Original Release: 1978

October 31st, 1963 was a horrifying Halloween for the town of Haddonfield, Illinois as six year-old Michael Myers suddenly and viciously stabbed his sister Judith to death in the family home.  Still dressed in his clown costume and mask, Michael's parents came home to find him in an emotionless stupor, still holding the blood-stained knife.

Michael Myers was committed at the Smith's Grove sanitarium where he was treated by Dr. Sam Loomis.  Despite fifteen years of therapy and examination, Loomis was ultimately unable to break though the psychotic silence of his catatonic patient.

On October 31st, 1978 Dr. Loomis was to transfer Michael out of Smith's Grove for his criminal sentence hearing, but arrived to find Michael has broken out of the sanitarium along with other inmates.  In the confusion, Michael steals a car and escapes to return home to Haddonfield.

Dr. Loomis tracks Michael back to town, warning the authorities that a maniacal killer will soon be preying on Haddonfield's population.

Laurie Strode, a pretty but bookish high school senior in Haddonfield, notices that a stranger is stalking her from a distance, following Laurie and friends Annie and Lynda on their walk home.

Annie and Lynda ignore this mysterious figure, much more concerned about how they can get together with their boyfriends Halloween night.  Laurie has little to look forward to this evening other than babysitting duty for young Tommy Doyle.

Dr. Loomis insists Sheriff Brackett take the threat of Michael Myers seriously, but initial searches of Haddonfield reveal no sightings. Yet Michael Myers patiently stalks his prey from the shadows in the neighborhood where Laurie and Annie babysit for the Doyle and Wallace families.

When Annie gets a chance to rendezvous with her boyfriend, she cajoles Laurie into babysitting Lindsey Wallace too. Dutiful Laurie agrees, unwittingly letting Annie fall into Michael's clutches as he strangles her in a parked car.

Tommy insists to Laurie that he saw The Boogeyman across the street, carrying Annie's body into the house.  Laurie sees nothing and assures the kids that The Boogeyman doesn't exist.

After her romantic liaison with boyfriend Bob, Lynda calls Laurie to track down Annie.  Michael Myers strangles Lynda during the call, which Laurie writes off to another of her girlfriends' taunting Halloween pranks.

With the kids asleep, Laurie crosses the street to the Wallace house to find Annie, but instead she discovers the horrifying murder scene of Lynda and Bob.  Worse still, Michael has laid out Annie's corpse on the bed, posed in front of the stolen tombstone of his sister, Judith Myers.

Michael has indeed come home this Halloween, and now Laurie is his next victim.  She flees the murder scene to protect Tommy and Lindsey.  Yet Michael has already broken into the Doyle house, and his terrifying game of cat and mouse ensues as he and Laurie battle from room to room.

The ensuing climax offers terrifying thrills and twists as Laurie manages to use her wits against Michael's relentless attacks.

Having tracked Michael to the neighborhood by spotting the stolen car, Dr. Loomis enjoins the deadly struggle just in time to save Laurie from Michael.

Certain as Loomis knows Michael's demented mind, the doctor also knows the horrible truth that the pure evil which Michael embodies cannot be stopped with bullets alone.  Seemingly shot dead off the balcony of the Doyle house, Michael mysteriously disappears into the night and the evil stalking Haddonfield lives on.

What began as "a babysitter story" produced on a $320,000 budget soon became the most profitable independent film in history and remained so for two decades.

HALLOWEEN started from very modest beginnings by executive producer Irwin Yablans, conceived as a small horror film to enter into the low-budget but often profitable genre.  Yablans had seen Carpenter's previous film Assault on Precinct 13 and agreed to distribute it.  That film didn't succeed in its American release, but when Yablans entered it in European film festivals, Assault was well-received by critics and audiences.

Irwin Yablans wanted Carpenter to write and direct the story concept which would become HALLOWEEN, and pursued film financier Moustapha Akkad to back the project.  After some creative cajoling, Akkad agreed to put up the $300,000 to produce the film, perceiving it as a bargain compared to his current international production Lion of the Desert, which was spending that same amount per day in location filming.

With such welcome but modest funding, Carpenter agreed to co-write, co-produce and direct the film for a salary of $10,000 plus 10% of the film's net profits.  It became the best career decision he ever made.

Joining Carpenter in writing and producing was his then-girlfriend Debra Hill, his script supervisor on Assault on Precinct 13. Both were fans of Hitchcock's film masterpieces of suspense, and the duo wrote their HALLOWEEN script in that intellectual mode, mixing terrible anticipation and mystery with solid gotcha moments of shocking horror.

Debra Hill wrote half of the script focusing on Laurie Strode and her girlfriends, Hill having been a babysitter herself and knowing how to flesh out the female characters to increase audience sympathy when threatened by The Shape.

John Carpenter wrote the dark side of the story, building the suspense elements and conflict between Dr. Loomis and his escaped mental patient Michael Myers.  It was Carpenter who gave Loomis his trademark soliloquies on the nature of pure evil, detailing Michael's family and psychological history.

After testing and being turned down by several young actresses, Jamie Lee Curtis was finally cast in the role of Laurie Strode — though she actually preferred and identified more with the character of Lynda, played by actress P.J. Soles who was fresh off Brian De Palma's horror hit, Carrie.  Rounding out the trio of girls was Nancy Loomis as Annie, the daughter of Haddonfield's Sheriff Brackett.

With the part of Michael being a virtually anonymous role (played for $25-a-day by Carpenter's friend Nick Castle), the film needed a name actor in the role of Dr. Sam Loomis to offer some marquee value.  Carpenter and Hill pitched the part to veteran horror actors Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee, both of whom quickly rejected the offer.  Many years later, Christopher Lee told Hill that was the biggest mistake of his career.

The role was offered to British stage actor Donald Pleasence, who to their delight accepted the part, but not quite for the expected reason: Pleasence didn't understand the script or his character in this "melodrama," but he agreed because his daughter was a fan of the music score for Assault on Precinct 13!  It's no small irony how music would soon play a key part in Carpenter's HALLOWEEN as well.

The four-week shooting schedule began in spring 1978, filming on location mostly in South Pasadena and Hollywood, California which doubled for fictional Haddonfield, Illinois.  With little budget, the film crew was comprised mainly of Carpenter's and Hill's friends.

While the director was both pleased and intimidated by Donald Pleasence at first, the actor quickly joined the camaraderie of the crew, even helping movie lights and pull cable when needed.  Help was definitely appreciated in such a tight schedule, made more hectic since the production only had Pleasence available for five days' shooting.  Thus all of Loomis' scenes were filmed in a great rush from location to location in order to finish per his contract.

Not to be restricted by his schedule or budget, Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey planned an elaborate one-take shot to open the film, using the newly created filming platform, the SteadiCam (actually using Panavision's own version, the Panaglide). 

The continuous point-of-view shot as Michael enters his home and stabs his sister, then descends the stairs to be discovered by his parents used an entire magazine of film with each take.  While it was filmed a few times the same night to get it just right, the final sequence in the film actually edits three takes, blended seamlessly into one congruous POV shot.  This ambitious opening moment became an early highlight of HALLOWEEN's captivating and menacing visual style.

Long hours and little-if-any pay for the crew meant HALLOWEEN was a labor of love endured for the sheer joy and excitement of making movies, and this enthusiasm definitely shows in the final film.  With drama, suspense and production value far exceeding its modest budget, HALLOWEEN became a landmark film in both its horror genre and cinematic history.

Yet all this effort fell flat when Carpenter showed an early cut of the film to a studio executive.  She found the film not the least bit suspenseful or scary.  Carpenter learned a valuable lesson: never screen a film without a music score. 

The director quickly composed and performed his original score for HALLOWEEN in about three days. His distinctive and disturbing theme, composed in 5/4 time, immediately infused the film with a dissonant dramatic tension it lacked without music.  Carpenter's simple yet effective cues would soon have audiences screaming and cringing in terror, not unlike how John Williams' score signaled moviegoers when Jaws was about to attack.

Four hundred prints of HALLOWEEN were made at MGM and distributed slowly from local market to market across the nation.  HALLOWEEN first opened in Kansas City, where it was barely noticed on opening weekend.   But word of mouth rapidly spread and the film's box office receipts steadily grew the longer it played, a positive indicator of things to come.

While the film's regional distribution got HALLOWEEN off to a slow start, its entry in a Chicago film festival garnered recognition and acclaim for Carpenter and Hill's thrilling tale.  Acclaim grew into applause as the critics found the film and the film found its audience, eventually going on to earn approximately $70 million in its complete release, and create a popular new genre in American cinema.

A low-budget horror yarn about a psychotic killer stalking teenagers on Halloween night became a cultural phenomenon which ensured the longevity of both horror films and the holiday itself for generations to come.

Halloween the holiday would never be the same once the legend of Michael Myers was born in John Carpenter's landmark horror hit, HALLOWEEN.

Director John Carpenter, like many other film critics and fans, credit Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho as the birth of the modern American horror film.  Similarly, the dark, twisted tale of Norman Bates is a direct, influential progenitor to the creation of HALLOWEEN.

Designed using the template of psychological terror and suspense in favor of blood and guts horror, HALLOWEEN dramatized the local legend of a small town's scandalous murder.  It's a classic theme in literature and folklore: a town's dark, repressed secret arises to haunt its citizens once again.  Only instead of a ghostly spirit scaring neighborhood kids in a haunted house, Haddonfield endures a terribly real threat in the violent return of Michael Myers.

While Hitchcock's Psycho was a landmark in horror cinema, its style and story remained unique and never successfully followed up.  This stand out thriller cast a long shadow in the horror genre, and thus left an unfulfilled gap amid its legacy.  That gap would finally be filled when Carpenter and Debra Hill created HALLOWEEN.

Wildly profitable in its own right, standing for decades as the most successful independent film in cinematic history, HALLOWEEN unwittingly created its own genre: the slasher film.  This wasn't Carpenter and Hill's goal at all, they simply took the assignment to get the work it provided.  But so skillfully executed was their "small" horror film that film audiences embraced and elevated it to dizzying heights far above its budget or ambitions.

HALLOWEEN's success mirrored that of Steven Spielberg's Jaws, though Carpenter enjoyed a fraction of the production budget and none of the technical toys.  Filmmaking concerns aside, both tell the story of a relentless killing machine, devoid of emotion or pity, but unstoppable in its hunger for blood.

Spielberg had so many problems with his mechanical shark that he limited exposure of his villain until the last half of the film.  The terror of Jaws is the suspense built up in the audience's mind that this great white shark can attack anyone at any time.  Spielberg also used subjective shots which kept his killer a mystery to the audience while making them see the terrifying attacks from the shark's point of view.  Thus the audience was inescapably forced to confront this man-eating threat while building suspense about it at the same time.

Carpenter and Hill's script had no such technical challenges in creating their killer, Michael Myers.  Still they made the artistic choice to slowly crank up dreadful anticipation of Michael's murderous rampage, as Hill described it, like winding up a jack-in-the-box toy.  The duo kept cranking the handle, accompanied by Carpenter's unsettling music box score, until they released audience suspense in carefully-timed scenes of climactic violence and terror.

Much like Spielberg's shark, Michael Myers was designed as an inhuman bringer of death — The Shape.  An incurable, criminally insane psychopath from the age of six, the adult Michael Myers is the embodiment of evil according to his doctor-turned-pursuer, Sam Loomis.  Michael's insatiable drive to kill supercedes all human reason and rationality, which increases his nightmarish menace as a landmark horror villain.

Michael's inhuman power is accentuated by the happy accident which created The Shape: production designer Tommy Lee Wallace selected a Captain Kirk Star Trek mask as one of two choices to hide Michael's identity, the other option being a clown mask.  While many people find clowns immediately creepy, the nondescript Kirk mask bore little resemblance to actor William Shatner nor indeed anyone in particular, which made it all the more unsettling.  Its expressionless face with generic human features became the perfect blank canvas on which audiences could project their darkest fears.

Michael may have worn the mask, but as The Shape he was anonymously terrifying, free to be the inhuman embodiment of evil as envisioned in the script.  Like the shark, like Norman Bates, there is no Michael Myers behind the mask: the monster residing inside The Shape kills out of the hunger for survival which can never be satisfied.

As an archetypal icon of death, Michael's victims and audience empower him by investing their own personal terrors into his bland image.  By elevating him to a symbol, the evil idea of The Shape can never be destroyed . . . as seven sequels have gone to great, if not absurd lengths to illustrate over 25 years.

The original HALLOWEEN spawned an entire genre full of slasher villains, faceless and inhuman killers who sliced and diced their way through a human buffet of film victims.  In 1980 Paramount released Sean Cunningham's Friday the 13th, which engrossed audiences with more gore and titillating sex instead of building up layers of psychological terror.  It followed many of the newly-minted slasher genre rules in its story, but lacked the ingenuity and cleverness of Carpenter's story.   Still Cunningham filled the market void left in HALLOWEEN's wake, eventually steering the slasher genre in a bloodier, gore-filled direction.

Meanwhile the filmmaking careers of John Carpenter and Debra Hill enjoyed an auspicious boost, as did their young starring actress, Jamie Lee Curtis.  All three reteamed with other original crew members in 1981 to make HALLOWEEN II, a mostly satisfying sequel which continued Laurie Strode's terrifying aftermath of Halloween night with Michael Myers continuing his pursuit. 

HALLOWEEN's cinematic legacy produced a talented pool of alumni who went on to successful Hollywood careers: John Carpenter forged a string of horror genre successes like The Fog and Prince of Darkness, his excellent remake of The Thing, sci-fi favorites like Starman and They Live, and offbeat fan delicacies like Escape From New York and Big Trouble in Little China.

Creative partner Debra Hill co-produced two HALLOWEEN sequels with Carpenter, and expanded her credits with diverse productions such as The Dead Zone, Big Top Pee-Wee, Gross Anatomy, and The Fisher King. Debra Hill's last production was Oliver Stone's World Trade Center, completed after her untimely death from cancer in 2005.

Jamie Lee Curtis eventually revisited the role of Laurie Strode three more times, first in HALLOWEEN II.  Curtis gained critical acclaim in hits like Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies before returning to Haddonfield in HALLOWEEN H20: 20 YEARS LATER and her brief finale to Laurie in 2002's HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION.

Donald Pleasence reprised his role as Doctor Loomis in HALLOWEEN II, then returned for sequels 4 through 6 before bidding the character farewell.  He teamed up again with Carpenter in Escape From New York and Prince of Darkness, also appearing in numerous films and TV roles before his passing in 1995.

Cinematographer Dean Cundey shot HALLOWEEN II and III, later adding a wide variety of projects to his credits including the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Jurassic Park and Apollo 13.

HALLOWEEN's horror lineage continues even today after a cycle of seven direct franchise sequels is followed up by rocker-turned-horror-director Rob Zombie, now planning his new, re-imagined version of HALLOWEEN due in theaters August 2007. Like the evil within Michael Myers, audiences' fascination with the terrifying tale of Haddonfield's darkest curse may never die.