10 Movie Characters That Shocked The World

Though it had predecessors with the likes of Bob Clark's Black Christmas and Powell and Pressburger's Peeping Tom, Halloween is generally considered the first slasher film, launching a franchise and a slew of copycats.

Michael Meyers may seem like a lightweight in the age of today's horror movies, only killing four characters onscreen in his first outing doing so with little to no blood shown, but in 1978 he was something with which audiences were unfamiliar.

In the first film, Myers was merely credited as "The Shape". The mask he wears is apropos. It was merely a Captain Kirk mask the crew spray painted white. It serves as the kind of pure, faceless evil Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) rants about throughout the film.

You can't kill evil and, in a decade pockmarked with the resignation and pardon of a crooked President, the deaths of nearly 60,000 Americans and a seemingly endless struggle for civil rights, the anonymous shape serves as a multi-purpose stand-in.

When he is finally gunned down - shot six times off a balcony by the only one who recognizes him for what he is, his corpse vanishes, and we hear heavy breathing over a montage of places he might be. Suburbia, once a safe haven for middle America, had a boogeyman.