Nothing less than a horror-film renaissance was spawned with the release of director John Carpenter's Halloween in 1978. Halloween also gave independent film producers something to scream about. With a budget of around $300,000 and no major studio behind them, executive producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad backed the film, which Carpenter co-wrote with Debra Hill (who also served as producer). The film went on to earn an estimated $55 million, siring several not-so-memorable sequels as well as some worthy and unworthy imitators in the early 1980s.

The plot of Halloween is a deceptively simple one. The film begins in the sleepy town of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, 1963. Little six-year-old Michael Myers has just murdered his sister with a butcher knife. Cut to fifteen years later. Michael has reached the age of twenty-one within the walls of a mental hospital, under the care of Dr. Loomis (played with fidgety obsessiveness...