Halloween (1978) at Tampa Theatre

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 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, indelibly 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?