The night John Carpenter came to town.

Rating: 9/10 (31 October 2007)

Halloween has a simple premise, a psycho stalks babysitters on the title day, but it's the style brought to the table by John Carpenter that makes this movie a classic. He turns Michael Myers into evil personified and you can't kill evil. Myers has this catlike quality, he likes to appear in rooms suddenly and rather than killing his victims straight off, he prefers to maneuver them into corners, letting their fear do most of the work. Carpenter frames Myers from the neck down, making the already terrifying sight of William Shatner ever more so, and he was, to the best of my knowledge, one of the first to heavily use the point of view shot that gives the character a lot of it's menace. The best of his touches may be the simple, yet always effective score. Halloween is one of his best, the opening titles' music creeping out like a masked man and the stalking music, the single, repeated pounds on the piano, coming across as the beating of the victim's heart. Halloween has aged and been imitated to the point where some of it's power may be lost on younger audiences looking for buckets of blood, but make no mistake, this is the main reason why Carpenter is considered a horror icon.