Halloween
Halloweenis as pure and undiluted as its title.  In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter  tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which  a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged  youths. Director John Carpenter takes this simple situation and  orchestrates a superbly mounted symphony of horrors. It's a movie much scarier for its dark spaces and ominous camera movements  than for its explicit bloodletting (which is actually minimal). Composed  by Carpenter himself, the movie's freaky music sets the tone; and his  script (cowritten with Debra Hill) is laced with references to other  horror pictures, especiallyPsycho. The baby sitter is played  by Jamie Lee Curtis, the real-life daughter ofPsychovictim  Janet Leigh; and the obsessed policeman played by Donald Pleasence  is named Sam Loomis, after John Gavin's character inPsycho.  In the end, though,Halloweenstands on its own as an  uncannily frightening experience--it's one of those movies that had  audiences literally jumping out of their seats and shouting at the  screen. ("No! Don't drop that knife!") Produced on a low budget,  the picture turned a monster profit, and spawned many sequels,  none of which approached the 1978 original. Curtis returned for two  more installments: 1981's dismalHalloween II, which picked  up the story the day after the unfortunate events, and 1998's occasionally  grippingHalloween H20, which proved the former baby sitter  was still haunted after 20 years.--Robert Horton