John Carpenter’s 1978 film Halloween cost about $300,000 to make and still launched a run of sequels. The BBC says its masked killer, Michael Myers, became a pop culture icon.
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What the money bought
The BBC puts the budget at just over $300,000 and says the film has since made more than $47m. The Guardian reports a worldwide gross of $60m, a record for an independent film at the time. The Hollywood Reporter goes higher, with more than $70 million for the original and more than $362 million across its nine sequels.
The three totals differ, and none of the outlets says why. All three agree on the budget.
A babysitter, a producer and a deal
Carpenter already had a cult hit in Assault on Precinct 13, which flopped in the US but found an audience in Europe. A producer, Irwin Yablans, and the financier Moustapha Akkad called him to London. Carpenter says they wanted a film first called The Babysitter Murders.
Akkad agreed to hand over the money and give Carpenter and his writing partner, Debra Hill, full creative control. Hill had started in the mid-1970s as a script supervisor. She rose to assistant director and then co-wrote Halloween. Carpenter also composed the music.
Why the mask looks the way it does
Carpenter wanted Myers to seem almost supernatural. He says the idea was evil as a force of nature, so the character got a mask with no human features.
The BBC calls it a two-dollar rubber mask in the likeness of the actor William Shatner, sprayed bluish-white. Carpenter tells The Hollywood Reporter a different story. The art director bought a clown mask and a Captain Kirk mask at a Hollywood magic shop, and Carpenter says the Kirk mask looked like nobody. The crew sprayed it and altered the eye holes.
Did Carpenter start the slasher boom?
The BBC says Halloween ushered in the slasher films of the 1980s and helped push horror into the mainstream. Carpenter plays down any claim to be the genre’s father.
His explanation is about money. He says shrewd producers saw how little it cost and decided they could copy it and profit. The film itself did not start strongly. Carpenter recalls that it opened regionally, city by city, with bad reviews, and grew by word of mouth.
