In 1978 John Carpenter changed the perception of what constitutes a truly terrifying motion picture experience forever with the release of his horror classic Halloween. The plot of the film is brilliant in it’s simplicity: One Halloween night in 1963, a young boy murders his older sister in an upstairs bedroom of his home in Haddonfield Illinois. The kids is shuffled off to a sanitarium.

Fifteen years later, on October 30th 1978, the now-adult patient orchestrates an escape from the asylum, heads back home to Haddonfield and begins a murder spree which carries over into Halloween Eve and would become the stuff of cinema legend.

The maniac in question is, of course, Michael Myers and he is pursued (with a determination almost as relentless as Michael’s urge to kill) throughout the film by the psychologist who treated him all of those years, Dr. Samuel Loomis (the late great Donald Pleasance). Along the way, Michael targets and stalks one particular young woman named Laurie Strode, who is sympathetically portrayed by a young Jamie Lee Curtis making an assured screen debut.

This sounds like a standard slasher movie plot, but it’s important to note this movie was groundbreaking at the time. There were no endless franchise installments with interchangeable masked lunatics hacking up sexually active teens when Halloween hit. And- as the film’s inferior sequels, remake and imitators would demonstrate over the course of the next thirty years - the quality of the filmmaking would rarely be equaled.

Looking for buckets of blood? Forget it. Carpenter was far more interested in investing this film with a ghoulish chill. This is the type of movie where something scary will occur a few seconds after you’ve decide that nothing is going to happen. Most movies are concerned with the frightening monsters lurking in the dark. Halloween is about not only the monsters, but the fear of the dark itself.

On the subject of monsters, evil has rarely been as convincingly manifested on the big screen as it is in the form of Michael Myers. He is unstoppable and silent, but he is also possessed of a deadly intelligence. Watching Nick Castle’s performance as Michael in the film, I’m reminded of a disturbed child who traps small animals and then terrorizes them before moving in for the kill. There is a fundamental cognizance in Michael’s pattern of murder throughout the movie. Though he utters not one syllable (his only sounds being the heavy breathing issuing forth from beneath the emotionless facade of his stark white mask), it becomes clear early on that the greatest danger Myers represents to his intended victims is not his size, strength or ability to shrug off physical trauma.. it’s that he can outthink them at every turn. As an observer to the terrifying series of events which unfold in Halloween, the viewer finds themselves wondering where and when this silent monolith will appear next.

Then there’s the ending. I won’t reveal it here, but will confine myself to remarking that this movie ends on a note which will have you looking over your shoulder and hurriedly moving to turn on the lights.

Ultimately, that’s why Halloween is- in this reviewer’s estimation- still the greatest American horror film ever made. All these years later and it still serves as a potent reminder that, sometimes, there’s a very good reason to be afraid of the dark.

Ten out of Ten Times I believed in the Bogeyman.