The month of October is a notorious month, and the spookiness peaks on Halloween day. “Halloween,” written, scored, and directed by John Carpenter is a film that changed the pace of not just horror movies but the entire cinema industry. It came to theaters on October 25, 1978.
“Halloween” pioneered the slasher genre with its iconic villain Michael Myers. “The Shape,” “The Boogeyman,” and “The Embodiment of Evil.”
The film was not only known for its quintessential killer. Starring a young Jamie Lee Curtis in her first break-out role as Laurie Strode. October 25, 2023 marks “Halloween’s” 45th anniversary, and it is important to remark on its legacy in pop culture.
Despite its early entry into the genre, it is not the first slasher movie. That title is disputed between Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho” (1960) and Bob Clark’s “Black Christmas” (1974). These two movies actually both inspired “Halloween” with all three films featuring mysterious hidden figures wielding blades. The separating characteristic between these films is that Halloween took a horrifying story and simplified it down to a simplistic plot with memorable characters set in the Midwest. With a setting that so many people can find familiar or nostalgic, the film really makes the audience feel like what the viewer was watching could happen in their own small town.
At the time of the film’s creation, no other horror movie had made the main villain such a main staple to the franchise. Micheal Myers has inspired so many horror classics, like Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees. After the release of “Halloween,” the horror genre was forever changed; now, instead of the monster movie craze of the 60s and 70s, a wave of serial killers and slashers dominated the 80s and 90s.
It is hard not to wonder how people do not count it as objectively the most impactful horror movie of all time. From the inspiration, creativity, characters, setting and even the infamous score, “Halloween” will forever be the horror movie that changed the genre.
