Halloween (1978)

The setup

On Halloween night in a quiet Illinois town, a teenage babysitter begins to notice that someone is watching her. A patient psychiatrist, who has spent years with the man responsible, is certain what is coming. The film moves slowly and deliberately, and it treats ordinary streets, porches and hedges as a source of dread.

Context

Halloween began with a producer's pitch, not a finished idea. Independent producer Irwin Yablans, working with financier Moustapha Akkad, had seen John Carpenter's low-budget thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) and wanted him for a new film built around a babysitter being stalked on Halloween night. Carpenter reportedly accepted on the condition that he keep creative control. He wrote the screenplay with Debra Hill, who also produced the film. The fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, takes its name from Hill's hometown of Haddonfield, New Jersey.

The numbers are part of the story. The film was made for roughly $300,000 (the infobox figure on Wikipedia gives a range of $300,000 to $325,000), a very small sum even in 1978, and it was shot in about 20 days. Though the setting is the American Midwest, the production worked in Southern California, with South Pasadena among the locations, and dressed the streets to pass for Illinois. A young crew, a short schedule and almost no margin for error shaped the film's look: simple setups, long takes and a lot of dark space.

Why it matters

Halloween is not the first slasher, and critics usually place it alongside Psycho (1960), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and Black Christmas (1974) as one of the films that pioneered the form. What it did was fix the template. It combined a masked, near-silent killer, a resourceful young woman, a babysitting job and a holiday into one clean, repeatable design, and it proved that design could make serious money.

It is also one of the great lessons in restraint. The film contains far less visible violence than the films it inspired. Its fear comes from placement and timing: where the camera waits, what stands at the edge of the frame, and how long a quiet shot lasts before something changes. Many later filmmakers copied the killer and the calendar but not the patience, which is one reason the original still feels different from its imitators.

Finally, it was a business landmark. Major American studios declined to distribute it, and it still became one of the most profitable independent films of its time. That result convinced distributors that low-budget horror could be a reliable product, and it helped open the door to the boom described in our slasher subgenre entry.

What to look for

• The opening shot, a long take filmed from the killer's point of view, which asks the audience to share his perspective before we know who he is.
• Carpenter's own piano theme, played in an unusual rhythm (often described as 5/4) that sounds like something approaching with an uneven step.
• Widescreen compositions by cinematographer Dean Cundey, which leave large areas of empty, dark frame around the characters.
• The way the killer, credited as The Shape, appears in the background of shots, often visible for only a moment and sometimes not noticed at all on a first viewing.
• The role of Dr. Loomis, whose speeches supply the film's sense of fate and who gives the audience information the teenagers do not have.
• Laurie's active part in her own survival, which is more resourceful and less passive than the stereotype that later slashers created.

Writing and casting

The screenplay came together quickly, and accounts of the writing describe a division of labor: Hill shaped much of the dialogue for the young women, which gives the babysitters an easy, believable rhythm, while Carpenter wrote the speeches of the psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis. Hill later recalled that Yablans wanted a script that delivered a scare at regular intervals, in the manner of a radio thriller.

The cast mixed one established name with newcomers. Donald Pleasence, the most experienced actor on the set, played Loomis; Peter Cushing was reportedly the first choice for the part. Jamie Lee Curtis, in her first feature role, played Laurie Strode. She is the daughter of Janet Leigh, the star of Psycho, a connection that critics have often noted. Nick Castle played the masked figure credited as The Shape, with Tony Moran appearing as the unmasked Michael Myers. Nancy Kyes, credited as Nancy Loomis, and P. J. Soles played Laurie's friends.

Shooting in California

The shoot was fast and tightly planned. Production designer and co-editor Tommy Lee Wallace also helped with locations, and the crew turned ordinary Southern California neighborhoods into a Midwestern town. Because the action was filmed out of sequence, Curtis has described Carpenter using a kind of fear scale to tell her how frightened she should be in a given scene.

Despite the small budget, the film was shot in anamorphic widescreen with Panavision equipment, including a Panaglide, a camera stabilizer in the same family as the Steadicam. By some accounts roughly $70,000 of the budget went on this equipment. It is a notable choice: the extra-wide frame is what gives the film its sense of space, and it lets Carpenter place a threat far from the center of the image.

The mask, the music and the widescreen frame

The killer's mask has become one of horror's best-known props, and its origin is unglamorous. According to several accounts, Wallace bought a Captain Kirk mask at a Hollywood costume shop for $1.98, painted it white and widened the eye holes. The result is blank enough to read as expressionless, which suits a character defined by his silence.

The score is just as economical. Carpenter composed and performed it himself, building the main theme on a simple repeating piano line. A film this cheap could not afford an orchestra, and the sparse sound became part of its identity. The only commercial song heard clearly is Blue Öyster Cult's “(Don't Fear) The Reaper,” playing on a car radio in a scene that deliberately sets daylight normality against what is to come.

Release and reception

The release was gradual. The film opened in a handful of theaters in Kansas City, Missouri, in October 1978, and it also played the Chicago Film Festival that November. It was distributed by Compass International Pictures, with Aquarius Releasing handling some regional bookings. It went on to earn roughly $47 million in the United States and about $70 million worldwide, and it is widely described as one of the most profitable independent films of all time.

Critics were divided but many were enthusiastic. Roger Ebert gave it four stars and put it on his list of the year's best films, while Pauline Kael was among those who disliked it. In the decades since, its reputation has only grown: the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 2006, calling it culturally, historically or aesthetically significant, and it appears regularly in lists of the best horror films ever made.

Reading the film

Halloween has been the subject of a long scholarly argument. Film scholar Carol J. Clover points to it as the film that initiates the figure of the final girl, the young woman who survives and defeats the killer, and she notes that the story still lets Dr. Loomis rescue Laurie. Another critic, John Kenneth Muir, argues that Laurie survives through luck more than planning, a reading that complicates the image of her as purely resourceful.

A more contested idea is that the film is a morality tale in which the sexually active teenagers die and the chaste one lives. The people who made it reject this. Carpenter has said he saw the characters as simply normal teenagers, and Hill said there was no such intent, adding that she was raised as a Catholic schoolgirl. Other writers, such as Pat Gill, read the film as a quiet critique of the adult world, pointing out that no parent in the story checks on the children. These interpretations coexist, and the film's open surface is part of why it still invites them.

Legacy

The immediate effect was a flood of imitations. Some scholars count more than 100 similar films released between 1978 and 1984, among them Friday the 13th (1980), which borrowed the formula and made a franchise of its own. Halloween itself became a franchise of thirteen films, tracked in our Halloween franchise hub, and its killer, Michael Myers, and heroine, Laurie Strode, became fixtures of popular culture.

Its influence runs through later work. The 2018 film of the same name, which Carpenter scored and executive produced, chose to ignore every sequel and continue directly from the original. That decision is a measure of how strongly the 1978 film is still seen as the one that matters. For a wider look at the genre it helped define, see our short timeline of horror cinema and the entry on John Carpenter.

Verified details

• The film opened in Kansas City, Missouri, in October 1978 and also played the Chicago Film Festival in November.
• Cinematography is by Dean Cundey; editing is credited to Tommy Lee Wallace and Charles Bornstein.
• It runs 91 minutes.
• The budget is usually given as $300,000, with a range of $300,000 to $325,000 listed in reference works.
• Compass International Pictures distributed the film, with Aquarius Releasing handling some regional bookings.
• Nick Castle played The Shape, and Tony Moran played the unmasked Michael Myers.
• The theatrical poster was created by Robert Gleason.
• Jamie Lee Curtis made her feature film debut in the film. Her mother, Janet Leigh, starred in Psycho.
• The film was selected for the U.S. National Film Registry in 2006.
• The franchise it started has thirteen films.

Connections

• Part of the Halloween franchise hub.
• Character profile: Michael Myers.
• Character profile: Laurie Strode.
• Subgenre: Slasher.
• Director profile: John Carpenter.

Sources and further reading

• Halloween (1978 film), Wikipedia
• Slasher film, Wikipedia
• Making Halloween (1978), Calgary International Film Festival
• National Film Registry, Library of Congress