I did not see this one in a theatre. I caught it when it first hit HBO, which for a lot of us in that era was the next best thing. I remember sitting there thinking I had never seen anything quite like it before. That feeling stuck with me for a while.
The setup is simple. This kid kills his sister, gets locked up, and then escapes fifteen years later and comes back to his hometown of Haddonfield to kill again. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Laurie Strode, a babysitter who ends up in his path. Donald Pleasence plays Dr. Loomis, the psychiatrist who has spent years warning anyone who will listen that Myers is not a patient, he is something else entirely. Nobody listens until it is too late.
What got me then and still holds up now is the absence of a reason. Myers does not want money. He is not getting revenge for something Laurie did. He just comes back, and he moves through the neighborhood like a force of nature with no explanation attached. That refusal to explain him is where the movie gets its grip. Most horror gives you a motive you can file away. This one does not, and the not-knowing sits with you.
Carpenter also wrote the score, that simple, repeating piano figure in 5/4 time, and it does exactly what it needs to do. It does not swell and announce danger. It just runs underneath everything, patient and indifferent, the same way Myers moves. The music and the pacing are the same idea expressed two different ways.
Laurie Strode is also worth talking about. She is the template. The capable, resourceful survivor who keeps her head when everyone around her does not. The final girl became a genre staple after this, and you can see exactly why it worked here. Curtis plays her as a real person first, not a scream machine, and that makes everything she does in the last act have meaning.
I went back and worked through Carpenter's other films after this one, and they held up. But you always remember your first, and this was mine. Recommended.
