Halloween (1978)

"Halloween" is one amazing bloody flick, buoyed by director-writer John Carpenter's classic score (it rivals "Jaws" in simplicity and sheer mind-blowing coolness), Jamie Lee Curtis as a screaming teen and a silent unstoppable killer in a Captain Kirk mask. The film opens with young Michael Myers slashing his freshly sexed teen sister to death. The boy is incarcerated until we rocket ahead 15 years as the grown Myers escapes from the mental ward and returns home. Michael's psychiatrist (Donald Pleasence, never better at combining indignant helplessness and then rage) says his charge has the devil in him, and he ain't lying. Myers moves quickly and like a demonic robot, and with never a wasted gesture. He says only one word the whole film. Yet he owns it. Who cares if Curtis is certainly no teen, Carpenter's cheapy horror masterpiece takes dead aim at rural America's precious suburban dream. It is no accident that the opening title says 1963. It's the year America woke up to real horror. A