I don't get it.

Rating: 5/10 (5 November 2013)

Slow moving, and with no big payoff - I think Jean Rollin could pull off something like that and make it work (and did, with several of his films) , but John Carpenter's low budget suspense flick does little to impress me, overall.
A point-of-view intro has a girl being stalked and stabbed to death on Halloween night 1963, by what ultimately turns out to be a small child. After being institutionalised for the next fifteen years, he escapes and returns to his hometown, and begins stalking a babysitter and her friends, with his shrink in maniacally obsessive pursuit.
The Shape brakes into a hardware store and steals a mask early on, but no one had seen him since he was institutionalised fifteen years earlier, so why did he even bother to steal a Halloween mask, no one would recognize him?
Film is technically well made, its photography lends it a certain amount of atmospherics; probably one of the most effective and instantly recognisable music scores ever; a good intro and tense climax all work in its favour, but it is a long, slow, verbose way in between. Before anyone says something stupid like "Go watch Transformers if you don't want a slower paced movie!", one of my all time favourite films is Rivette's Out 1, which is 13 hours long, so I am perfectly happy to watch a long, slow burn, if the plot and acting can draw me in, which Halloween never really did.
Contrary to popular belief, this was not the first holiday horror. That title probably goes to 1974's Black Christmas, which is more of a blueprint for holiday horrors than this film. Carpenter ripped off much from that film: Both use a large house at a holiday as the setting. Both films take place in a short time: Black Christmas, in a day and a half; Halloween, largely in one day. Both open with sequence filmed from the killer's point-of-view. Both have a strong, central female character. Both have an unseen killer stalking and killing those around her to get to her, for unknown reasons. Both have a brief shot of the killer's right eye, and part of his face briefly illuminated (in Black Christmas, the killer is shown looking through a crack in the doorway at the climax; in Halloween, we briefly see Michael Myers' right eye and most of the right side of his face at the very end) Admittedly, this is reaching, but both films have sequences centering around a large staircase in the house. Final end shot recapping, showing again all of the scenes of the crimes from earlier in the film.
Black Christmas is vastly superior; a much better view, in my opinion.