What it’s about: On Halloween night in 1963, six-year-old Michael Meyers (Castle, mostly) stabbed his sister to death. For 15 years, he was studied by Doctor Loomis (Pleasance), who concluded the boy was a soulless creature, incapable of understanding good and evil, incurably driven to murder. And on the night before Halloween in 1978, he escapes, with Loomis hot on his heels. The next night, in Michael’s old neighborhood, bookish teenager Laurie Strode (Curtis) is stuck babysitting young Tommy Doyle (Andrews) while her friends Annie (Keyes, credited as Nancy Loomis) and Linda (Soles) are sneaking off to fool around with their respective boyfriends. But Laurie is on edge, feeling a strange presence around town, and Tommy’s fear of the Boogeyman isn’t helping.

Reflections: Films like Black Christmas and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre may have come before it, but John Carpetner’s third film and true breakout feature is the moment that came to truly codify the slasher film. For all its legendary importance, it’s a small movie–gore is minimal, the body count is low (three onscreen kills), the real action takes place mostly in two houses–but it’s the impeccable way in which its executed that makes the magic. There is the score which, aside from the iconic main theme, washes the tension in synths that never drown out what’s onscreen. But it’s also a surprisingly beautiful movie to look at, with Dean Cundey’s camera bringing out not just a lot of dynamic movement, but also Carpenter’s painterly composition–see: the shot of Laurie on the sofa after she stabs Michael with the knitting needle that’s almost like a pulp novel version of Edward Hopper. Letting the tension play out slowly, leaving the specter of the killer in the background gets the viewer scanning every one of these composed images, making every shadow, every corner feel potentially dangerous, and the actual scares are paced out masterfully.

The leads take kind of opposite approaches to a script that isn’t necessarily more than it needs to be in the dialogue department. On the one hand, Pleasence quietly hams up Loomis into an almost religious fervor, spouting his doomy lines (“Death has come to your town.”) almost gleefully. On the other hand, Curtis–in her debut–brings an immediacy to Laurie that makes the film work. The other victims are dispatched before they can react, but her escalating fear–culminating in the famous closet sequence–and earned resourcefulness are what ground the experience, setting the template for a thousand Final Girls to come.

But slasher movies are more defined by their villains than anything, and Michael Meyers is one of the best, especially here. He never speaks a word and his inhuman resilience is never explained. The famous mask makes his face stand out, even spied at a distance, but is also uncannily blank, revealing nothing of his motives or intentions. He is simply an unstoppable force, both within the film and in terms of his impact on popular culture and the direction of horror cinema. This is one of the all time classic films, not just horror films, and if you’ve never seen it, it’s absolutely still worth watching.