Vietnam dramas dominated 1978's movie awards circuit with The Deer Hunter taking the Best Picture Oscar and Coming Home earning the Best Actor and Best Actress awards for John Voigt and Jane Fonda, respectively. Even with this much-needed cathartic focus on war and remembrance the year was varied enough to simultaneously produce the Broadway fantasy Grease and the comic book big screen fantasy Superman. Somewhere between these dramatic and escapist extremes lay the fertile landscape mined by a new breed of horror filmmakers intent on exposing suburbia as the true locus classicus of true terror and fright.

Pioneering the movement's leading edge that popularized the slasher formula begun with Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween is the granddaddy of all modern horror films. Well made with genuinely frightening moments and filled with insider jokes appealing to cinephiles and mainstream audiences alike, it was a low budget phenomenon that put writer-director-producer Carpenter on the map. Equally important it made star Jamie Lee Curtis a viable commercial risk and gave an entire generation the shape of a bogeyman.

Shot over 21 days in California during the spring of 1978, the film was produced for a budget of just over $300,000. In light of the short shooting schedule, its seasonal setting and an extremely tight budget, crewmembers were forced to scrimp and creatively approximate higher production values whenever possible. To cut costs they bought paper leaves from a decorator and painted them with autumnal colors for scattering about each shooting location. Once finished with a sequence the leaves were gathered and scattered at the next location and so on thereby ensuring each sequence would more or less appear like October 31st in the movie's actual setting, Illinois.

The prop department was similarly stretched when asked to characterize the psycho killer at the film's center named Michael Myers. Described by large physical size, absolute silence and a constantly worn Halloween mask, prop technicians bought the cheapest mask they could find. It was a William Shatner-inspired faceplate from the movie The Devil's Rain that they then spray-painted white along with reshaping its eyeholes and teasing out its hair to nearly cartoonish effect.

Crewmembers doubled as extras and cast members wore their own clothes to avoid spending scarce funds on costumes with but one exception. Curtis was allowed to shop at the local J.C. Penney where she purchased her character's entire wardrobe for less than $100.

Her participation in the movie itself was one of the minor coups staged by Carpenter and his writer-producer partner Debra Hill. As the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh who was made famous for her role in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Jamie Lee Curtis was the only cast or crewmember with a Hollywood pedigree. Of course she had no reputation of her own yet it was considered enough of a commercial consideration for the film that she was spawned by two of Tinsel Town's yesteryear stars.

Combining its low budget circumstances with a nearly unknown cast, the resulting picture has an overall look and feel that's rather desolate and lonely. With a narrative concerning only a few characters, scenes are largely confined to outdoor locations and darkly lit interior sequences. The moodiness of this barely populated eponymous holiday adds to the sense of dread and mystery while also stamping the movie with a style later copied many times over in its own sequels and various copycat productions.

After its release Halloween became the highest-grossing independent movie ever released up through 1978. Produced and distributed entirely outside Hollywood, Carpenter and Hill's seed capital of $300,000 eventually grossed $55 million domestically and $20 million abroad. Such a budget to earnings ratio of 233:1 lit a fire beneath upstart filmmakers and caused mainstream producers and financiers to take notice.

A sequel also starring Curtis was released in 1981 eventually leading to a series numbering seven entries through its seeming conclusion in 1998. Ever the pioneer in terms of both subject and franchise appeal, Halloween's model was later applied to the studio produced Friday the 13th and saw itself echoed in lesser-known works like Prom Night on through the infamous Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Within its hour and half duration Halloween defined the main traits of slasher movies that are primarily concerned with psychotic killers motivated by sexually repressive traumas. Killers are often seen acting out their trauma through superhuman killing abilities that are unleashed upon young adults caught exploring their own maturing sexuality. Usually there is a virginal heroine, a series of expendable, whorish young women and men, a sympathetic though ineffective adult and a host of walking meat in the form of various young people introduced simply to be cut down through the most brutal means possible.

Stylistically Halloween also established new standards for realizing horror sequences. Carpenter is undoubtedly the root of the tendency when given his film schooler's knowledge of movie history and interest in genre structures. Thus slasher movies in the mold of his earliest hit repeatedly pay homage to classic movies like Psycho, Peeping Tom and Un Chien Andalou and they also foreground movies as a layer of popular culture that papers the production design and informs characters of their environment.

Donald Pleasence's part of Dr. Sam Loomis is but one example in the film since he's named after a character from Psycho. Then there is the famous moment part way through Michael's hunt for fresh victims where he happens upon some kids watching the original The Thing and leaves them unmolested as being unworthy of his murderous abilities or else as a privileged class for their observance of a B-movie classic. In the end, though, Halloween's hold on movie memory stems from its simple story that opens with a flashback sequence revealed through first-person camera work.

On Halloween night 1963 in Haddonfield, Illinois, six-year old Michael Myers (Will Sandin) sneaks up on his older sister Judith (Sandy Johnson) and kills her with a butcher's knife after watching her have sex with her boyfriend. Silent from that moment forward he's locked up in a sanitarium where he's placed under the care of Dr. Loomis (Pleasence) who sees purest evil in his charge's soul.

Exactly 15 years later 21-year old Michael (Tony Moran) escapes from the sanitarium and heads back to Haddonfield to hunt down Laurie Strode (Curtis) and her friends. Loomis catches on to what's happening and attempts to stop him only to find a grisly trail of dead teenagers lying in Michael's wake. With the help of the local sheriff (Charles Cyphers) Loomis tracks the killer but in the end Laurie emerges triumphant over her evil foe by relying on her tomboy practicality and survivor's instinct.

Tagged with the phrase, "HE came home for HALLOWEEN", Carpenter's movie was a popular hit that was equally hard to dismiss by more serious-minded critics. At once cinematically savvy with good composition, eerily implicating first-person sequences allowing audiences to see through Michael's perspective and the God-awful shrieks of tortured Laurie Strode, the movie was a genre re-invention and a political maelstrom.

Detailing a sexualized psychotic and his prey as interchangeably objectified young women, Michael Myers embodies the masculine trait of aggression gone awry. His victims are equally descriptive of gendered ideals in that they are uniformly pretty, horny and two-dimensional, all the easier for dispatching with bravado and the effective use of various kitchen tools and appliances.

Naturally enough feminist outrage fomented with the film's release. Though the outcry was undeniably valid there was a complication in that Laurie's character differed from the mold of the picture's typical victim. In fact, it's this deliberate confusion about her sexual identity, gender and individuation that sets her apart within the diegetic world. Depicted as being innocent of the more sexually charged life of her friends and consequently endowed with caution instead of laughably exposed breasts or lapsing sexual morals, she's not easy fodder for Michael's death machine and proves his superior by film's end.

Some scholars have taken this binary in the movie between man and woman, masculinity and femininity and Michael versus Laurie and turned it into a thesis on various cultural crises in the 1970s. Viewed through the collective fantasies of popular entertainment, but most especially in the movie genres of horror and science fiction, such thinkers believe the interplay of violence with sex and the confusion over maleness and femaleness is symbolic of greater social disruption.

Making Michael Myers a mute brute force of murderous rage is inspired horror movie characterization but it's also a cathartic representation of masculinity in crisis. Laurie Strode's oppositely effective feminine survivor then becomes the ultimate horror movie non-victim victim who reverses the terms of her terrorization to control the uncontained fury of her adversary.

At the cusp of an ending decade and in the moneyed glow post-Star Wars such an unsettling switch of gendered roles in movies was remarkable at the very least. Because the vehicle for this transgression was a horror film, and a B-movie-influenced horror movie at that, Halloween entertained eggheads and exploitations freaks with the very same gross-out slashing, dicing, killing and hunting. So effective was it at encouraging these two often disparate groups of people to enjoy the same entertainment that it ushered a small revolution of sorts and led to a wide variety of spin-offs including Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Scream and even more celebrated titles like Silence of the Lambs.

Of course not all these movies trace themselves through the benchmark of Halloween. Yet they should because they owe an obvious debt and we would be well served to remember the connection.