Halloween (1978)
About the event
In 1978, legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael reviewed John Carpenter's HALLOWEEN. She didn’t like it. "HALLOWEEN has a pitiful, amateurish script (by Carpenter and his producer, Debra Hill). An escaped lunatic wielding a kitchen knife stalks people in a small Midwestern town (Haddonfield, Illinois), and that's about it. Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness – when it isn't ashamed to revive the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic) – it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do." Eternal respect to Ms. Kael, but what she disdained more than 40 years ago are the very elements that have made this film endure for over four decades. HALLOWEEN might not have resembled the “sophisticated” horror films of the 1970s, but the simplicity of the film’s story and production values allowed…