Halloween Review

The budget was around three hundred thousand dollars and the film's whole method is a response to that. Carpenter and Dean Cundey shoot in Panavision so the widescreen frame can hold a foreground and a doorway at the same time, and the horror is almost always something you notice in the background rather than something the camera points at. The prowling point of view shot that opens the film, one long take ending on a reveal, does more with a single idea than most horror films manage in ninety minutes.

Carpenter's own score, written in five four time, is doing an enormous amount of the work. Jamie Lee Curtis is genuinely good and Donald Pleasence is enjoyably unhinged. The script is thin, the teenage characters exist to be positioned rather than known, and the shape of the plot is almost nothing once you remove the technique. That thinness is exactly what a decade of imitators copied. Judged on craft rather than story it remains close to flawless.