloween may not be the grandaddy slasher movie of all time (it's a matter of opinion & could be debated endlessly). However, Halloween arguably set the precedent as being the alpha holiday themed slasher of all time. It's quite baffling that amongst the directors of the 20th century that John Carpenter appeared to be the only director in the world who had a lightbulb blink on & say "Wait a minute, Halloween is the creepiest damn holiday on the calendar. And no one has taken advantage of it for a horror movie setting??? Jackpot!"

Halloween is set in the fictitious town of Haddonfield, Illinois circa 1963. It's the picturesque small sleepy American town, yet also the hometown for Carpenter's destined maniac in-the-making: little 6 year old Michael Myers. On a Halloween night with the parents out for the evening, a clown costumed Michael selects a knife from the kitchen & begins to slowly ascend the stairs. With no apparent motive or provocation, young Michael nonchalantly walks up behind his older sister & in a horrific act inexplicably stabs her to death.

Flash forward 15 years to a rainy Halloween Eve's night at Smithsgrove Sanitarium. Over the years Michael has become the star patient & obsession of psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (the late great Donald Pleasence). Finally dawning on him that his tireless crusade of rooting out the core of Michael's evil has failed, Loomis makes it his lifetime objective of ensuring Michael stays locked up. But those hopes are soon flushed down the toilet when a simple transfer ends up with Michael escaping the loony bin. "He's gone from here! The evil is gone!" rants a distraught Loomis. Take a wild guess where Michael is headed.

With her perky hormone-driven high school friends planning on partying (partying being lingo for beer n' sex), teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has her Halloween night booked babysitting Tommy Doyle, a Haddonfield kid superstitious of the Boogeyman coming out on Halloween night. What the unsuspecting citizens of Haddonfield don't realize is that the little boy who shattered the serenity of their town so many years ago has returned to his stomping grounds. With Loomis & a dubious town sheriff both out patrolling the town in search of the psychotic Michael, Laurie Strode & her friends go about their care-free evening oblivious to the fact that Michael has marked them for some first-class stalking.

Probably the most crucial part to pulling off a great slasher film is giving the audience a likable protagonist that they can relate to, in this case Laurie Strode (Curtis). She's the cute girl next door who's a bit of a bookworm, but isn't afraid to flash some teenage rebellion by driving around & smoking a fattie with her best friend, Annie (Nancy Loomis). By the time the lunatic starts chasing down the heroine, you want to be rooting her on & mentally shouting "Run like hell!" & Curtis succeeds at that challenge. Likewise Pleasence is perfectly suited as the courageous (if not mildly neurotic) Loomis hellbent on stopping the murderous Michael.

What Carpenter truly mastered with Halloween was the ability to instill fear into those watching. This was accomplished using several tactics. A musical score with a simple jingle that dissolves into a bellow of imminent doom. Ingenious shots in which we glimpse the POV of Michael Myers accompanied with his asthma-like breathing (which is still unnerving as hell). The ghostlike Michael who seems to materialize out of nowhere only to vanish in the blink of an eye, often times making not only Laurie but the audience wondering if it was merely a hallucination. And Nick Castle (who helped write Carpenter's 1981 classic Escape From New York) is the ideal candidate for the man behind the mask, Michael Myers (though credited under the pseudonym The Shape for reasons never explained). The mannerisms & body language of Castle suggest Michael is more of a supernatural menace than a soulless killer (the sequels that followed certainly reasserted this notion). There's no question that Michael Myer's sanity has dipped completely off radar (for starters, his wardrobe consists of a mechanics jumper suit & a white rubber mask in the mold of William Shatner's face if that tells you anything).

Don't go into Halloween expecting geysers of gore (decapitations, dismemberment, disemboweling, etc). That sort of violence was reserved for the 70's Italian giallos & the ubiquitous 80's slashers that aped each other (the latter class owes a great debt of its success from Halloween). Aside from some strangulation & a few stabbings, Halloween is almost a bloodless slasher (quite the oxymoron). The only real blemish on Halloween is the atrocious sequels that followed (check out Busta Rhymes doing kung-fu on Michael in Halloween: Resurrection--actually, DON'T). Halloween remains Carpenter's quintessential ode to slashers even though the genre has long since become bloated with trite cliches. What it all boils down to is a horror classic prototype that's been often imitated, but never replicated.