Halloween (1978)
Advertisement
Part of the A Nightmare on Franklin Street 2026 series
**********************************************************
1h 31m / R / Horror, Slasher
The script for the original 1978 Halloween was written in 10 days, which … yeah, actually seems like plenty of time, come to think of it. It’s a terse movie: silent killer menaces teens, travels with unsettling quickness but only when off-camera, murders many, can’t be stopped. How many pages do you need?
And that simplicity is a virtue; Halloween’s premise contains everything but only what it requires. It takes the psychological tension of a Hitchcock movie, strips out everything but the bare vectors of a plot, and renders the audience complicit and uncomfortable by forcing the perspective of the monster — the infamously masked Michael Myers — on them. It’s so powerful a recipe that it ushered in a new Golden Age of slasher film, influenced the direction of a whole genre of movies for decades to come, and earned Jamie Lee Curtis a near-permanent No. 1 spot on the list of cinema’s top scream queens (an honor that had, up to that point, belonged to her mother, Janet Leigh, of Psycho fame.)
So come see Halloween on Halloween. What else are you going to do, go trick-or-treating? Don’t you know there are killers out there?
**********************************************************
A Nightmare on Franklin Street series is presented by Bank of America. View the full series at https://tampatheatre.org/nightmare
**********************************************************
1h 31m / R / Horror, Slasher
The script for the original 1978 Halloween was written in 10 days, which … yeah, actually seems like plenty of time, come to think of it. It’s a terse movie: silent killer menaces teens, travels with unsettling quickness but only when off-camera, murders many, can’t be stopped. How many pages do you need?
And that simplicity is a virtue; Halloween’s premise contains everything but only what it requires. It takes the psychological tension of a Hitchcock movie, strips out everything but the bare vectors of a plot, and renders the audience complicit and uncomfortable by forcing the perspective of the monster — the infamously masked Michael Myers — on them. It’s so powerful a recipe that it ushered in a new Golden Age of slasher film, influenced the direction of a whole genre of movies for decades to come, and earned Jamie Lee Curtis a near-permanent No. 1 spot on the list of cinema’s top scream queens (an honor that had, up to that point, belonged to her mother, Janet Leigh, of Psycho fame.)
So come see Halloween on Halloween. What else are you going to do, go trick-or-treating? Don’t you know there are killers out there?
**********************************************************
A Nightmare on Franklin Street series is presented by Bank of America. View the full series at https://tampatheatre.org/nightmare
Advertisement
Where is it happening?
Tampa Theatre, 707 N Franklin St, Tampa, FL 33602-4400, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
Host or PublisherTampa Theatre
