I can’t say definitively but I cannot remember such a POV being used that way before the advent of the Steadicam.
I think Black Christmas (1974) had some of that killer’s POV stuff in it. It also introduced that “the calls are coming from inside the house!!” gag that was later used in When A Stranger Calls.
Random trivia: Hallowe’en was originally intended as a sequel to Black Christmas.
And, yes, BC made extensive use of the killer’s POV…they came up with a fairly clever rig to allow it, as I remember, but I can’t remember the details.
I remember seeing it in the theater…and being disappointed. I love horror movies; it just didn’t do it for me.
My idea of a scary movie: A Nightmare on Elm Street. I want something that crawls in my brain and won’t leave me alone. Nightmare brought a surrealism to the party that I still can’t dismiss.
I thought Nightmare was the least scary movie I’d ever seen, personally…even less scary than the sequels which ranged more into comedy than horror.
I wouldn’t debate you on sequels, but with regard to the original, that’s interesting. What scares one person vs. another is fascinating to me. I really enjoy a scary movie and some of the others (E.g. “The Thing”) didn’t do much for me. I always want to be scared, but it doesn’t happen often.
So did Jaws (1975) :).
As was When a Stranger Calls. Weird, huh?
Then I must be one of the rare individuals that enjoy both genres. I’m an artist, so I’m already a bit loopy; that may be why. I thought Zombie might have done a better job to show the decline of Michael’s psyche into utter madness, setting up the slasher portion of the film. That was the hardest thing to accept, that he would go from talkative Michael to silent brooding killer so easily just by being isolated. He should have made more of Danny Trejo’s character inadvertantly giving Michael the nudges toward the end result (“Ya gotta learn to live inside your head; there’s no walls there that can stop you.”) But I thought that he tied in the two “halves” of the movie well with the contrasting breakfast scenes, and I found both the young and the adult Michael Meyers in this film to be pretty terrifying. It WAS missing a proper “sitting up calmly after just being apparently killed” scene (he does get up after being stabbed and later after being shot, but it didn’t have the otherworldly “OMFG” feel of the original) and I think sometimes Zombie kept some scenes or references in just to pay homage to the original; sometimes it works (The ghost and “see anything you like?”) sometimes it doesn’t (I thought the discovery of the desecrated grave seemed forced and unnecessary).
All that being said, I thought that the ending was dragged out a bit, at least in the unrated version that I saw on DVD.
You want amazing POV? Try 1948’s Dark Journey with Humphrey Bogart. That movie starts with a fantastic POV sequence. We are the eyes of Bogey. The camera was a hugely heavy Mitchell camera- and the work is excellent.
I’m just sayin’…
Agreed. Zombie took Halloween’s reputation (a relentless bloodbath of teenage tits and buckets of blood) and made it a reality. Then he tacked on 60 minutes of the Jerry Springer Show Does Haddonfield.
It was a mess.
That goofy doctor (played by the late donal pleasance)-was it Dr. Loomis? The guy comes across a s a prize idiot. fisrt, he allows Michael to get out of the asylum. He knows that MM has evil intentions-but instead of alerting the local polic-he dcides to try to kill MM himself. The local PD chief is pretty goofy as well. So know its Halloween-and MM is busy filleting horny teenages. The gall has to wash her cloths-and whilst stripping off, MM (conveniently) comes upon her.
All in all, light entertainment…and a sobering indictment of Dr. loomis and his mental hospital!
The point was Halloween can be considered the first modern slasher film. Certainly the first in the mainstream. It’s very Frankenstein-like with an unbeatable monster, townspeople chasing him (primarily Loomis, but this isn’t a literal remake, or even reimagining, I just think there are similarities), and “good” versus “evil”. Was MM evil? Who knows, since we don’t know why he did what he did. Was he misunderstood, or just like killing for its own sake?
And besides, Dr. Loomis…Sam Loomis.
Who was Marion’s fiancee in Psycho? Sam Loomis.
Call it an homage. 
Hopefully we can at least agree that the girls in the remake were more believable as hot horny teenagers than the original.
Old: http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjE0Mjk0NzQ0OV5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTYwNjQ3Mjky._V1._SX450_SY356_.jpg
New: http://www.mtv.com/movies/photos/h/halloween_08272007/the_girls.jpg
Especially the new Annie Brackett. RWWWOOAAARRR!!
Seconded. The first time I saw Halloween, I let out a scream that could have been heard at the South Pole.
I’ve watched RZ’s version and I’m sorry, Rob, you just didn’t do it for me. I’ll give you a B+ for effort.
:smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack::smack:
Passage, Journey, Night, Knight, Side Of The Moon, what-have-you !!
Me, I shoulda IMDB’d. I sit corrected. 
The hand-held work… SUCH a heavy camera. Brilliant.
Now that is a righteous horror movie. The killer’s phone calls to the doomed sorority chicks while he’s hiding in their attic – which we know already, having seen him climb up an ivy trellis and go through an open window within the first five minutes of the film are among the most unsettling moments of dialogue you’re likely to hear in a fiction movie.
Seriously, BC (aka **Stranger In The House **and **Silent Night Deadly Night *– beware of much-inferior movies with almost-identical names!) delivers. Indeed it has the distinction of being one of exactly five horror movies I’ve seen as an adult which had grown-up me uneasy about being in my home alone late at night for a week after seeing it.
P.S.: So as not to highjack the thread too badly, allow me to take a moment to join in on the praises being sung to the original version of Halloween. It’s a tight, effective little chiller which often misses the credit it deserves, and gets wrongly dissed for the stupidity and predictibility of the floodtide of drek that followed hard on its release
*P.P.S.: Oh, all right – if you must know, the other four were The Addiction, The Blair Witch Project, Cookers, and Henry,Portrait Of A Serial Killer.
Question: when jamie lee curtis is stripping off in the laundry room (and making sure everybody gets a look), she senses something isn’t right. So how come she doesn’t call up Dad and get the cops involved? I don’t see how MM gets around so quick-did he steal a car or something?
I think the original is a totally great film, but there totally was one thing that was totally pointed out to me that makes it totally unwatchable.
The trees are totally green.