Halloween (1978) wasn’t the first slasher film, not by a long, long shot, and Laurie Strode wasn’t the first Final Girl, but — as I have discussed here before — the commercial appeal and success of Halloween codified the slasher subgenre and set the rules for at least […]
Elvis’ favorite Christmas movie*, Black Christmas (1974), is partly culled from the 1960s Babysitter and the Killer Upstairs urban legend that most of us now remember simply as 1979’s When a Stranger Calls. An early version of Roy Moore’s** script, in fact, was called The Babysitter,*** and it […]
Sometimes I have a terrible suspicion that my favorite Halloween movie is actually Halloween III: Season of the Witch. For a long time, after being forced to downsize my movie collection in a move, Halloween III was the only film in the series I bothered to repurchase. Before […]
Consider the problems of Dr. Sam Loomis. You are a resident psychiatrist at Smith’s Grove sanitarium. You have a patient, Michael Myers, who was institutionalized after he knifed his teenage sister to death on Halloween night as a mere 6-year-old boy. At the time, you were told he […]