A few months back, I sat in a crowded theater on opening night of My Bloody Valentine 3D. As I was sitting there waiting for the movie to start, it occurred to me that I was the only one in the audience who was old enough to have seen the original in the theater. All of this reminded me how I felt about slasher films as a teenager, which is basically the same way I feel about them now: I love them — and yet I hate them, because there are far too few good ones. I went to these movies hoping to be scared but the TV ads usually frightened me more than the actual movies. The aforementioned original My Bloody Valentine (1981) turned out to be kind of lame. Even the ultimate ’80s slasher movie Friday the 13th (1980) didn’t scare me all that much. Sure, I jumped at the end like everyone else when Jason’s corpse came out of the water, but the ending still made no sense whatsoever.

The problem for most of these movies is that the bar had been set tremendously high by John Carpenter in 1978 with Halloween. Shot on a reported $320,000 budget, Halloween raked in $70 million worldwide and spawned a wave of slasher film imitators that lasted most of the ’80s.

Previous to Halloween, Carpenter had made Dark Star (1974) and Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). Dark Star began as a USC film school project shot on 16mm, a very funny black comedy sci-fi tale about hippies in space who are on a mission to destroy unstable planets. Assault on Precinct 13 is a tense low-budget action flick about a police precinct under siege by a street gang seeking retribution, in which cops and prisoners have no choice but to fight side-by-side to fend off the attack.

So what makes Halloween succeed on a level that its later imitators could never quite match? To be fair, Halloween was in many ways the first of its kind so many elements that would later become cliché (such as camerawork from the POV of the killer, teenagers being murdered after having sex or a “boogeyman” killer that won’t seem to ever die) weren’t cliché yet. But the true reason for its success is the level of filmmaking. (more…)