One of the highest-grossing independent films of all time, director John Carpenter's horror masterpiece pays homage to other great masters of cinematic suspense as well as establishing Carpenter as a genre auteur in his own right. The story, penned by the director with co-producer Debra Hill, is deceptively simple. The film's prologue takes place on Halloween night, 1963, in the peaceful suburb of Haddonfield, IL: six-year-old Michael Myers, clad in a clown costume and mask, enters the bedroom of his teenage sister and stabs her to death with a butcher knife. The story picks up 15 years later at the state hospital for the criminally insane, where the fully-grown Michael is to be picked up by his psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), in preparation for an upcoming murder trial. Amid an ominous thunderstorm, Michael makes his escape. The balance of the film is set in Haddonfield on Halloween of 1978. We are introduced to Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), a pretty, bookish teenager whose Halloween plans are limited to babysitting young Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews). Laurie's girlfriends Lynda (P.J. Soles) and Annie (Nancy Loomis) have very different plans, mostly involving beer and illicit trysts with their respective boyfriends. As the day passes, a gray station wagon can be seen lurking about the neighborhood, and the desperate Loomis meets with local Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers) to warn him of the danger facing Haddonfield. Though skeptical, Brackett agrees to help Loomis case the neighborhood, beginning with the abandoned Myers house. Unbeknownst to Laurie, who wiles away the evening watching old horror movies with Tommy, Myers is stalking Annie and Lynda with murderous intent...and is saving Laurie for last. Carpenter fills every moment of the film with pervasive dread, even in the early daylight scenes, but it is after nightfall that the horror reaches an unbearable pitch. What could have been a standard stalk-and-slash scenario is given a kind of mythic resonance by Carpenter: Myers is depicted not as a flesh-and-blood psychopath but as an unstoppable creature of evil, somehow embodying the dark nature of Halloween itself. Sadly, this unique approach paved the way for similar impervious killers in countless lesser films of the genre, as well as the oft-noted "slasher" convention in which the killer punishes the film's promiscuous characters with death, while the virginal heroine usually manages to escape. Halloween was followed by several increasingly substandard sequels from the production team of Debra Hill, Irwin Yablans, and Moustapha Akkad, in which Carpenter's participation quickly dwindled down to a mere "created by" credit.