Halloween (1978) on Netflix
On Halloween 1963 in Haddonfield, Illinois, six-year-old Michael Myers murders his sister. Fifteen years later he escapes a sanitarium and returns home, where teenager Laurie Strode babysits.
- Netflix4.4/5
- IMDb7.7/10343,152 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
On October 31, 1963, in Haddonfield, Illinois, six-year-old Michael Myers stabs his teenage sister Judith with a chef's knife and is committed to a sanitarium. Fifteen years later, psychiatrist Samuel Loomis and nurse Marion Chambers drive there to escort him to a court hearing, but the patients have broken out, and Loomis concludes that Michael has taken their car. He takes coveralls, a white mask, rope and kitchen knives, then returns to Haddonfield. There he begins following teenager Laurie Strode, who is delivering a key to the empty house he grew up in, which her father, a realtor, is trying to sell. Laurie's friends Annie Brackett and Lynda Van Der Klok take her worries lightly, and Loomis searches the streets after discovering the stolen car.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Halloween (1978)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The part of Dr. Loomis was offered first to Peter Cushing, whose agent rejected the low salary, and then to Christopher Lee, who turned it down and later called that the biggest mistake of his career. Donald Pleasence took the role because his daughter Lucy, a guitarist, liked John Carpenter's score for Assault on Precinct 13.
- John Carpenter wanted Anne Lockhart, the daughter of Lassie's June Lockhart, to play Laurie Strode, but she had other commitments, so Jamie Lee Curtis, then 19 and unknown to Carpenter, got the part.
- Because Halloween was shot out of sequence, John Carpenter gave Jamie Lee Curtis a "fear meter" of numbered terror levels, about a 6 here, a 7 there, a 9½ for that night's scene, each with its own facial expression and scream volume.
- Told after a test screening that the film "wasn't scary," John Carpenter wrote and performed the score himself, mostly a piano melody in a 10/8 or "complex 5/4" time signature, and recorded all of it in three days.
- After a censorship debate between John Carpenter, Debra Hill and NBC's Standards and Practices, the network aired Halloween in 1981 with twelve minutes of new material that Carpenter shot during production of Halloween II to fill the two-hour slot.
- The Myers house was played by an abandoned house owned by a church, and the film's climax was shot on Orange Grove Avenue in Hollywood because its few palm trees made the street pass for a Midwestern one.
- Halloween helped make slasher staples standard: the final girl, the killing off of characters who are sexually promiscuous or substance abusers, and the use of a theme song for the killer.
