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The first film, Halloween (originally titled The Babysitter Murders), was written and directed by John Carpenter, executive produced by Moustapha Akkad, and released in 1978, starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance. In the movie, six-year-old Michael Myers brutally kills his older sister on Halloween night, 1963 and is locked in a mental institution. Fifteen years later, he escapes and returns to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois to continue his rampage. Pursued by his psychiatrist Dr. Sam Loomis (Pleasance), Myers sets his intentions on babysitter Laurie Strode (Curtis) (after already killing several of her friends). Eventually, Loomis catches up with Myers in the upstairs room of a house, and shoots the murderer six times. Myers falls through a window and Loomis rescues Laurie. But looking up from the upstairs window, Loomis discovers Myers is gone...he has escaped once again. Myers has "come home" (as the tagline on the movie poster mentions), and will return to kill again.
Shot on a budget of $300,000, it was the highest grossing independent film ever, until Dirty Dancing was released in 1987.
Halloween is generally considered the first of a long line of modern-day " slasher" movies, though some film scholars (and cult movie fans) say the credit for this goes to either Michael Powell's Peeping TomPeeping Tom is a 1960 psychological horror film by the British film director Michael Powell. The film takes its name from the character "peeping Tom" the voyeur in the tale of Lady Godiva, and is an horrific tale of voyeurism, serial murder and child abus, Alfred HitchcockSir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock KBE ( 13 August 1899 29 April, 1980) was a British film director closely associated with the suspense genre. Influenced by expressionism in Germany, he began directing in England, and worked in the United States from 1939.'s PsychoThis article is about the novel and the movies based on it. Psycho is usually a slang abbreviation of " psychopath". Robert Bloch's pulp novel Psycho partly inspired by the crimes of Ed Gein, was made into a black-and-white feature film in 1960 by Alfred or Tobe HooperTobe Hooper is an American television and film director best known for his work in the horror film genre. His movies include Lifeforce Poltergeist and the watershed exploitation classic The Texas Chainsaw Massacre''. Before becoming a filmmaker, Hooper, a's The Texas Chainsaw MassacreThe Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a low-budget horror film, made in 1974 by director Tobe Hooper and starring Marilyn Burns, Gunnar Hansen, Edwin Neal, Allen Danzinger, Paul A. Partain, and Jim Siedow. It concerns a family of cannibals in Texas, who likely a. Nonetheless, this movie originated a great many of the clichés seen in countless low-budget "splatter" films of the 1980sMillennia: 1st millennium 2nd millennium 3rd millennium Centuries: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s Years: 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 Events and trends and 1990sCenturies: 19th century 20th century 21st century Decades: 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s 2000s 2010s 2020s 2030s 2040s Years: Events and trends Computers, technology Explosive growth of the Internet; decrease in the cost of computers and other techn. (First-time viewers of Halloween may be surprised by the fact that compared to its many imitators and competitors, the original film actually has very few explicitly violent scenes.)
Deeper meaning has been read into this movie by some film critics, including the idea that everyone who dies in the film is sexually promiscuous, while the "innocent" (chaste) heroine survives. Carpenter has been quoted as saying that inclusion of this sort of moralityMorality is a complex of principles based on cultural, religious, and philosophical concepts and beliefs, by which an individual determines whether his or her actions are right or wrong. These concepts and beliefs are often generalized and codified by a c into the story was entirely unintentional, and he did not mean for the movie to be seen as a form of "punishment" for those who indulge in sex and drug use. And yet the parallel between a character's moral strengths and their likelihood of not getting killed has become a standard slasher movie trope. Critic Roger Ebert has taken to calling this genre the "Dead Teenager Movie", the principal cliché of which is that the only teenager to survive is always the virginal girl who declines all of the vices (pot smoking, etc.) indulged in by those who end up skewered. And some other films in this genre have explored the sexual morality question from the other angle, drawing metaphorical parallels between sexual repression and the acts of the killer (as in William Lustig 's Maniac ).