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Halloween

1978

John Carpenter

Jamie Lee Curtis, Donald Pleasence, Nancy Loomis, P.J. Soles ...

6.7

29,381

Horror In the small town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a teenage baby sitter tries to survive a Halloween night of relentless terror, during which a knife-wielding maniac goes after the town's hormonally charged youths.

	Author	Review
United States	Roger Ebert rogerebert.com	“'Halloween' is an absolutely merciless thriller, a movie so violent and scary that, yes, I would compare it to 'Psycho' (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)	POS
United States	Ron Pennington The Hollywood Reporter	"Carpenter makes the most of the situation in Halloween, a tense and frightening film (...) [He] obviously knows the genre well and he builds a properly terrifying atmosphere through his well-paced direction."	POS
United States	Dave Kehr Chicago Reader	"The most widely imitated film of the 70s (...) Carpenter displays an almost perfect understanding of the mechanics of classical suspense; his style draws equally (and intelligently) from both Hawks and Hitchcock"	POS
United Kingdom	Philip French The Guardian	"John Carpenter's best movies are his first four or five, all of them where imagination, intelligence, wit and chutzpah (...) The third, 'Halloween', is the ultimate refined slasher movie"	POS
United States	William Fischer Collider	"Its moments of true horror are undeniably well-crafted, but they're too easily undermined by what else is in the film (...) I see a lot to recommend. But I don't see a classic"	NEU
United Kingdom	Adam Smith Empire	"It became the most successful independent production at that time and changed the face of the horror movie. If Frankenstein is 'the most important horror movie' then Halloween runs it a close second (…) Rating: ★★★★★ (out of 5)"	POS
United Kingdom	Tom Milne Time Out	"A superb essay in Hitchcockian suspense, which puts all its sleazy 'Friday the 13th' imitators to shame with its dazzling skills"	POS
United States	James Berardinelli ReelViews	"'Halloween' is the rival of Alfred Hitchcock's 'Psycho'. With only a few arguable exceptions (such as 'The Exorcist'), there isn't another post-1970 release that comes close to it (…) Rating: ★★★★ (out of 4)"	POS
United States	Jason Zinoman The New York Times	"Part of the reason [it] has aged so well (…) is that it plays no topical notes and wastes little time on character development, plot, theme or any other elements extraneous to the critical business of sending shudders down your spine."	POS
United States	Variety	"After a promising opening, Halloween becomes just another maniac-on-the-loose suspenser"	NEU

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