As the old saying goes, “success has many fathers, failure is an orphan.” John Carpenter’s 1978 classic, “Halloween,” is the very definition of a successful film: it made so much money that it held the record for the highest-grossing independent movie of all time for numerous years, and it became so influential that it not only kickstarted a boom of horror movies in the late ’70s and early ’80s, but solidified the subgenre known as the slasher film, creating a template that other successful movies like “Friday the 13th” and “Scream” utilized and riffed on.All this success means that a number of folks over the decades have attempted to precisely define what made “Halloween” so special.
Of course, like any work of art, “Halloween” was not cut from whole cloth, drawing as it did upon the storied history of other horror movies and media in general for inspiration.
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