Halloween (1978)

In 1978, legendary New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael reviewed John Carpenter’s HALLOWEEN. She didn’t like it.

“HALLOWEEN has a pitiful, amateurish script (by Carpenter and his producer, Debra Hill). An escaped lunatic wielding a kitchen knife stalks people in a small Midwestern town (Haddonfield, Illinois), and that’s about it. Maybe when a horror film is stripped of everything but dumb scariness – when it isn’t ashamed to revive the stalest device of the genre (the escaped lunatic) – it satisfies part of the audience in a more basic, childish way than sophisticated horror pictures do.”