I don’t understand this script and I don’t understand my character, but my daughter is in a rock-and-roll band in London and she liked the music to your last film [Assault on Precinct 13], so that’s why I’m here. – Donald Pleasance (upon meeting John Carpenter to discuss his offer of role in Halloween)

In his follow up to Assault on Precinct 13, John Carpenter created not only one of the most influential and enduring horror movies of all time but also one of the genre's most iconic musical scores, capable of bringing chills both inside and outside the cinema in equal measure.

When six-year-old Michael Myers is confined to an insane asylum, after inexplicably stabbing his sexually active sister to death on Halloween night 1963, he faces over a decade of institutionalisation. Under the watchful eye of a psychiatrist Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), his subsequent attempts to penetrate Michael’s troubled psyche are met with nothing but dead ends. So when exactly fifteen years later Michael escapes, returning to his home town of Haddonfield with Doctor Loomis in hot pursuit, it spells bad news for bookish babysitter Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) - all alone in a house on Halloween night and soon discover that she is Michael's next target.

Despite its relatively simple and uncomplicated score (inspired by both Dario Argento's Suspiria and William Friedkin's The Exorcist - it took Carpenter just 3 days to write and record it), Halloween's iconic score is also one of its strongest assets. It’s dissonant, jarring themes provided the perfect backdrop for Michael's deviant activity and proved that a film didn't need a symphonic score by an A-Grade composer in order to be highly effective. Try putting it on when you're alone in the car sometime after midnight on a lonely country road and see if this unrelenting earworm doesn’t still cause your hair to stand on end with the minimum of effort.

---