A Masterpiece of Suspense and Horror

Rating: 10/10 (11 July 2001)

Without resorting to buckets of blood, director John Carpenter made one of the best horror movies of the 1970 (and of all time, for that matter) with HALLOWEEN. I rank it right up there with JAWS and CARRIE.
Its story of a masked maniac who comes home to Haddonfield, Illinois on Halloween night to create more murderous mayhem after having been locked away for fifteen years has admittedly become a cliche. It has been imitated hundreds of times over, usually with awful, bloody results (FRIDAY THE 13TH, SCREAM, etc.). Still, what Carpenter managed to do with just $375,000 and with a relatively small cast and crew is far more remarkable than what a bunch of horror-film hacks can do with millions of dollars worth of gory special make-up effects.
The homages to Hitchcock's PSYCHO are by now legendary: our heroine, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, is Janet Leigh's real-life daughter; the character played by Donald Pleasance is named Sam Loomis (the same as John Gavin's character in PSYCHO). Like Hitchcock (and indeed like Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma as well), Carpenter pushes the suspense angle very well. This, as much as anything else, is what puts HALLOWEEN head and shoulders above its atrocious rip-offs.