20 Things You Didn't Know About Halloween (1978)
You can't kill the Boogeyman and, once you've read this article, it will be clear why!
John Carpenter's original Halloween film from 1978 is seen as the father of modern slasher films. It remains one of the most successful independent films ever made and, arguably, Carpenter's best film.
Shot on a limited budget, Halloween does not lack in inventiveness, creating effective chills and thrills that other, higher budget horror films have failed to achieve.
It also introduced wider audiences to the incredible acting talent of Jamie Lee Curtis, who continues to be proud of her involvement with the film as its iconic "final girl", Laurie Strode, a role that she reprised in the 1981 sequel, Halloween II and in the film's more modern sequels and reinventions.
The film also provided a forum for Donald Pleasence to portray Michael Myers's psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, an unlikely good guy who appears to be almost as unhinged as Myers himself, thus ending Pleasence's streak of being typecast as evil characters. Of course, Myers - or The Shape - has become an icon of horror cinema in his own right.
Be sure to leave a comment if you "see anything you like" or if you think that something has been missed off this list!
20. The Trees In Autumn
Halloween (the event) occurs every autumn and, therefore, it is quite usual to see the trees shedding their leaves over roads and pavements during the course of the film of the same name. Added to this, the film takes place in the fictional town of Haddonfield in Illinois.
However, if audiences watch the film carefully, they will see that the majority of the trees in Haddonfield still bear very green leaves, even though there are plenty of dead ones littering the streets, and there are even palm trees seen in and around the town.
This is because Halloween was largely filmed in and around Los Angeles California, in May 1978. Owing to the shortage of dead leaves, the cast and crew would all pitch in to decorate the streets with pieces of paper cut and painted to look like leaves; even a pre-Freddy Krueger Robert Englund stopped to help out! After each scene had been shot, the cast and crew would then have to collect all of the faux leaves, not only to avoid littering, but also because the "leaves" would be required in later scenes.
In one of the film's many demonstrations of the power of suggestion, Carpenter manages to convince audiences that a Californian summer is actually an Illinois autumn.