Credited, rightfully, as the film that kickstarted the “slasher” subgenre, Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween is a masterwork of building tension, an exercise in mood and suspense that takes its cues from Hitchcock — unlike most of the 80s gorefests it would inspire. Besides the indelibly terrifying image of the blank-faced “shape,” aka Michael Myers, the film’s key innovation is setting it in an innocuous American suburb; there’s nowhere, not even a nice middle class home, where the viewer is safe. Jamie Lee Curtis makes her scream queen debut as one of several babysitters being stalked by a masked, escaped mental patient on Halloween night; her only savior is the patient’s maniacally driven doctor, played with gusto by the great Donald Pleasance. But the secret weapon of Halloween is Carpenter’s score, a tinkling, off-meter piano figure that continues to haunt long after the final unsettling frame. A Halloween season perennial. - Courtesy of Roxy Cinema