By the end of the 1970s, the horror genre was undergoing a sea change thanks in part to some of the independent successes of the late 1960s and early 1970s.
George A. Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) transcended the zombie movies that had defined the genre in earlier decades by tapping into the EC Comics that had filled comic book shelves in the USA and became one of the biggest, if not the biggest, midnight movie successes with the youthful hippie crowd.
In 1972, Wes Craven and Sean S. Cunningham emerged from the underground sleaze of the grindhouse circuit with their semi-remake of Ingmar Bergman’s THE VIRGIN SPRING (1960), THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT, which Craven outlined in a 1982 interview with STARBURST that the film was reflective of what it seemed to be like to kill somebody for real, as well as tapping into what was being shown on the evening news from the Vietnam War.
In 1974, Tobe Hooper took the real-life exploits of Wisconsin mass murderer Ed Gein, who inspired Robert Bloch’s PSYCHO (and became the source material for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 classic) and created one of the seminal moments of 20th Century cinematic horror with THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE, which was filmed in a darkly satirical documentary style, chronicling a quintet of friends who fall foul of a cannibal family who have fallen on hard times in the butcher business wanting for meat – and realizing there is clearly plenty to be had if you look around the community.
However, it was John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN in 1978 that ushered in the modern horror era – and until 1999’s THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT was the most successful independent movie, making millions of dollars from an original $300,000 budget.
Inspired by PSYCHO (which is what Carpenter states on the sleeve notes for the first-run LP release of the soundtrack), HALLOWEEN is the tale of Michael Myers, who in 1963 kills his sister Judith on Halloween Night in his home town of Haddonfield, Illinois (the name comes from late producer Debra Hill’s own namesake hometown in New Jersey).
Fifteen years later, he escapes just before being transferred and heads back to Haddonfield, where he takes more than a passing interest in three high school students, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), Lynda (PJ Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis). His doctor, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) heads there to in hot pursuit, but Michael is hiding in the shadows now, ready to unleash terror on the three students….
Full of wonderful scare moments – and one of the most haunting movie themes of all time (composed by Carpenter himself), HALLOWEEN is the modern horror bible, a film that inspired SCREAM creator Kevin Williamson – and remains the model of the genre that all who aspire to make a movie in it look up to.