I did my annual rewatch of Halloween two days ago and yeah, it scared me to death again. I’ve seen the film three times and now and surprisingly the movie’s gotten scarier and scarier.
It’s not often when you can watch a movie that’s perfect from start to finish but this is one of those movies.
Halloween is the embodiment of perfectly terrifying moviemaking. Every frame–from the creepy pumpkin at the beginning paired with Carpenter’s iconic score to the sound of Michael Meyers’ haunting breathing as the camera shows the “quiet” neighborhood of Haddonfield for the last time–is imbued with a essence of uneasiness. The cast is perfect, the story is impeccably woven, and the final five minutes of the film are undoubtedly the movie’s most terrifying.
There’s not much more I can say other than this is the ultimate Halloween movie.
What do you think the perfect horror movie is?
I thank you for reading and I hope you have a fantastic day.
Annlyel Online 
It’s amazing how its classic status has been retained despite the countless imitations it spawned. Scream seems to be the only other slasher movie since then that won over critics, became an instant audience favorite and earned status as a genre-defining cult classic. Of course Psycho is the one earlier slasher that is also part of the same elite club.
One movie I still want to check out is Westworld from 1973. John Carpenter cited it as an influence on Halloween in the early LaserDisc commentary. Both Westworld and Halloween also seem to have influenced the Terminator. And of course, Jurassic Park was a reworking by Westworld director Michael Crichton of the same theme park gone haywire concept. Westworld may be one of the most influential and consequential movies ever made, despite how relatively obscure it’s become. Without it, we may have never gotten the two movies that were most responsible for revolutionizing modern special effects with CGI, Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park.
I think my favorite horror movie might be Night of the Living Dead. And the zombie genre it spawned has held up better than the slasher genre.
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Hmm…Night of the Living Dead. That sounds positively terrifying. Lol
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Just looking online, I see Indiewire has a top 125 horror movies. Halloween is 5. Night of the Living Dead is 10. Others in the top 10 are Shining, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Rosemary’s Baby, Exorcist, Psycho, Eyes Without a Face, The Thing (1982) and Alien. Exorcist is the horror movie I haven’t seen yet that I think I need to watch next.
https://www.indiewire.com/feature/best-horror-movies-all-time-scary-films-1202012183/13/
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The Exorcist is terrifying (to me anyway) but it is very good. I saw Eyes Without a Face. I was honestly shocked.
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#29 on the Indiewire list is The Innocents from 1961. I heard about that one just recently. Some shots from it look like they could’ve inspired shots of Michael Myers in Halloween. The characters apparently repeatedly see a mysterious ghostly woman standing in the distance and staring at them. She’s not wearing a mask, but her face looks pale in the black-and-white photography.
https://themotionpictures.net/2018/01/26/second-looks-the-innocents-1961/
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I think Halloween and Psycho are probably the two greatest horror movies of all time. I could see an argument for Night of the Living Dead, but I’ve never really been into zombies, so I’m probably just not the right judge of that. Scary, sure, but they get trite fast. Then again, so do slashers… but you can rewatch Halloween and still find Michael Myers terrifying, whereas it’s hard to go back to the original Living Dead movies after decades of one-upsmanship and “our zombies are better.” Plus, the theme song of Halloween will still be playing when the cockroaches are crawling around the orange nukescape. It’s one of the stickiest soundtrack pieces ever.
Sleeper horror movie: What Lies Beneath. I did not expect that one to be nearly as scary as it was.
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