The Best Movie Of Each Year From 1925-2025

48. 1978 - Halloween

Halloween 1978
Compass International Pictures

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.

 
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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.