> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.reel-fixation.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Franchise Fixation: Halloween (1978)
- URL: https://www.reel-fixation.com/franchise-fixation-halloween-1978/
- Published: 2026-09-27T05:26:28.000Z
- Updated: 2026-09-27T05:26:28.000Z
- Description: The movie that launched a franchise, changed horror, and somehow became my comfort movie.
- Author: Jonathan Watkins
- Tags: Franchise Fixation

There are movies I've watched fifty or more times. And then there's Halloween. I first saw Halloween on network television on October 30, 1981—the same day Halloween II opened in theaters. I was five years old. But here’s the funny thing:

I don't remember watching it.

That's probably a strange way to begin an article about what might be the most important movie in my life, but it's true. I don't remember sitting in front of the television that night. I don't remember Michael Myers appearing from behind a hedge. I don't remember Laurie Strode walking home from school. I don't remember hearing John Carpenter's score for the first time. My mother is the reason I know I watched it.

What I do remember is the tape.

We recorded Halloween that night, and I watched that recording so many times that eventually the tape became useless. At some point, we had to record it a second time when the movie aired again on television, and I think we may have eventually recorded it a third time. Somewhere along the way, Halloween stopped being a movie I'd seen and became something that was just sort of permanently there.

I watched it throughout childhood. Every October, obviously, but definitely not only in October. My grandmother used to talk about me putting that tape in practically every day during summers when she kept me while my mother was working. That habit never entirely went away. I still watch Halloween at least once a year and usually two or three times. There's the obligatory October viewing. There's often another one during the summer when I've had enough of heat and humidity and start yearning for a crisp breeze and the smell of autumn. Then there's usually some random viewing somewhere in between. And that doesn't include all the times I've had it playing in the background while working, or put it on to fall asleep.

Maybe it's strange to call a movie about a guy in a painted-white Captain Kirk mask hunting babysitters my comfort movie. Especially a movie featuring Bob (John Michael Graham), who apparently thinks joking about ripping the clothes off an eight- or nine-year-old girl is an acceptable way to flirt with his girlfriend; poor Lindsay Wallace.

But, alas, Halloween is my comfort movie. Hell, for me, it's just THE movie. With the possible exception of 1985's Clue—and believe me, Clue will be doted upon at some point in this newsletter—I can't think of another film that has consumed this much of my movie-going life. I don't know what that says about me, and I don't really care. If you judge someone by the fictional narratives they choose to engage with, you're probably someone I don't want to know anyway. My thoughts about the anti-horror crowd could fill another article (and probably will one day). Today we're talking about Halloween, and if I'm going to start a series called Franchise Fixation, I really didn't have another choice.

# The Night He Came Home

The story behind Halloween has been told so many times that some of it has started to feel like horror-movie folklore. John Carpenter had made Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13 when producer Irwin Yablans approached him about directing a low-budget movie centered around a killer stalking babysitters. The project is often associated with the early title The Babysitter Murders, although accounts of exactly when the title was used have varied over the years. What matters is the idea eventually became inseparable from Halloween night—and eventually became one of the simplest, best horror-movie titles ever conceived.

Producer Moustapha Akkad provided somewhere around $300,000 to make the movie. That's a number worth keeping in mind throughout virtually every story about its production because so many of the things that now define Halloween happened because they simply didn't have enough money to do something another way. That said, I feel like a hell of a film could be made for $300,000 and an iPhone these days, but I digress.

Carpenter co-wrote the screenplay with producer Debra Hill, directed the movie, and eventually composed the score. Hill's contribution shouldn't get reduced to a co-writing credit buried behind Carpenter's name, but more on that later. 

The movie was shot in Southern California in only a few weeks, and somehow this tiny independent production became one of the most influential horror movies ever made. You'll sometimes see Halloween described as the highest-grossing independent film of all time until Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles surpassed it in 1990\. Other versions of the story drag The Blair Witch Project into the equation. The problem is that "independent film" is a surprisingly slippery category, especially when you compare movies from different eras and decide what counts as independent production versus independent distribution. I say this because I'm not going to plant a flag on a record that doesn't need it. The actual story is impressive enough. A movie made for roughly $300,000 eventually grossed tens of millions of dollars. More importantly, people noticed.

We tend to talk about Halloween changing horror, which it absolutely did, but I don't think we talk enough about what its success said about independent filmmaking. You didn't necessarily need movie stars. You didn't need elaborate sets. You didn't need a giant studio budget. You needed an idea people could understand, filmmakers who knew what they were doing, and a way to get the movie in front of an audience. Then the audience had to show up.

For Halloween, they absolutely showed up.

# Halloween Wasn't Just John Carpenter's Movie

Before going any further, though, I want to spend some more time on Debra Hill, because it's very easy for the history of Halloween to become the John Carpenter story. That's understandable. Carpenter directed it, co-wrote it, composed the music, and created some of horror's most recognizable images. His name will come up a lot in any discussion of this movie.

But Halloween isn't just John Carpenter's movie.

Hill co-wrote the screenplay and produced the film, and when you start looking at how much of what we recognize as Halloween has her fingerprints on it, calling her simply Carpenter's co-writer doesn't really cover it. For starters, Haddonfield itself came from Hill. She grew up in Haddonfield, New Jersey, hence where the fictional Illinois town originated. More importantly, she helped give the place its people.

Carpenter and Hill divided up much of the writing. Carpenter concentrated on Dr. Loomis, Michael Myers, the scares, and the action, while Hill wrote much of the dialogue involving Laurie, Annie, and Lynda. Hill had also worked as a babysitter, which gave her firsthand experience with the world the movie was trying to recreate. I think that's a big part of why Halloween works, more than it sometimes gets credit for. Michael Myers is only frightening if there's a normal world for him to invade. Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), Annie (Nancy Loomis) and Lynda (P.J. Soles) don't spend every scene talking about the plot or announcing that they're characters in a horror movie. They talk about boys, school, babysitting, and whatever else happens to be important to them in the moment. They tease each other. They get distracted. They sound like friends. That ordinary teenage stuff isn't filler we have to sit through until Michael starts killing people. It's part of the movie's entire trick. Hill helps make Haddonfield feel safe and familiar, and Carpenter spends the rest of the movie contaminating it.

Hill's job didn't stop when the screenplay was finished, either. On a production this small, 'producer' wasn't exactly a sit-in-an-office title. She handled the practical work of getting the movie made. Cinematographer Dean Cundey had worked with Hill when she was a script supervisor, and he later recalled that she was the one who thought he and Carpenter would make a good team. Considering how essential Cundey's photography is to Halloween, that's a pretty consequential introduction.

And when the production needed the hands of six-year-old Michael Myers for the opening sequence, Hill supplied those too. Her hands reach for the knife and mask and stab Judith. Apparently co-writing and producing a movie on a shoestring budget also means playing your own child murderer when necessary.

Even the philosophy behind the movie was something Hill and Carpenter developed together. Hill described their central idea as evil that couldn't simply be killed. That's the idea the entire movie eventually builds toward: Michael can look like a man, move like a man, and be hurt like a man, but by the end Carpenter and Hill aren't asking us to think of him as one anymore.

None of this takes anything away from Carpenter. It makes the movie more interesting. Halloween works because these two creative geniuses brought different strengths to it. Carpenter gives the movie so much of its visual language, its suspense, its music, and its conception of Michael. Hill gives it an enormous amount of its human texture and helped hold together the production that put all of that on screen. Take either side away, and I'm not sure we get the Halloween we're still talking about nearly fifty years later.

So, as Franchise Fixation moves through these movies, Debra Hill's name is going to come up a lot. It should. She's not a footnote in Halloween's story. She's one of the reasons there is a story to tell.

# Welcome to Haddonfield, California

Of course, one problem with making a movie for around $300,000 is that you can't necessarily travel halfway across the country because your script says the story takes place in Illinois. Haddonfield, Illinois, is actually Southern California, and if you've watched Halloween enough times, California occasionally starts fighting its way into the movie. There are palm trees lurking in the distance. Some locations don't look quite as Midwestern once you know where they really are.

And then there are the leaves.

The movie takes place on October 31st. They shot it in California during the spring. Autumn was not exactly cooperating, so the production brought in bags of leaves to scatter around the locations. With money as tight as it was, the crew couldn't just throw them down and forget about them. They had to collect the leaves after filming so they could be reused at another location. There's also one of my favorite pieces of Halloween trivia: years before he became Freddy Krueger, Robert Englund has said he spent a day helping scatter dead leaves around the set. Michael Myers and Freddy Krueger crossed paths years before either of them knew it. Sort of.

What's funny is that once you start noticing all these things, none of them really hurt the movie. I've seen the palm trees. I've seen crew mistakes. I've noticed things I probably wasn't supposed to notice. It doesn't matter. Because Carpenter and cinematographer Dean Cundey don't convince me that Southern California is Illinois through geographical accuracy. They convince me through atmosphere.

Haddonfield feels like the neighborhood you grew up in. There are kids walking home from school. There are leaves on the ground. People know their neighbors. Teenagers babysit a few houses apart. It's safe. Normal. Boring, even. Except there's a man standing behind that hedge.

# Where's Michael?

This is the thing Halloween does better than almost every movie that tried to copy it. Carpenter doesn't simply show us Michael Myers. He teaches us to look for him. Michael is standing at the end of a street. He's outside a window. He's behind a hedge. He's in the background while the person we're watching goes about her day without realizing anything is wrong. Laurie looks. He's there. She looks again. He's gone.

Eventually Carpenter barely needs Michael at all. Once we've been trained to search for him, an empty doorway becomes scary. A dark corner becomes scary. The space behind Laurie becomes scary. That's suspense. In his [review](https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/halloween-1979?ref=reel-fixation.com), Roger Ebert compared Carpenter’s film to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic, Psycho, and I don’t think he’s wrong. That's not me saying Carpenter is "better than Hitchcock" or trying to create some ridiculous director death match. It's saying that for these 91 minutes, Carpenter understands how to control an audience at that level. Hitchcock famously illustrated the difference between surprise and suspense with his “bomb under the table” example. If two people are talking and a bomb suddenly explodes, the audience gets a few seconds of surprise. But if the audience knows there’s a bomb under the table while the characters don’t, an otherwise ordinary conversation becomes suspenseful.

Michael Myers is the bomb underneath the table, and the scariest part is that we know he’s there before the characters in the movie do. That was what Carpenter felt was the most effective route, and he was right. Even more impressive, he turned the five-minute “bomb under the table” sequence into 91 minutes of terror that rarely lets up. And if we’re talking about impressive, look at how little blood there actually is. The movie's reputation is considerably more violent than the movie itself. That's especially funny, considering what the slasher genre eventually became, not to mention most of the rest of this franchise. 1978’s Halloween doesn't need elaborate gore because Carpenter is more interested in where Michael is standing, what Laurie sees, what we see, and how long he can make us wait for something to happen. Sometimes the waiting is worse.

# Learning to Watch Movies As They Were Intended

This movie also taught me one of my earliest lessons about why movies should be seen in their proper aspect ratio. I just didn't know I was learning that at the time.

For years, I watched Halloween on television and VHS. Like most movies shown that way back then, it was often presented in pan-and-scan, cropping a widescreen image to fill the old 4:3 television screen. For many movies, that meant ugly compositions or two people talking to each other while one of them had apparently been banished from the television set. For Halloween, it could fundamentally change the scare.

Carpenter and Cundey shot the movie in anamorphic widescreen. They use that wide frame constantly. Laurie can occupy one part of the image while Michael stands somewhere else. The audience sees him. Laurie doesn't. Cut off the sides of the image, and you can literally remove Michael Myers from a shot.

I can't think of many better ways to explain why the old argument that "fullscreen uses my whole TV, so I'm seeing more" was wrong. Sometimes you were seeing less. With Halloween, sometimes what you weren't seeing was the Boogeyman.

# Looking Through the Killer's Eyes

Carpenter tells us what kind of movie we're watching almost immediately. After the opening credits, we're looking through someone's eyes. We move toward the Myers house. We look through a window. We enter. We pick up a knife. We go upstairs. We put on a mask. We kill Judith Myers. Then we go back outside. Someone pulls off the mask. And the killer is a six-year-old boy. It's still one of horror's great reveals.

Halloween didn't invent the killer POV shot. Michael Powell's Peeping Tom had forced audiences into the perspective of a murderer almost two decades earlier. Black Christmas had also used subjective killer photography several years before Halloween. But Carpenter and Cundey's use of the Panaglide gives that opening a fluidity that's still impressive.

Cundey has talked about how Carpenter wanted the moving camera to become associated with Michael—sometimes literally his point of view, sometimes an ominous presence following him. That visual idea extends well beyond the opening. The camera itself starts to feel predatory. The opening shot was much more complicated than it looks. The crew had to coordinate Michael's movement through the house, the performers, the lighting, and the camera while maintaining the illusion that we're seeing everything continuously through his eyes.

# The Face of Michael Myers

Then there's the mask. At this point, the story is so famous that even people who have never seen Halloween probably know some version of it. Michael Myers is wearing William Shatner's face, or at least he started that way.

Production designer and editor Tommy Lee Wallace needed a mask for Michael and found a cheap Captain Kirk mask based on Shatner. They altered the eye holes, changed the hair, and painted the face a pale white, and somehow Captain Kirk disappeared. What remained was The Shape. That's what Michael is called in the credits, and it's a perfect description of what Carpenter does with him in this movie.

Michael isn't much of a character. That's a compliment. He doesn't have funny lines. He doesn't explain himself. He doesn't even have the exaggerated physical presence that later versions of the character sometimes lean into. He's simply a shape. Sometimes he's barely even that. He's a white face emerging from darkness.

And that last image is where Cundey becomes essential again. Halloween's night photography doesn't simply illuminate Michael so we can see him. It lets him disappear into blackness and then slowly gives him back to us. The moment his mask materializes behind Laurie works because the darkness has been treated as part of the composition, not an obstacle the cinematographer needed to eliminate. The blankness of that mask is what makes it work. Michael doesn't look angry. He doesn't look happy. He doesn't look insane. There's nothing there. Michael Myers is scary in this first installment because we don't know who he is or why he’s doing the things he’s doing. We just know he has the “blackest eyes… the Devil’s eyes”.

# Dr. Loomis Would Like to Prescribe Six Bullets

 I love Donald Pleasence, and I really love his portrayal of Dr. Sam Loomis. I've spent years using Samloomis13 as my handle online for a reason, but Loomis is also kind of a ridiculous character if you reduce him to the basics. He's Michael Myers' psychiatrist. And his professional opinion is essentially: That guy is evil. We should probably kill him.

This isn't what you generally hope to hear from your psychiatrist, but Donald Pleasence sells every second of it. Actually, saying he "sells it" undersells what he's doing. Pleasence is one of the main reasons Michael Myers is frightening. Michael spends much of the movie watching people in silence. Loomis tells us what Michael is. He's our storyteller.

When Loomis talks about meeting Michael as a child and seeing nothing behind his eyes, Pleasence doesn't deliver the speech like a psychiatrist trying to convince Sheriff Brackett of something. He sounds like a man who has spent 15 years trying to convince himself that there must be some rational explanation and finally gave up. That's what makes those speeches work. Loomis is scared of Michael. Not nervous. Not concerned. Scared. And this is a man who knows him better than anyone.

Every time Loomis talks about Michael, Michael becomes a little less human. The movie needs that. Without Loomis, he's an escaped killer. With Loomis, he's the Boogeyman.

Peter Cushing was reportedly approached for the role. Christopher Lee was also considered and later said turning it down was a mistake. I love both of those actors. I'm glad neither one played Loomis. Maybe if one of them had taken the role, we wouldn’t know what we had missed out on, but I’m thankful Donald Pleasence is Dr. Loomis. There's an eccentricity to him that I can't imagine anyone else duplicating. He can be deadly serious one second and strangely funny the next without ever making Loomis feel like comic relief. Watch him scare the hell out of Lonnie and then immediately look delighted with himself. That's Loomis.

Moustapha Akkad once asked Pleasence how many more Halloween films he intended to make, and Pleasence replied, hilariously, “I stop at 22.” We’ll obviously be getting into the troubles the future installments had, but the lack of Loomis after Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, due to Donald Pleasence’s unfortunate death, is a big reason the troubles exist. 

# Laurie Strode Before There Were Final Girls Everywhere

It's difficult to watch Halloween now without thinking about everything that came afterward. We know Laurie Strode becomes one of horror's defining characters. We know Jamie Lee Curtis becomes one of the genre's most recognizable stars. We know Laurie will return again and again and again. None of that existed in 1978.

Curtis was 19, mostly known for television, and making her feature-film debut. Her mother, being Janet Leigh, certainly gave the production a publicity angle. Casting the daughter of the woman murdered in Psycho's shower scene in a new horror movie is the kind of thing a marketing department doesn't exactly hate. But famous parents don't make a performance work; Jamie Lee Curtis does.

Laurie feels like an actual person, not a character who knows she's going to become "the Final Girl." That term wasn't even part of the conversation yet. She's shy. She's responsible. She's insecure. She's smart. And when everything goes to hell, she survives because she keeps fighting.

I should also note, I don’t think Nancy Loomis (Annie) and P.J. Soles (Linda) get enough credit alongside Jamie Lee Curtis. Curtis steals the show, well at least when Donald Pleasance isn’t on screen, but Nancy and P.J.’s performances help humanize the character of Laurie in a way that should not go unmentioned.

# Carpenter Only Needed a Few Notes

And holy Halloween, the music. I don't know if Halloween works without that score. I really don't. There's a famous story about Carpenter showing an early cut of the movie without music and being told it wasn't scary. Then he added the score. Turns out that helped.

The main theme is ridiculously simple. A few piano notes. A 5/4 rhythm. Repetition. That's basically it. And you hear about three seconds of it and immediately know where you are. Carpenter has traced the unusual rhythm back to his father teaching him to play 5/4 time on bongos when he was a kid. It's one of those perfect examples of limitations helping create something iconic. There wasn't money to hire some massive orchestra and spend weeks recording an elaborate score, so Carpenter did it himself, and now it's one of the most recognizable horror themes ever written.

The music also does something important structurally. It gives Michael momentum. When that theme starts, it feels like something is coming. Not running. Not rushing. Coming. Michael Myers has somehow spent nearly fifty years proving that you can walk slowly and still catch everyone. The score makes that seem completely reasonable.

And Halloween also introduced me to Blue Öyster Cult. "(Don't Fear) The Reaper" plays in Annie's car as she and Laurie drive; another lifelong obsession created by this movie. For the record, "Shooting Shark" is their best song. Fight me.

# The Halloween I Grew Up With Wasn't Quite Halloween

There's another strange part of my history with this movie. As I mentioned, the Halloween I fell in love with wasn't actually the theatrical version. It was the network-TV version.

The television version NBC aired in 1981 had to remove material to meet broadcast standards, but it also included footage theatrical audiences had never seen. Carpenter filmed additional material during the production of Halloween II to help the edited film fill its network time slot.

I don't remember exactly when I finally saw the unedited movie. I think I was probably a preteen and had gotten a VHS copy. I do remember my reaction. Wait. They show nudity in this? They're smoking pot? What the hell have I been watching all these years?

Also, one of those added television scenes introduces an idea that becomes rather important to the sequel. I'm going to leave it there. This is Franchise Fixation, after all. We've got Halloween II coming next, and we'll have plenty of time to discuss the various decisions this franchise makes about Michael Myers and his family. A lot of time.

What fascinates me now is realizing that the movie I spent those early years obsessively watching wasn't exactly the movie Carpenter released in 1978, and it didn't matter.

It was still Halloween to me.

# When You've Seen a Movie Too Many Times

Of course, there's a downside to watching a movie this many times. Eventually you start noticing everything. Take the hedge scene. Laurie sees Michael watching her from behind the bushes. Annie looks. Michael is gone. Watch closely enough, and you can spot a little puff of cigarette smoke coming from Carpenter's hiding place behind the hedge. Once you see it, you'll probably see it every time. Sorry. It’s not like I’m the first person to mention this. It’s just always been funny to me, and honestly gives the movie some added character.

You start noticing things like that when you've watched a movie for decades. You notice the palm trees. You notice little continuity errors. You notice where California doesn't quite look like Illinois. You notice how the camera moves. You notice where Cundey puts the light. You notice how long Carpenter holds a shot before cutting. You start seeing the machinery behind something that once seemed like magic.

But that's one of the things I love about movies. Knowing how the trick works doesn't necessarily ruin the trick. Sometimes it makes you appreciate the magician more.

# Halloween Didn't Invent the Slasher Movie

There's a shorthand history of horror that goes something like this:

Halloween invented the slasher movie.

It didn't, and I don't think we need to pretend it did to appreciate how important it is. There’s a 1932 movie called Thirteen Women with a slasher setup: a prank gone wrong, and someone seeks revenge by trying to kill off each prankster one by one. You could even make an argument for Irene Dunne's Laura Stanhope as an early ancestor of the ‘final girl”. But even if that’s a loose connection for you, Psycho existed. Peeping Tom existed. The Texas Chain Saw Massacre existed. Black Christmas existed. And Black Christmas, in particular, deserves a place in any serious conversation about what came before Halloween.

A story has floated around for years that Black Christmas director Bob Clark gave Carpenter the idea for Halloween. Clark recalled a conversation with Carpenter about what a hypothetical Black Christmas sequel might look like, including the possibility of a killer escaping and returning around Halloween. But Clark himself rejected the idea that Carpenter stole his movie. Influence isn't theft. Movies influence other movies. That's how genres develop, and Quentin Tarantinos.

What Carpenter did with Halloween was take ideas that had existed in different forms and assemble them into something so effective that everybody suddenly wanted one. A mysterious killer. Young victims. A holiday setting. Subjective camera. Stalking. A resourceful final survivor. A simple hook. A tiny budget. A huge return.

The early '80s slasher boom wasn't simply a bunch of filmmakers saying, "Let's remake Halloween." They were looking at what Halloween proved was possible. And that may be the movie's biggest influence on independent cinema. It didn't merely create a template for a kind of horror movie. It created a business model. You could make something cheap and scary and, if you caught the audience's imagination, the upside was enormous. Of course, Hollywood being Hollywood, the lesson eventually became: Let's make 400 of these.

But that's not Halloween's fault. Halloween might’ve helped set a template that others, most notably 1980’s Friday the 13th, would use as a starting point, but that doesn’t make the original any less important, scary, or fantastic. One could argue that many of the future Halloween sequels resemble a Friday the 13th more than they do a Halloween, but that’s for a future conversation, not to mention a future Franchise Fixation.

# Don't Explain the Boogeyman

The most interesting thing about watching the entire Halloween franchise in release order is going to be seeing how many increasingly complicated answers people come up with for a question the first movie wisely doesn't answer. Why does Michael Myers kill? And as we’ve already touched on, Halloween's answer is essentially: Who knows?

Maybe there isn't an answer. And that's terrifying. Loomis spent years looking for one. He couldn't find it. Michael isn't avenging anything. Laurie didn't wrong him. He doesn't know her (at least in the original theatrical version). Laurie has no grand plan she can unravel and use against him. She happens to cross his path. He starts watching her. That's enough.

The movie doesn't even fully commit to Michael being human in the way we understand it. He can be injured. Laurie hurts him. Loomis shoots him. But he keeps getting back up. And then we reach that ending. Laurie survives. Loomis arrives. Michael attacks. Loomis shoots him repeatedly. Michael falls from the balcony. Loomis walks over and looks down. Nothing. He's gone.

Laurie asks the question the entire movie has been building toward. Was that the Boogeyman? Loomis answers: "As a matter of fact, it was."

And then Carpenter shows us Haddonfield. The houses. The rooms. The street. Places where Michael isn't. Except we hear him breathing. So maybe he's everywhere. That's one of my favorite endings in movie history. Not horror history. Movie history.

No explanation. No final shock where Michael jumps toward the camera. No elaborate setup for Halloween II. Just breathing. The Shape is still out there. Good night. It’s simple and effective. It’s genius.

# The Boogeyman at 50

I've spent most of my life with this movie. At five, it was apparently something my mother thought was perfectly reasonable to let me watch on television. We'll leave the parenting discussion between the two of us.

As a kid, Michael Myers scared me. As a teenager, Halloween was cool. As I became more interested in filmmaking, it became something else entirely. I started noticing Carpenter's direction. Cundey's cinematography. The widescreen compositions. The editing. The music. The way Pleasence tells us who Michael is without the movie ever proving he's right—or wrong. The way Jamie Lee Curtis slowly shifts Laurie from ordinary teenager to someone fighting for her life.

Now I'm 50, and I can see all those versions of the movie at the same time. I can see the movie I watched on that worn-out tape. I can see the movie I eventually discovered wasn't quite the same as the unedited theatrical version. I can see the movie that taught me why widescreen mattered. I can hear the music that introduced me to Carpenter as a composer. I can hear Blue Öyster Cult and remember that this movie sent me down another rabbit hole. I can watch Donald Pleasence and understand why some version of Sam Loomis has been my online name for years.

I can spot the palm trees. I can see Carpenter's cigarette smoke. I can know exactly where Michael is standing before he appears. And somehow none of that diminishes the movie. If anything, I appreciate it more.

Because here's the thing that matters:

It still works.

Michael slowly emerging from the darkness behind Laurie still works. Michael standing across the street still works. The hedge still works. The score still works. The final chase still works. Loomis looking over that balcony and finding nothing there still works. Most importantly, that empty space where Michael might be still works.

That's not just nostalgia talking. Nostalgia explains why putting Halloween on in October feels right. It might explain why I sometimes watch it during the summer because I'm ready for autumn. It certainly explains why hearing that score or seeing that jack-o'-lantern instantly transports me somewhere else. But nostalgia doesn't explain why the filmmaking still works when I know exactly what's going to happen. That's craft.

That's why we're still talking about Halloween almost fifty years later. And that's why this had to be the first movie in Franchise Fixation. We've got twelve more Halloween movies ahead of us. We're going to get different masks. Different timelines. Different versions of Laurie Strode. Different explanations for Michael. At one point we're going to get Paul Rudd. We're going to get Rob Zombie. We're going to pretend some sequels didn't happen, then pretend some other sequels didn't happen. Eventually we're going to reach a movie that concludes a trilogy about Michael Myers by spending a surprising amount of time not being about Michael Myers.

I have thoughts. We'll get there. But everything starts here. A tiny independent movie. A young director. A first-time movie star. A $1.98 Captain Kirk mask. A few piano notes. A babysitter. A psychiatrist who is absolutely done trying to rehabilitate his patient. And a shape standing in the distance.

For me, it started with a television broadcast and a VHS tape I eventually watched until it stopped working. I don't remember watching Halloween for the first time. I've spent the rest of my life making up for it.

# THE FIXATION SCALE

★★★★ — 4 out of 4

Come on.

Did you really think it was going to be anything else?