Throughout history, October 31 has always marked a time for new beginnings. It was the eve of the new year for the Celtics and Anglo-Saxons, and the date when huge bonfires were set on hilltops to ward off evil spirits. And whether it was called Samhain, All Hallow's Eve, or Hallow-even, it has always been a time for mischief, mayhem and the souls of the dead revisiting their homeland. Centuries later, Halloween became the harmless holiday we all know, where children run around dressed in scary costumes begging for candy, while the darker origins of past cultures have been forgotten.
    That was until 1978 - the night he came home.
    Of course, everyone knows that he is unstoppable masked bogeyman Michael Myers, who made his debut in the seminal John Carpenter's Halloween. From that point on, the holiday and the film became synonymous with terror as Carpenter preyed on audiences' fears to create a bone chillingly effective scarefest. No one knew that it would mark the shape of things to come.
    "The thing about Halloween is that it was the first horror film in a long time that was a roller coaster ride of scares - a fun house," says the film's producer, Debra Hill.  Carpenter agrees: "I was lucky with that movie," he admits. "It made my career. Halloween got me on the map."
    The seeds of Halloween date back to 1976 and Carpenter's second theatrical film, an urban action thriller then called Siege. Irwin Yablans, and independent producer and president of Turtle Releasing, had seen the film and picked it up for distribution.  After a poor showing in a few cities, Yablans changed the title to Assault on Precinct 13, took it to Europe and attempted to make some sales at the Milan Film Festival. It was there that he met with an English gentleman named Michael Myers, the head of a company called Miracle Films. He believed in the movie and entered it in festivals, where it subsequently won many awards and became an overseas hit.
    "The English perceived this film as very special: they attached great importance to it," recalls Yablans. "So while I was in Milan, I kept thinking about the young talent in John Carpenter and that I had to find something for him before other people started to mine his abilities."
    It was while on the way home from Italy that Yablans started to sketch out and idea he loosely referred to as The Baby-sitter Murders. "I was thinking about what would make sense in the horror genre, and what I wanted to do was make a picture that had the same impact as The Exorcist," he says. "So I came up with the idea of a murderer terrorizing baby-sitters, because everybody has had an experience either hiring or being a baby-sitter; that was the geneisis. And I kept thinking about how I could make the film cheap, so I decided it all had to happen in one night and that Halloween was a good one. I went through a whole metamorphosis on that airplane. It started as The Baby-sitter Murders, and by the time I got off the plane it was Halloween."
    Excited by the idea, Yablans called Carpenter as soon as he got home. While pitching the concept Yablans kept expecting Carpenter to think the idea was corny, but was surprised when the young director immediately responded to the rough story. " Low budget films were considered high risk investments in those days, so a lot of people were making bad films so they could write them off - some of them weren't even released," recalls Hill. "The beauty of it, though, was that young filmmakers like us could learn about the process of movies by making them."
    Figuring he could rustle up $300,000, Yablans brought in producer Moustapha Akkad for a meeting with Carpenter and himself in order to sell him on the concept. "We basically shamed Moustapha into it" laughs Yablans. "I told him '$300,000 would probably be too much for you to invest' knowing he couldn't back off because of his pride."
    The price tag was a concern for Akkad, however, since he was dealing with a relatively new filmmaker and the promise that the film could be made in four weeks for that budget - a challenging endeavor for any director. "You get worried when the budget is too high or too low, and whether someone can deliver." says Akkad. "But two things made me decide. One, Carpenter told me the story verbally and in a suspenseful way, almost frame for frame. Second, he told me he didn't want to take any fees, and that showed he had confidence in the project."
    The deal was structured in a unique way, with Carpenter to be paid $10,000 to direct, write, and compose the music for the film, and then receive 10 percent of the profits. "He never thought that would mean anything, and later it turned out to be very valuable," notes Yablans. Carpenter did have two major stipulations: the first was creative control, to make the movie without any interference.
    "I thought that was pretty ballsy from a kid who hadn't had much experience, but I have it to him, because I was willing to do anything to get it done," says Yablans. "Besides there's nothing more exciting than getting young talent, stripping them away from all the nonsense of Hollywood and getting down to the creativity and complete dedication."
    The second request was that Carpenter wanted Hill, his girlfriend at the time, to write with him, feeling she had the organizational mind to pull it off. "We had met on Assault, where I was script supervisor," recalls Hill. "I had never produced anything, so this was a real leap of faith on John's part. I can remember the conversation we had just a few hours before we found out whether or not we would move forward with the movie: John asked me 'Do you think you can do it?' I hadn't produced any movies - I had worked on some, but never as producer. He was very supportive."
    After they got the go-ahead, the pair had four weeks to fashion Yablans' story into a working script. The producer had only one criterion: Make it scary. "My instructions to him were that I wanted this movie to be made like a radio show," says Yablans, referring to Inner Sanctum and Lights Out as prime examples. "First, I wanted the movie to say 'Boo' every 10 minutes or so. Second, I didn't want the audience to see anything, I wanted them to think they saw something. Let's not show them, let's get them anticipation something. John followed these instructions, and went beyond them."
    According to Hill, the scripting process began with sitting down and writing out as many Halloween scares as they could come up with. Next came the story: the pair tinkered with the idea of the father of one child being the killer, taking girls home and seducing them. Though Hill admits the murderer could have been anyone from a parent or teacher to another kid from school, the key always came down to telling the story from the teenagers' point of view and dealing with "things that go bump in the night."
    "The idea was that you couldn't kill evil, and that was how we came about the story," Hill says. "We went back to the old idea of Samhain, that Halloween was the night where all the souls are let out to wreak havoc on the living, and then came up with the story about the most evil kid who ever lived. And when John came up with this fable of a town with a dark secret of someone who once lived there, and now that evil has come back, that's what made Halloween work. We didn't want it to be gory. We wanted it to be link a jack-in-the-box. We have a scare here, a scare there - that's the rhythm we went for."
    One of the films that served as inspiration during the writing stage was Dario Argento's Suspiria. "That film really made no sense in some ways, but it was stylistically beautiful," says Carpenter. "Because it was so much fun to be scared in that film, that was a real inspiration to us and get the audience screaming and yelling."
    The initial draft of Halloween was written by Hill with Carpenter's input; the director then went back and retooled it. "I worked on the structure and Laurie's character, and John rewrote me and put in Dr. Loomis," says Hill. "He also drove this movie with the whole through line about evil." Carpenter adds, "There was one thing I regret, and that was this incredible sex scene that I took out but should have left in. It was unbelievable. It really got you going as you read it. I thought 'Wow, Debra, this is steamy.' "
    After this quick incubation period, the final script for Halloween was complete.  "I think we had seven weeks from writing the script to the start of production," recalls Carpenter. "What we learned as filmmakers was that before you start shooting, you have to have a script that makes sense and one that everyone is happy with. The script is everything." The story of course, takes place in Haddonfield, Illinois, where three teenaged babysitters are stalked by Michael Myers, an escaped mental patient who stabbed his sister as a child. Tracking the killer is Dr. Loomis, who proclaims his former patient as "purely and simply evil."
    As the brief pre production period began, Tommy Lee Wallace (a close friend of Carpenter from his hometown of Bowling Green, Kentucky, who had worked on Assault) joined the crew and juggled several jobs, including production designer, art director, location scout and finally co-editor with Charles Bornstein. The task of creating an effectively terrifying look for Myers fell to Wallace, who scoured costume shops for inspiration. "The idea to make him almost humorless, faceless - this sort of pale visage that could resemble a human or not," says Hill.
    The scariest thing Wallace could find, though, was an old William Shatner mask. "I got that thing, painted it white, pulled off the sideburns and made the eye holes bigger," recalls Wallace who held a meeting with Carpenter and Hill where he presented a couple of choices to them. "First came a clown mask, which we all thought was errie and scary," Wallace continues. "A clown mask really shakes you up a bit, so we knew we were on solid footing. Then came the fixed-up Shatner mask, and when that came out, it caused our stomachs to churn. It was so frightening and eerie looking that there was no need to vote. There was an echo of Texas Chainsaw Massacre in there - this awful skin-on-skin presentation, since it was pale and fleshly."
    In the end, this $1.98 thinking was part of the charm of Halloween. Since the $300,000 all had to go up on the screen, that left little cash for the casting of any stars aside from the Loomis character. One of the first actors approached for that role was Hammer horror star Christopher Lee. "We ran into Lee a few years later at a part for Escape from New York, and he said, 'I wish I could have done it,' " recalls Hill.
    The role when to fellow British actor Donald Pleasence instead. "He was our marquee name - our big gun," says Wallace. "Pleasence's name was there to help us in foreign markets and was a calculated move. John was crazy about working with Pleasence, and it was very exciting to him. Plus, Pleasence has a very peculiar quality that added a great deal to the role."
    Carpenter admits to having been terrified of working with the actor at first, but their initial meeting at the Hamburger Hamlet in Hollywood soon rid him of any prefilming jitters. "He said, "I have come to do this movie because my daughter in England said she liked your other film,' " recalls the director. "He didn't understand the character, though. 'Why is my character doing all this?' he kept asking. But he became one of my closest friends."
    In an interview that he gave Fangoria in 1989, Pleasence found Loomis to be a man who "always felt responsible for the fact that he did not stop Michael when he first murdered his sister. The guilt had turned him from a thinking psychiatrist into a paranoid who's only anxious to stop this evil. Stopping Michael is Loomis' mission in life."
    Pleasence, who took a flat fee of $25,000 instead of a percentage of the film's profits, reprised his role in every subsequent sequel aside from the Shapeless Halloween III: Season of the Witch, but feels that Carpenter's was still the best. "John created the idea of Halloween, so it comes as no surprise that his vision remains the most focused and intelligently directed for the series," he told Fango.
    After Pleasence was signed, the remainder of the cast was soon filled out by Carpenter regulars and a group of bright unknowns. For Annie, Carpenter hired Nancy Loomis (who now goes by Nancy Louise Kyes). "He tailored the roll for what he perceived to be my sense of humor, because I have this streak of sarcasm and he thought it worked on film," says Kyes, who had previously appeared in Precinct 13 and was Wallace's girlfriend at the time. "It also kept my nerves in check."
    "Nancy was, in effect, part of John's repertory company and she could hold down that end of the character," adds Wallace, who later married her (though they are now divorced). "John always referred to Annie as  'that Nancy Loomis character' - someone who has somewhat acerbic, wry sense of humor and doesn't take things very seriously."
    P.J. Soles, best known at the time from Brian De Palma's Carrie, ended up playing the promiscuous Lynda, a flighty high-schooler who can't say one sentence without using the word "totally." "John wanted to see anybody who was in Carrie," recalls Soles. "So I went into the interview, and the way things happened back then is that you went in to do a reading and people would hire you on the spot. That's just what happened, which is slightly unusual these days. John told me the reason I got it was that I was the only actress who said 'totally' right."
    Coincidentally enough, Soles' boyfriend at the time, Dennis Quaid (who she later married; they are now divorced), was considered briefly for the role of Lynda's ill-fated boyfriend, Bob. "He was just a punk with a surly attitude and a pickup truck at the time," recalls Wallace. Due to a scheduling conflict, though, Quaid had to leave being impaled to another young hopeful, John Michael Graham. Charles Cyphers was cast as the skeptical Sheriff Brackett, while the children in the babysitters' care were Brian Andrews and Kyle Richards, the latter already a genre veteran with roles in The Car and Tobe Hooper's Eaten Alive (her actress sister Kim was in Precinct 13).
    In the end, the film's big find turned out to be Jamie Lee Curtis, who nabbed the prominent role of Laurie. With only a handful of credits at the time and a contract at Universal, where she was doing the TV series Operation Petticoat, Curtis was surprised that she was even in the running for the role, especially up against what she considered to be strong competition.
    "There was one actress who had done a lot of movies, and when it came down to it, I thought for sure I wouldn't get it," recalls Curtis, noting that she ultimately had to audition several times before she was cast. "I couldn't believe I got it. I screamed when I found out. It was the biggest part in the script - nearly every page had my name on it."
    There was another positive side to casting Curtis - she happened to be the daughter of Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, and since Leigh had starred in the horror landmark Psycho, it was only fitting that her daughter do the same (ironically, this wasn't even a first for Curtis, as her father had starred in the 1959 Operation Petticoat movie). "I thought that if I could put the photographs of Leigh from Psycho and Jamie from Halloween together, with a caption. 'Like mother, like daughter,' we might get a tremendous amount of publicity," says Yablans.
    Casting the character of Michael Myers (a.k.a. The Shape) was not as involved, and the part was played by a variety of different people at various moments in the film. Wallace played the Shape whenever the character tore through sets (since he designed them and knew how to make them work on the first take), stuntman Jim Windburn took the fall out the window at the end, and actor Tony Moran was Michael when the mask was pulled off. The majority of the time however, a fellow filmmaker and friend of Carpenter. "No one could do what Nick did - he made the movie what it is by making the character very creepy," says the director.
    One factor that played into Castle's memorable performance was his having a father who was a dancer and choreographer, giving him a familiarity with the importance of gestures and movement. "I remember asking John, 'How do you want me to walk across the street?' and he just responded, 'Just walk.' " recalls Castle. "So I did, and was as casual and normal as you can imagine. It was a very unusual character to play." In real life, Castle was anything but abnormal; he would bring his children to the set and would occasionally play his guitar between takes (he, Carpenter, and Wallace were part of the self created rock outfit the Coupe De Villes, who have an unaccredited song in the film).
    "I remember Nick being a real nice guy," says Curtis. "I would sit with him at lunch and think how funny it was to see a guy with a mask and a knife sitting around with his kids."
    Given only a 21 day schedule, the renegade group of filmmakers banned together to shoot the movie with none of the amenities that normally go with the process. There was only one trailer (a Winnebago) that everyone shared, whether it was the art department, make up, props or simply a place for the actors to change or leave their personal belongings. Catering also wasn't a luxury, and box lunches became the meal of choice.
    "We were like these little kids who they were coming to with $300,000 and we really wanted to put everything on screen," says Hill. "We practically did the entire movie out of this little vehicle called the Movie Van, which [cinematographer] Dean Cundey owned and where he housed all his equipment. If he was late we didn't work.."
    An affinity for widescreen movies led Carpenter to shoot the low budget film in Panavison, which was integral to his approach. "Widescreen gives the impression to audiences and the general public that this is bigger than life," he says. "That was important to Halloween, because it wasn't a small intimate movie," adds Hill. "It helped the movie complete with the others that came out at the time. It gave it size and scope that we normally wouldn't have been able to do, and that's one of the differences between Halloween and the films that came after."
    Another device the theme incorporated was a just introduced Panavision version of a Steadicam called Panaglide. "Dean Cundy and our camera operator, Ray Stella, went over to Panavision and put that thing on, and it was awful - it killed your back," recalls Carpenter. "It's basically a gyroscopic mount - you run along with your camera in it and it basically glides. It was used extensively throughout the film and gave a really different look."
    Much like De Palma, who later made a reputation for shooting long, continuous takes, Carpenter attempted a rough variation of this aesthetic for the movie's first scene. "We wanted to do an opening shot that was a seven minute take with no cuts, using the Panaglide," says Carpenter, citing the 10 minute opening shot of Orson Welles' Touch of Evil as the inspiration.
    Shooting Halloween's shocking prologue was, not surprisingly, terribly complex. It entailed the point-of-view perspective of the young Michael as he watches his sister make out with her boyfriend, then sneaks into the house, grabs a butcher knife from the kitchen (hand played by Hill), goes upstairs and murders her, then runs downstairs to confront his father. "When the camera was turned on, there was this little dance of grips, electricians and camera people moving lights around as we were shooting up and down through this house," says Hill. The process entailed only two takes, and there are two unseen cuts in the movie that were made simply to tighten the scene and use the best portions from both takes.
    "There was an awful swiftness to making the movie," recalls Soles. "We only had a certain amount of time to film, so we couldn't do 25 takes. A major movie lasts three months and you might do one or two scenes a day. John did everything in about one or two takes - sometimes we only did one, but there's a kind of excitement in that."
    According to Wallace, one of the biggest challenges in shooting Halloween was creating the Midwest in Los Angeles. "I drove all over Southern California in Debra's brand new Triumph TR7 looking for locations," recalls Wallace, who settled on locations primarily in South Pasadena and on unobtrusive Hollywood street called Orange Grove, though utilizing that location was a last minute decision.
    "One of the houses I had scouted in Pasadena was perfect, and I went back to take some measurements," Wallace recalls. "The maid let me in and I went upstairs to look at the closet for that scene, and I was merrily measuring away when I suddenly turned around and realized that somebody was asleep in the bed. It was the lady who owned the house, and I let myself out quietly so as not to wake her. I felt very uneasy about the whole situation, and sure enough, she found out I had been in her bedroom and threw us out."
    The Orange Grove location ultimately worked out better, Wallace says, because it was not only logistically right but turned out to be cheaper to film on.  He notes that even today, if you drive past the street, it still has a very Midwestern look. Curtis still occasionally drives by the houses where she was once stalked by the ominous Shape, but notes that in the interim, the area has become "yuppified."
    A now vacant lot remains where the Myers house once stood in Pasadena, Wallace reveals. "At the time, the Myers house was owned by a retirement home and was pretty much a junker. We used it largely as is for the present day sequences. We didn't have to do much to make it look like a haunted house, because it was perfect just sitting there."
    However, Wallace was responsible for restoring some of the house's luster for the opening scene sequence, adding a new coat of paint on the outside and touchups for those areas of the inside that would be visible to the camera's eye. "It was just what the camera saw that was the true renovation," says Wallace. "In an ordinary movie, you would have had a whole crew there a day ahead of time, but I didn't even have a whole crew. It turned out to be a beautiful job though; never mind that inches above the camera, the rest of the house looked trashy."
    The Myers house currently resides a few yards away from its original location; it was moved to make room for a freeway that was never built. It is now proudly called The Century House and is fully restored, sporting gray paint and dark red trim, and has been transformed into office space, with a chiropractor currently operating there, no doubt unaware of its darker history in the film world.
    "On the last day of shooting, Nancy and I spent the night at the house," recalls Wallace. "It had been a really special movie experience. Some of it was nuts and of course I was really shredded by that point. It was too much work on a low budget. When you pull one off like that with only a very few people involved, you do so at a great personal cost. And somehow the finish of it was such a great relief that it seemed like the right thing to do at the time -sleeping in the haunted house."
    Making a hot Southern California spring look like a Midwestern fall was another hurdle the production had to overcome (not to mention finding pumpkins in March). "My absolute first point of concern was covering up any palm trees; we even talked about making jackets to put around the trunks," says Wallace. "We also bought a bag of leaves from a big decorating shop, painted them brown and blew them through the shots. Then, just to demonstrate the kind of low budget production this was, we would rake them up, put them in bags and save them for the next shot."
    While the logistics did pose some problems, the easy part came with the actors, who had to bring an emotional center to the film. Carpenter recalls that Pleasence would occasionally condense lines or not say them at all, and some improvisation was employed with the younger performers as well. The entire scene of Curtis and Loomis driving towards their babysitting job and talking about boys was improvised on the spot under the direction of Hill, who sat in the back seat with the cameraman.
    Creating a memorable heroine with Laurie was another concern for Carpenter. Curtis remembers the director teaching her about "screen vulnerability." since in essence this was the first time Curtis was given the opportunity to utilize her acting skills to their fullest potential. "We worked on the idea of letting people feel something for the character so they would invest in her when the unreal elements started taking place," says Curtis. "It was really proven when I saw the film for the first time with a paying audience.  When Laurie was walking over toward the house to look for Annie and someone yelled, 'Don't go over there, don't go over there!' somehow the audience hooked into this young woman, and that's what John was talking about."
    With her character emotionally distressed throughout most of the film, Curtis also developed a shorthand with Carpenter to determine the level of fear Laurie was feeling at the time. "Wherever we were story wise, I could always refer to the script and say, 'Here's about a 7, here's about a 6 and this scene we're shooting tonight is a 9 1/2,'  because I knew we would be shooting out of sequence." says Curtis.
    The first day on the set for the actress went relatively smoothly, entailing her walking with Andrews to the Myers house and dropping off a key - but the actress' reaction to her work that day was anything but perfect. "I thought for sure after that I would be fired." recalls Curtis. "That's an actor's fear, that you're going to get that call the first night. And sure enough, John called and my heart sank to my feet. He said, 'Hi, Jamie, this is John and I just wanted to tell you that you did great today.' When I hung up the phone I was trilled. And to this day it's never happened again. No director has ever called me up after the first day of work to tell me how good I was. I will never forget the feeling when I went to bed that night.  It was extraordinary."
    While having a producer - director team who are personally involved with each other might seem like a potentially uneasy combination, Hill and Carpenter admit that shooting went smoothly, though some interesting dynamics occasionally came into play.  "You have to change hats a lot and sometimes be careful," says Hill.  "If I criticized him on a shot or choice of direction, it would be as if I was criticizing him on his lovemaking. You really have to learn how to give bad news without attacking someone's ego or person."
    While Carpenter and Hill remained professionally involved through several movies thereafter (including The Fog and Escape from New York), Halloween had a greater significance beyond the film's ultimate success.  "We basically broke up," remembers Hill.  "He was my soulmate creatively and I always thought we'd be together as a team. We continued to work together and he remains one of my closest friends, but at the time is was horrible."
    While Carpenter agrees that things were a bit "edgy" during this period, he does feel that none of that tension shows in the film.  "You wouldn't see it on screen, because Debra and I had been in the trenches for too many years and what was on screen was important.  Your life may be falling apart, but you still have to come back to work and do it." Hill adds,  "The movie was like our child. We were getting a divorce in many ways and we had to rear the child properly and sent it off to a life of its own."
    Luckily, their child grew up wonderfully, with little of the growing pains normally associated with post production.  During the editing process, Wallace was astonished by how easily the film cut together, something he admits hasn't happened on any movie he's been involved with since. "What we wound up with in the editing room was remarkably clean, seamless and extremely well directed, and it cut together like butter," he says.  "The cut you see today is not much different from my first cut. I still marvel at how neatly it came together; it's a real stunning piece of filmmaking. We embarked the following year on The Fog with the same team and I just assumed it would be another cakewalk in the cutting room, but every cut bumped from the beginning to the end. We had to tweak and finesse everything to make it come together. It was like pulling teeth. There was a valuable lesson in there somewhere, because after all, it was the same team. It was just different circumstances."
    The memorable theme music Carpenter composed for Halloween also helped bring the film to life. The rhythm was based on a 5-4 time exercise taught to the director by his father, and Hill remembers that Carpenter already had the tune pounded out before shooting began.  "It was sort of unusual for a movie, but John had the theme finished, and prior to doing the writing he would go to the piano and play this melody. We could just imagine the scenes in the movie, from the long walks through the streets to the buildup to the scary moments."
    The music proved to be so integral that when Carpenter screened the unscored film for an executive at 20th Century Fox, she said that it wasn't scary at all and didn't work. Six months later, after the film had gone on to considerable success, Carpenter ran into the same executive. "She said that she was completely wrong about the picture, and I told her she wasn't - it was because the music wasn't there, and without the music she had seen a different film," the director recalls.
    Yablans believes that Carpenter tapped into something very unnerving with his synthesized score. Instead of utilizing the slow mood music films of the time often employed, he immediately started the opening credits with that jarring rhythm.  "He provided the same kind of signature that Bernard Herrmann created in Psycho," notes Wallace.  "You can't think of Psycho without thinking of those strings, and Halloween carries the same familiarity."
    Once the film was completed Yablans knew he had something special, though it took much effort to convince Akkad to even watch the finished product.  "I forced him to look at it because he wasn't even interested - in those days. these kind of pictures were beneath his dignity," says Yablans.  "After he saw it, I couldn't figure out why he was so unhappy. I tried to explain to him that the film would do well, and he turned to me and said, 'Where's my name?' So I ended up taking 'Irwin Yablans Presents' off the movie and put 'Moustapha Akkad Presents.'  I even took my name off the story credit. In the end, I regret having given all my credits away, but I am satisfied that it's commonly known that I am co-author of all the ideas."
    The marketing plan can also be attributed to Yablans, who created Compass International Releasing in order to distribute Halloween.  "I got rejections from every major studio at the time because no one understood it," says Yablans, who took the film to Milan, where the reception was much more lucrative. "Every major foreign distributor came running at me. The first distributor I made a deal with was Warner Bros. who wouldn't buy it from me domestically bought the rights for all of Western Europe."
    In fall of 1978, Halloween was given a platform release, slowly opening across the country (it was never in more then 200 theaters at a time). "The movie was eliciting all sorts of emotions," recalls Yablans.  In Kansas City, the film debuted to a solid opening night and then doubled its gross each subsequent evening due to word of mouth.  "Here was an unheralded movie with no stars and no money pushing it, and it caught on quickly," says Yablans, who then took it to Chicago, where it grossed over $1 Million before its run was finished.
    The remaining parts of the country slowly began to discover what Halloween was all about shortly thereafter; it was subsequently re-released every year until 1981, when the first sequel arrived. The initial reviews ranged from good to outright pans, but the usually conservative Siskel and Ebert (whose Sneak Previews show was then on PBS) loved it and proclaimed Halloween "the most important horror film since The Exorcist."  "I remember we got uniformly bad reviews, but once Pauline Kael wrote a positive rebuttal in The New Yorker magazine, we suddenly started to get credibility and had good reviews everywhere," says Carpenter.
    One aspect of the film that was dissected by critics at the time - and for years to come as the slasher movie craze took off - was the underlying theme read into thhe film that  "sex kills." and that Laurie survived purely because she was virginal.  "I've been attacked on that a lot because I'm a woman - it's a reverse kind of feminist thing," notes Hill, who says that that wasn't even an afterthought when she was writing the script with Carpenter.  "I think it was more the character of Laurie Strode.  She was shy and more suspicious of guys, but that didn't mean she didn't get killed because she was a virgin.  It was just that she questioned people and their motives more."
    Charges of extreme violence were also thrown Halloween's way, though Carpenter notes that the film contains little actual onscreen bloodshed.  "The knife plunges out of frame and you hear a sound effect and see someone lying there dead, but you don't see it happen," he says,  "Its not a gory movie at all. It's a movie with a lot of jumps, shocks, fun and misdirection."
    Anticipation of the scare is what Wallace feels made the film work so well.  "It was about knowing something was going to happened and having to deal with that period where you weren't quite sure when he was going to jump out," he says.
    Ultimately, Halloween went on to become the highest - grossing independent film of its time, with domestic rentals totaling in excess of $50 Million.  Four sequels soon followed in the intervening years, with none living up to the original's classiness (though the daring third film took the franchise into a different direction by dropping the Myers story line and going for a different, self - contained story centered around Halloween)
    Shortly after Halloween II was shot in 1981 under the direction of Rick Rosenthal, a deal was inked for $4 million to air the first Halloween on NBC.  There was one glitch, however - after some cuts for sex and violence, the running time was only 91 minutes, a few shy of the networks required length.  Thus, Carpenter went back and shot a couple of new sequences to make it fit the network's specifications.  These include scenes involving Pleasence visiting the hospital room where Myers escaped, as well as a dialogue between Curtis, Soles and Loomis.
    By the fourth film, Carpenter and Hill were no longer involved with the series, having had the rights pulled away from them by producer Akkad. The duo recently tried to regain control, but after a small legal battle, Akkad won out and Carpenter's idea for a sixth film was permanently shelved.  "If you can't kill him, what do you do?" asks Carpenter, setting up his concept for Halloween 6.  "You send him up into space, except he gets out of there and ends up on a space station."
    Carpenter carried on the genre tradition on a series of films, ranging from his classic remake of The Thing to next year's Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness.  Hill produced David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone and Terry Gilliam's The Fisher King, and is heavily involved with Showtimes Rebel Highway series of B - movie remakes.  The duo will be reteaming again soon on Escape from L.A.. the long awaited follow - up to Escape from New York.
   Both Wallace and Castle have become respected directors in their own right. Wallace directed Halloween III and has a number of TV movie credits, including the Stephen King miniseries IT. Castle has found success with light fantasy directing The Boy Who Could Fly and The Last Starfighter; his next film is the Damon Wayans comedy Major Payne.  Yablans went on to produce Hell Night, Fade to Black, and Prison.
    Soles appeared in Stripes and has turned up in genre items like B. O. R. N. and Alienator.  Loomis, after changing her name, dropped out of acting entirely to raise the two kids she had with Wallace.  She is currently restarting her acting career.
    The biggest success story among the cast, however, was Curtis. After Halloween she became the first modern scream queen, thanks to numerous subsequent genre credits including Prom Night, Terror Train, and The Fog.  She recently starred in the Hitchcockian thriller Mother's Boys and made a big splash in the James Cameron epic True Lies; she even refers to her mousey housewife turned action heroine in that film as "a grown up Laurie Strode."
    Ultimately, Wallace feels the success of Halloween rested on Yablans' shrewd understanding of the creative side of the business and the fact that everyone on the crew gave 100 percent.  "It's to Irwin's eternal credit that he put the financing together for a movie that had a solid idea, managed to find a highly qualified filmmaker and pretty much gave him complete control," he says.  "That's the secret to successful picturemaking in Hollywood.  It's simple, but somehow most of Hollywood even today still doesn't get it.  And John is truly passionate about Horror movies and really had a love for that world.  He deserved it, had a passion for it, and it really shows on screen."
    Even Carpenter is surprised by the longevity of Halloween, and finds it hard to believe that it's been 16 years since the Shape first came home.  "I had a 23 year old kid come up to me a while back; he was just getting out of college and wanted to write a book about me," recalls Carpenter.  "So I met with him and said, ' Why do you want to do this?' and he said that he grew up with my movies. And it occurred to me for the first time hoe old I was and that somebody was young when I made Halloween.  I walked into a video store and picked up a tape and it said, 'Veteran director John Carpenter,' and I realized, 'Hell, I'm old now.' And that was kind of a shock. It's something you just sort of expect.  It's inevitable."