It's Halloween night in Haddonfield. While kids costume up for trick-or-treating, a vicious, unfeeling killer by the name of Michael Myers has escaped the local sanitarium. While teenager Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee-Curtis) and her friends prepare for a night of babysitting – and anything else they can get up to with a free house – obsessively determined psychiatrist Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who studied Myers for fifteen years, attempts to sound the alarm. Meanwhile, Myers returns to the site of a murder fifteen years to the day and begins to stalk Laurie, butchering anyone in his way.

Before the mess of sequels and imitators that followed, John Carpenter changed the horror genre forever with this original 1978 masterpiece. Featuring iconic imagery by legendary cinematographer Dean Cundey and propelled by a bangin' synth soundtrack from Carpenter, Halloween is a supremely atmospheric slasher heightened further by a fanatical performance from Donald Pleasence who convinces you wholeheartedly of the seriousness of events and the mythic evil of Michael Myers. Full of iconic scares and kills, this one really stays with us for the uncanny nature of Myers who is actually credited as ‘The Shape’ – an almost inhuman manifestation of suburban fears who lingers in the background and exists only to destroy.