#34 - Halloween (1978)
(dir. John Carpenter)
On Halloween night 1963, young Michael Myers killed his sister for no apparent reason, and was committed to a psychiatric hospital. 15 years later, he escapes the night before - you guessed it - Halloween, and heads back to his childhood home, where he picks up his killing spree right where it left off. I love the simplicity of Michael's character - he is evil, more a force of nature than a person, and that's it. No complicated backstory or motivation. He picks Laurie Strode as his victim just because he saw her. The numerous sequels completely ruin this, unfortunately, but they can (and should!) mostly be ignored.
While John Carpenter had already made some excellent films (especially Assault on Precinct 13), this was his first breakout hit and established his position as a master of the genre. It was pretty low-budget, and that shows in some aspects (particularly the acting from basically everyone who isn't Jamie Lee Curtis or Donald Pleasence), but it does so much right that I can look past that. The cinematography and atmosphere is great, even in the really dark scenes (and Carpenter often takes full advantage of the dark, especially in one of the film's most memorable scares). And of course, the music is phenomenal.
This wasn't the first slasher film, but it was the first to be so wildly successful. It spawned decades of imitators, but few have been so effective. As the series went on, the sequels just got worse and more convoluted (with the exception of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which is good and unrelated to the rest of the films), but despite their best efforts the original remains one of the best slashers of all time.
Side note - during the movie, the kids watch the sci-fi classics The Thing from Another World and Forbidden Planet on TV. It kind of blew my mind when I realized that those films were only half as old at the time as Halloween is today.
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