Halloween review – a slasher classic you just can’t kill off

New hands are at the helm for a knowingly intelligent reboot of the 1978 masterpieceIn his brilliant turn-of-the-century documentary The American Nightmare, Adam Simon located John Carpenter’s 1978 Halloween as the end point of a decade of countercultural horror movies.

Starting with George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead, Simon unpicked the rebellious socio-political threads of films such as Last House on the Left, The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and Shivers before arriving at the more conservative inflections of Carpenter’s ruthlessly efficient modern morality tale.A stylishly suspenseful thriller in which teenagers indulging in illicit sex and intoxication are stalked and slashed by a relentless killer, Halloween was a funhouse ride with a puritanical narrative edge.

Yet it also had a punky power that inspired a slew of titillating teen-terror slashers.

Friday the 13th may have lifted its gory riffs from Mario Bava’s A Bay of Blood

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