10 Best Horror Movies With No Supernatural Elements
2. Halloween
In due course, Halloween antagonist Michael Myers would become something more than human, a truly unkillable demonic entity who, though never explicitly supernatural, took the increasingly tired series way beyond the point of credulity.
That first instalment, though, is pure dynamite. Tightly wound, brilliantly acted, monumentally influential, John Carpenter’s 1978 smash shows the power of simplicity in horror. Carpenter often worked with small locations, small crews. With Halloween he goes one further, giving Michael Myers an instantly iconic look, capped with a totally expressionless white mask.
A great villain needs a great hero, and Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie is one of the slasher sub-genre’s best. She conveys the appropriate levels of terror, but she’s never stupid or unrealistic. She’s simply desperate to survive, a plucky underdog against a blank but somehow characterful killing machine.
Halloween taps right into fear itself, with Myers presented as the boogeyman, the creature in the shadows that stalks and murders indiscriminately. And yet Carpenter’s restraint keeps the story grounded, focussed, and almost believable.