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at the reality but at the shameless artifice of the dinner scene, understood that Hooper was mixing horror and slapstick, because that was what he and Dan O’Bannon had done with Dark Star. He was so impressed that he contacted Hooper, told him he admired the film, and asked if he would be interested in directing a screenplay that he had first written in a few quick sittings in 1971. Called “Hillbillies from Hell,” it followed a group of city girls driving out to the country. They take a detour and meet up with a family of cannibals, one of whom is a huge, unstoppable madman in a mask who chases the girls around with a knife. After a few discussions, the collaboration fell apart. “There were complications,” Hooper said. “The deal didn’t work. [It was] about money. I regret not doing that,” Hooper said. But he didn’t really understand the extent of what he missed out on until two years later in 1978, when he went to see John Carpenter’s new movie, Halloween. As soon as the adult Michael Myers appeared on-screen, Hooper thought to himself: There he is!

HALLOWEEN IS a ruthlessly simple story of a virginal babysitter living in the fictional suburban town of Haddonfield, Illinois, running from a large man with a knife who kills off her more promiscuous friends one by one. A doctor named Sam Loomis is on his case. This is another movie about movies—or the act of watching movies. It is one thing that John Carpenter is passionate about. Carpenter, who wrote the movie with his then girlfriend Debra Hill, intended it as something of a love letter to suspense, which is apparent from his early ideas about casting. For the role of Dr. Loomis, Carpenter pursued Hammer stars Christopher Lee (who played Dracula many times) and Peter Cushing (Dr. Frankenstein). After they turned him down, he offered the part to Donald Pleasence, then a veteran performer who had appeared in Lucas’s THX 1138. Debra Hill argued that they should cast Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of Janet Leigh of Psycho fame, as Laurie Strode, the girl pursued by the stalker on Halloween. Carpenter concurred, thinking it would generate needed publicity.

Curtis connected the movie to Hitchcock’s classic—and so did the name of Pleasence’s “Dr. Loomis,” a reference to John Gavin’s character in Psycho. But instead of the baby-faced killer standing out in the creepy surroundings of an empty motel, Carpenter inverts Hitchcock’s conceit. Halloween begins with a decidedly normal, safe environment, an idyllic middle-class suburb of Illinois that looks less like the 1970s than an idealized vision of the 1950s. You see the same strange evocation of that more innocent decade in the first scene of Night of the Living Dead. Romero and Carpenter had different ideas about danger. But when they thought of safety, they both imagined the well-manicured lawns from the movies of their childhoods.

None of this was new. There had been movies made about movies. And there had been homages to 1950s horror. And while John Carpenter’s economical shocker is often celebrated for its meticulousness, this is also slightly misleading. Halloween is riddled with errors, big and small. Shadows from the camera enter the screen. While set in a midwestern suburb, the palm trees in the background give away that Carpenter shot near Sunset Boulevard. Jokes fall flat. The famous point-of-view camera shot of the young version of the killer in the first scene is far too high to be from the point of view of a six-year-old.

These missteps are standard for a quickly made exploitation movie. Halloween is a stalker film built around the murders of teenage girls. But it is also one of the more enduring and innovative horror movies ever made. The reason can be boiled down to a few brilliant elements. First, there’s the music. Carpenter paid special attention to the score, composing a piano melody himself. He says he did this because he couldn’t afford a composer and an orchestra, but the stripped-down notes and propulsive, unstoppable 5/4 meter lodged in the minds of the viewer. The music in Jaws told you something was