Movie Review: HALLOWEEN (2018): You can't keep a good Boogeyman down.
Sometimes just one critic can change the course of movie history. Or at the very least, the life of a talented, yet unknown director. In 1978, a young John Carpenter was hired to make a horror film about babysitters being stalked by a serial killer by producer Irwin Yablans and financier Moustapha Akkad, who had been impressed by his ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 . The gutsy 30 years old demanded complete artistic control, his name above the title (like his idols Howard Hawks, John Ford and Hitchcock) and proceeded to write, direct and score the film, which went from THE BABYSITTER MURDERS to the less on-the-nose HALLOWEEN (On a suggestion by Yablans). The film was released in October 1978 and was panned unanimously by critics, and looked like it may vanish quickly from theaters. That is until a particularly glowing review by Tom Allen in THE VILLAGE VOICE shifted the opinion of critics who started seeing the film for more than a mere killer on the loose horror fi...