The best Halloween movie created a whole new genre
By Chris Snellgrove | Published: 2025-10-31 15:22:00 | Source: GIANT FREAKIN ROBOT
Written by Chris Snellgrove | Published
John Carpenter Halloween (1978) gave an entire generation the horror of their lives, even as it invented a new genre: the slasher. While some of the pieces this film inspired (most notably Friday the 13th) keep getting a superior sequel, the first Halloween It remains the best entry in this long-running franchise. If you want to remind yourself how good this game is, just grab some of your favorite candy and stream this seasonal classic for free on Plex.
plot Halloween Straight and straightforward as a killer’s blade: Years after killing his sister, a young man escapes from a trash can and begins stalking the suburban woods. It focuses on a high school student who just wants to get high and have a blast with her friends. But unless this escaped killer’s obsessed psychiatrist can save the day, this girl will be just one of many victims murdered by the first official hit on the silver screen.
Welcome to the suburban jungle
the first Halloween It was a huge success, and it invented the modern slasher genre as we know it. This success led to the production of more films in the gory genre, including… Friday the 13thwhich was designed to take the Halloween formula (specifically, having a masked killer stalk and kill young people) from the suburbs and into the woods. In this way, it’s fair to say that Michael Myers is the blood-soaked patriarch of subsequent villains from Ghostface to Art the Clown.
naturally, HalloweenIts box office success (for a small budget of $325,000, the film earned $70 million) meant that it became a thriving franchise to this day. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to follow this franchise from beginning to end since there are sequels, reboots, and multiple movies telling you to ignore almost everything that came before. Every film has its own gory strengths and weaknesses, but after all these decades, this is John Carpenter’s first Halloween Still the best in the entire franchise.
Perfect cast, director and villain
The first original reason Halloween The film’s superior remains Michael Myers’ portrayal of Fury, a force of nature that is as unknowable as it is evil. Later films piled on more and more strange lore about Michael, giving him a surprise sister, a sad backstory, and even ties to a terrible cult. the first Halloween Devoid of all that, her iconic killer is infinitely more terrifying when he can simply wander the suburbs as a mysterious, masked killer.
The second reason is the first Halloween The film stands out from the others because it has a perfect cast, especially Donald Pleasence as the crusader Billy Loomis and Jamie Lee Curtis as horror’s most famous final girl. Both actors would reprise these roles to diminishing returns in subsequent franchise entries, but neither of those later films had the actors’ electric chemistry of the first film. Rob Zombie’s films are particularly miscast, though David Gordon Green’s newer and better reboot features extremely uneven acting that often gets in the way of its more dramatic moments.
The third original reason Halloween Working its way to the top of the series is that director John Carpenter gives the film a simplistic aesthetic that helps make Michael Myers so terrifying. For example, our crazed killer peering out of the bush feels like a deeply intimate violation, as Myers makes his way into comfortable spaces in the city that she thought were safe. Long before he began passing his blade on hapless babysitters, he had slipped into our collective consciousness as a reminder that no place (even the depths of the most comfortable suburbs) was truly safe from the most brutal forms of perversion.
A movie so good that it hurt the franchise
Ironically, that Halloween The franchise is a victim of the success of the first film. Other films in this series (most notably John Carpenter Halloween 2, H20The first is David Gordon Green Halloween) are perfectly serviceable horror films with moments of subversive wit. But none of them ever come close to the sublime gravity of the first film, a film that created the world’s most feared killer and then put us in his shoes with groundbreaking first-person shots.
It’s all true, too: If anything, Michael Myers’ first outing is scarier than ever. Carpenter uses a simple style that effectively presents this villain as a larger-than-life invention of modern cinema. He’s a new kind of villain, but he represents the modern fear of every small-town person: that the chaos and violence of city life cannot, and will not, be stopped forever.
Don’t believe that first one Halloween Is he the best in the franchise? Or maybe you just want to revisit the glory days of the modern Slasher game? Either way, it’s time to give yourself a real hard shot and stream the John Carpenter classic for free on Plex.
(tags for translation) David Gordon Green
ــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
