Halloween (1978)

Halloween (1978)

In John Carpenter's low-budget, quintessential slasher film, set in 1963 in the town of Haddonfield, IL:

• in the opening sequence, six year-old Halloween-masked killer Michael Myers (Will Sandin as boy) stabbed his 17 year-old sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) after she had sex with her boyfriend Tommy (David Kyle); the clown-costumed, insane boy stood there motionless on the front lawn, surrounded by shocked adults (his parents)
• via subjective point-of-view camera angles, 17 year-old teenaged high-schooler Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was stalked by 21 year-old escaped insane asylum inmate Michael Myers (Tony Moran); often-times, the psycho-killer appeared and then quickly disappeared
• Lynda Van Der Klok's (P. J. Soles) boyfriend Bob (John Michael Graham) was impaled against a wall with a large butcher knife and then - while wearing a white sheet draped over himself and with Bob's glasses perched on his face - the killer strangled Lynda with a phone cord while she was on the phone, making her death screams sound like she was having an orgasm

• innumerable times, the maniacal white-masked Shape/Michael Myers (Nick Castle) was resurrected and came alive again
• Laurie fought back throughout the Doyle house where she was babysitting: downstairs with a knitting needle (plunged into Myers' neck), and in an upstairs closet with a metal coat hanger (stuck into his eye), and with his own dropped knife (thrust into his torso) - but the white-masked Shape seemed indestructible
• in a startling, scary moment, the seemingly-dead Michael Myers sat up in the background behind a sobbing Laurie after she had left the closet. He approached and assaulted her again, and as he grabbed Laurie's neck and strangled her, she brushed the mask from Michael's face. Michael let go of her neck to put his mask back on to restore his masked facade
• shrink Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) made the horrifying discovery that the killer ("boogeyman"), who was stabbed three times and shot six times, had vanished from the ground below after a fall from the two-story balcony - and hadn't succumbed

• the final dialogue: bloodied and in near-shock, Laurie quizzically stated: "[it]...was the boogey-man," while Dr. Loomis confirmed: "As a matter of fact, it was..."