Which Halloween movies actually work?
John Carpenter was a 30-year-old director with two minor hits under his belt when fellow USC alum Moustapha Akkad and producer Irwin Yablans came to him with an idea for the next big deal: a horror movie about a crazed psychopath hunting teenagers. Carpenter was directing a TV movie called Someone’s Watching Me! when Yablans called him up with a crucial plot development: Why not set it on Halloween? Carpenter and producer Debra Hill worked on the script for a few short weeks, and after extensive preparations and a 20-day shoot, a new classic was born. Yablans wanted a movie to rival The Exorcist. Carpenter and Hill gave him one better: perhaps the single most important American horror movie ever made.
Carpenter’s precedents have been well documented — Italian horror movies, especially those of Mario Bava; Bob Clark’s great Black Christmas (Clark was something of an unofficial consultant on Halloween);Alfred Hitchock’s Psycho, Tobe Hooper’s Texas Chain Saw Massacre — but his successes are uniquely his. Though he was not the first person to use the camera as the eyes of a killer, nor the first person to pit teens against a knife-wielding menace, no one had done it in such a brazenly and archly formalist style.
Fifty years and a dozen movies later, an interesting phenomenon has been made clear: Very few of the creatives who have been involved with the movies understand what made the original Halloween the enormous hit it was. Moving through the works chronologically reveals much about the way capital and art fumblingly flirt with one another before ultimately agreeing on the cheapest interaction possible. So why does Halloween endure? And who, if anyone, got the idea of Halloween right?
Where to watch: Shudder, AMC Plus,
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