The original and still the best.

Rating: 9/10 (3 February 2004)

This movie started off the wave of slasher movie copycats and was the beginning of an era. Though some will argue TCM and "Black Christmas" were also partly responsible for the explosion of slasher flicks. This was I believe Carpenter's second film the first being "Assault on Precinct 13". This movie has great atmosphere (a Carpenter trademark), music, and tension. This movie involves the super killer Michael Myers before he made to many movies and became increasingly annoying. The plot was simple, no grandiose settings and bizarre situations were needed for this very good and suspenseful film. This one simply has a maniac escaping from a mental hospital and returning to the town he grew up in, on Halloween and he isn't in the best of moods. He ends up terrorizing a baby sitter played by Jamie Lee Curtis who is watching a young boy for the night. This one has some good deaths and some very memorable scenes (I love it when Myers sits up). After this film a sequel would follow that would be rather good and then part 3 which was interesting, but did not really have anything to do with the first two. The rest are just plain awful. This movie also has the most Halloween feeling of the bunch. You feel as if it is Halloween here and not just a few decorations scattered here and there. The second one did it well too. The rest of them starting with four though all feel kind of generic. They just don't seem like Halloween.