When Halloween premiered on October 25, 1978, Jamie Lee Curtis was making her film debut in an independent horror movie made for roughly $300,000. It went on to earn about $70 million worldwide.
Its early box-office numbers were modest, and some initial critical reviews were mixed or negative. Strong audience reactions and positive word of mouth caused it to expand and stay in theaters for an unusually long time. It kept returning to the top of the box-office charts weeks and months later as more people heard about it and sought it out.
John Carpenter directed the film, composed its electronic score and co-wrote the screenplay with producer Debra Hill.
Curtis played Laurie Strode, a teenage babysitter in the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, where Michael Myers returns 15 years after murdering his sister on Halloween.
After escaping a psychiatric hospital, Myers stalks Laurie and her friends while his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, played by Donald Pleasence, tries to stop him. P. J. Soles and Nancy Loomis also starred. The Illinois neighborhood was filmed in Southern California.
Carpenter built the suspense around familiar streets, a killer watching from a distance and a spare score he wrote himself. Michael’s blank white face came from a modified William Shatner Captain Kirk mask.
Earlier films, including Psycho, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Black Christmas, had helped establish slasher horror. Halloween’s success helped make the masked killer and resourceful surviving heroine a template for the genre’s 1980s boom.
The film grew into a franchise spanning sequels, reboots, comics and games. In 2006, the Library of Congress selected the original Halloween for preservation in the National Film Registry.
