The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

48. 1978 - Halloween

Honourable Mentions: The Deer Hunter, The Driver, Invasion of the Body Snatchers

While perhaps not the greatest film in John "The Master of Horror" Carpenter's oeuvre - with The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness together arguably embodying the peak of his powers - Halloween still lives up to its reputation as a chilling horror classic, following in the footsteps of Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre in the canon of stories devoted to exploring a more inexplicable, earthly evil than anything explicitly paranormal.

Carpenter and collaborator Debra Hill do sprinkle a little of the supernatural into their recipe, in which the institutionalised Michael Myers escapes from confinement to stalk the sleepy Illinois town he grew up in, but it's more a seamless blend of reality and nightmare than straight fantasy. Myers - credited only as "The Shape", and played to ghostly perfection by Nick Castle - takes on the qualities of the Bogeyman, slipping in and out of darkness in a chalk-white mask, but exacts a distinctly human evil on his victims, hyped up to glorious effect by Donald Pleasence's Sam Loomis.

Throw in a bone-chilling score from Carpenter himself and a star-making turn from Jamie-Lee Curtis, and you're left with not just slasher royalty, but an immaculate piece of horror fiction that makes an antiquated concept like inherent evil feel hauntingly tangible.