10 Movies That Changed The Genre They Were Made In

John Carpenter's independent masterpiece is almost a direct result of Psycho's massive impact on cinematic terror. Hitchcock developed the blueprint for the modern slasher film, while Carpenter showed how other talented filmmakers can apply the formula. And what a formula it is. Before cinemas around the western world were completely oversaturated by these types of films their ability to frighten could not be understated.

Halloween is a perfect horror film. You get the prototypical, unfeeling murderer that makes or breaks this type of movie and a group of disposable stock characters for him to hunt down. It's simple, entertaining, and when done effectively, incredibly tense. It also doesn't hurt that you're given a main character (in the form of Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie) that you actually care about.

Watching Laurie try to outwit and outrun Michael Myers is genuinely unsettling in Halloween because the "final girl" trope was still being solidified at the time. You have to keep in mind this was a year before Sigourney Weaver completely legitimized this type of character in Alien. Carpenter would go on to make scarier films than Halloween, but he never altered the state of the horror genre so heavily again.