Group 1 - Foundation Production: HB: Institutional Context

Halloween (Carpenter, 1978)

This independent film was originally intended to be called The Babysitter Murders, until the film’s producer Irwin Yablams suggested setting the film on Halloween night and calling it Halloween.
The film had a low (for the time) budget of $300,000. Director, John Carpenter had planned the story prior to it being filmed almost frame by frame ensuring he knew where suspense would be built.
The writing was done within 3 weeks by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill.

It was stated that the film took a great amount of inspiration from Psycho (Hitchcock, 1960) in terms of casting, characters, themes and shots.
For Yablam, inspiration was also taken from The Exorcist (Friedkin, 1973), when explaining the idea for the films plot he explained "I was thinking what would make sense in the horror genre, and what I wanted to do was make a picture that had the same impact as ‘The Exorcist’."

Tommy Lee Wallace was the films production designer, art director, location scout and co-editor.
Costume: Michael Myers’ mask was actually created by Wallace from a Captain Kirk mask that was purchased from $1.99, many actors wore their own clothes and Jamie Lee Curtis’ (Lorrie) wardrobe was purchased for only $100.

Due to the films low budget it did not feature (at the time) A-listers as the cast.
Also, it meant that the filming had a strict time schedule of 20 days located in South Pasadena, California and also at the cemetery at Sierra Madre, California.
The Myers’ house was also set in an abandoned house along with the use of two homes within Hollywood.
For the trick or treat scenes, local families would dress their children in costumes and they would participate in the films making.

Many of the main camera shots used were to increase the audience’s sense of participation.
For example, close ups, zoom and especially POV shots from the perspective of Michael Myers to build tension and suspense. The film also used a great deal of stedicam to create a similar effect.

Finally, there was very little use of the most typical pro filmic effect used within the horror genre, fake blood.
This was something Carpenter adopted from Psycho, he wanted to create a sense of fear and horror without the film being to gory.
When left to the imagination of the viewer it can often be more terrifying than if they are able to see all of the gore.
This is a different but effective twist to the slasher sub-genre.

Compass International Pictures was responsible for the films distribution within Canada and the USA while the international distribution was done by Warner Bros. Pictures.
This would have been beneficial to the film and Warner Bros. would have been able to use synergistic and symbiotic promotional activity to help ensure the film became known to primary audiences and secondary audiences.
The film was marketed with a series of theatrical posters (see top) distributed throughout multiple countries with individual countries having a different design to suit what would appeal to their audiences.
With these also came the iconic taglines “The night HE came home.” “The Trick is to stay alive.” And “Everyone is entitled to one good scare.”
They also included clear horror iconography by including a knife.
There was also a theatrical trailer released (see below.)
The film initially had a platform release, first on 25^th October 1978 in Kansas City, Missouri before reaching the rest of the states and eventually went international (wide release) grossing a total of $70 million.