Halloween

Halloween (1978) is John Carpenter's horror landmark you can watch online on iFILM. This is the film that more or less invented the slasher, and the role that put Jamie Lee Curtis on the map.

Quiet Haddonfield, Illinois. On the night of October 31st a six-year-old boy picks up a kitchen knife and kills his older sister. Fifteen years locked away in a sanitarium, and on the eve of another Halloween he slips loose and heads back to where it started. Babysitting the neighbours' kids, high-schooler Laurie Strode (Curtis) has no idea that a man in a pale mask has been watching her all day from across the street. The only one on his trail is his own doctor, Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who figured out long ago that this is not a patient but evil with no name and no motive.

Carpenter shot the whole thing in roughly three weeks on a shoestring and wrote that pulsing 5/4 theme himself, a riff people recognise even if they have never seen the movie. The masked killer is credited only as The Shape, played by Nick Castle. It made tens of millions at the box office and still writes the rulebook for the genre. Stream Halloween (1978) online on iFILM.