Its premise is so simple that it's more or less a description of the whole plot. The opening sequence, which has a handheld camera functioning as the view of a deranged murderer, jolts us with a terrible act of killing, and then it shocks us further with his identity eventually revealed in the end. After 15 years, the murderer in question escapes from a mental institution at the very moment when his watchful psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence), arrives at the facility for another routine evaluation ordered by court, and Dr. Loomis is quite certain that his homicidal patient is going to return to his hometown: Haddonfield, Illinois.

Now this is a familiar setup for your typical mad killer movie, but “Halloween” distinguishes itself as carefully accumulating a sense of fear and dread in its mundane background surrounding Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her high school friends. Everything looks fine in Haddonfield on Halloween day, and Laurie is expecting to spend a plain Halloween night with some babysitting, but she gradually senses that something is not quite right around her. At one point, she notices someone watching from the distance, but then the figure in question disappears in the next second, and she cannot help but feel nervous about that. Constantly signifying that something bad is about to happen sooner or later, the movie deftly dials up and down its suspense level as doling out a number of creepy moments like that, and we become more aware of that mysterious figure who is apparently stalking on Laurie.

While that ominous figure, who has been one of the most popular horror genre characters since the movie was released, is merely named “The Shape” in the end credits, the movie gives a little more information on him through Dr. Loomis, who comes to find that his intuition was correct not long after he arrived in Haddonfield. According to Dr. Loomis, his patient is simply an unstoppable evil force of nature as relentless as, say, the shark in “Jaws” (1975), and Donald Pleasence, who has been always associated with his performance in this film and its subsequent unnecessary sequels, is especially good during the scene where his character calmly talks about his patient’s diabolical nature. Even when he savagely stabbed his first victim for no apparent reason, his patient already showed the alarming signs of a merciless psychopathic killer who knows neither compassion nor morality. There is a chilling moment later in the movie when he seems to stare at his latest victim with detached curiosity right after killing that victim.