It’s 2025 And I Just Watched 1978’s Halloween For The First Time – These Are My Honest Thoughts

It’s hard to go without spoilers to 1978’s “Halloween” in 2025. Even as someone whose horror movie inclinations only pick up in October, I was well aware of some big beats coming. Michael Myers (Nick Castle) is the embodiment of evil, a voiceless killer. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) survived. John Carpenter’s song is definitely, emphatically so Bumps. However, I wasn’t quite prepared for exactly what I would find when I watched “Halloween” for the first time.

For context, I love Carpenter’s work – “The Thing” and “Escape from New York” in particular, but also “The Live”, “Big Trouble in Little China” and his criminally underrated “Lost Themes” albums of the last decade. As someone who has always preferred the sci-fi aspect of horror over more traditional films or supernatural horror, the “Halloween” movies have never made it straight onto my list. Going in, I was excited, expecting something similar to Carpenter’s 1980s films.

Oh, what a difference a few years, millions of dollars, and massive independent success can make. From the beginning, “Halloween” makes it abundantly clear what kind of movie it is: the kind made with passion and a lot of great aesthetics, but for very little money at all. Its $325,000 budget shows from start to finish, offering equal parts charm, character, and camp. These characters are hardly characters (forgive me, it’s true), and the plot is hardly a plot, yet I thoroughly enjoyed the films, although perhaps in a different way than audiences at the time.

The movie I kept thinking about after finishing “Halloween” for the first time was the original “Mad Max,” which was released just a year later in 1979 and made roughly the same tiny amount of money. Both films built a framework for an entire fantasy genre, largely outside of their attractive aesthetics. It can be difficult to revisit the writing, plotting, and composition in the absence of a historical lens, but there is still a lot of fun to be had in the look, sound, and overall feel of these films.

In the case of “Mad Max,” the idea of ​​leather-clad gunmen running each other down the back roads of the Australian outback is just that: an idea. good. Despite the execution (George Miller reached much greater heights with his second “Mad Max” film), the basic idea was read. In the same way, Michael Myers’ compelling pursuit of Laurie Strode and her teenage babysitter friends across a dark suburban landscape simply works.

As my fiancé commented while we were watching, it’s very much a movie about people getting around. “Halloween” begins with its most artistically impressive and aesthetically memorable sequence, depicted through the eyes of six-year-old Michael Myers on the night he killed his sister. It’s a gritty premise full of great camp, coupled with some truly impressive camera work. Although nothing in the rest of the film reaches the same level, the numerous tracking shots, rocky manual camera work, and use of background and shadows all build an effective sense of unsettling surveillance.

This film is about watching and being seen, and it’s anchored by a giant score from Carpenter that honestly makes it all work. No matter how many times you’ve heard that song, it’s just that Visits Every time he comes. It’s the only part of “Halloween,” for my money, that still feels completely timeless.

“Halloween” is still a lot of fun in 2025, and as a horror film with a very tight focus, its lack of any real character development or narrative variation is nowhere near disastrous. However, the fact remains that this film is nothing more than what it is: a $325,000 experiment in mood, tone, and elegant camera work. If you’re looking for something beyond that here, and don’t have a lingering nostalgia for the movie that started the series, you may be a little disappointed.

However, the things I liked far outweighed the things I didn’t like. I like the initial reveal of how young Michael is when he kills his sister. I love how thin he is, far from the hulking monster he has become in popular culture. I love the way the jacket hangs loosely on him, the campy dialogue between Laurie and her friends, the sweet friendship between the young kids, and the ambiguous and unsettling ending, framed in a series of the kind of set pieces we rarely get in the rest of the film. I love that Michael, being the father of modern punk, doesn’t really understand the rules of the genre he created. He stalks strangely in broad daylight, hides behind bushes, and often misses with his knife.

While “The Thing” remains as good a Carpenter horror film as it was the day it came out, “Halloween” needs a little more help. It’s more of a time capsule than a timeless classic, and much of the fun that still exists in 2025 comes at the expense of low-budget camp, but when has that ever been a bad thing?

Oh my goodness, for an hour and a half, the music alone makes it worth watching.