Kevin Coughlin

FULL WATCHALONG ~ HALLOWEEN (1978)

Added 2025-09-23 03:38:36 +0000 UTC

Halloween (1978) really is the gold standard for kicking off a horror franchise. Tara’s right—if we’re ranking first entries, it’s Halloween at the top, followed by Friday the 13th and then A Nightmare on Elm Street. Carpenter set the template, and the others played catch-up.

That said, it’s not without its quirks, and that’s half the fun. Michael Myers is supposed to be “pure evil,” an unstoppable force of death… yet he spends half the movie driving around in the world’s slowest, most conspicuous car like he’s late to a shift at Blockbuster. He stalks babysitters by standing six feet away in broad daylight, then vanishing like Batman when they blink. And poor Dr. Loomis—Donald Pleasence spends the whole movie shouting “Evil!” like a doomsday street preacher who forgot his sandwich board. Subtlety was not on the call sheet.

And yet, even with the goofy moments, it works. Jamie Lee Curtis nails Laurie Strode as the perfect “final girl,” selling both vulnerability and grit, and Carpenter’s score does 70% of the heavy lifting. That piano theme turns shots of suburban sidewalks into nightmare fuel. The fact that there’s almost no blood but the film still feels terrifying is proof of how lean and efficient the filmmaking is.

So yeah, we can laugh at Michael’s “peekaboo in the bushes” routine or Loomis monologuing about pure evil every ten minutes, but Halloween is still the scariest, most effective franchise starter ever. It’s tight, it’s iconic, and it’s aged better than most of the movies it spawned. Pure slasher perfection—with just enough goofy charm to keep us smiling while we scream.