SOURCE: Asahina, Robert. “Film Fantasies.” New Leader 61, no. 25 (18 December 1978): 17–18.

In the following excerpt, Asahina argues that Halloween is an immature horror film that warns the audience that “sex kills.”

Tom Allen, Sarris' disciple and fellow Voice critic, who has praised a cheap thriller called Halloween as “a sleeper that's here to stay,” while simultaneously conceding that it is a “schlock film.” Allen even calls it “a movie of almost unrelieved chills and of violence, conjuring up that unique mix of subliminal threat and contrapuntal physicality employed by Hitchcock” (one of the directors in the auteurist “pantheon”). I'm not sure how that description translates into English, but the reference to Hitchcock has some foundation. The first 10 minutes are a blatant ripoff of the shower scene in Psycho, and the entire movie is studded with fancy camera angles and obtrusive tracking dolly shots. There is even a brief nod in...