Jamie Lee Curtis In Halloween (1978)
She begins the night just going about her entirely innocent babysitting business, but soon enough young Laurie Strode (Curtis) is plunged into a terrifying nightmare at the hands of a masked Michael Myers. Newly escaped from the Warren County Smith’s Grove Sanitarium, the 21 year old killer returns to his home town 15 years after stabbing his older sister to death for spending time with her boyfriend instead of him. Engaging in some sinister stalking, Myers fixates on Strode from afar before staging his horrific assault under cover of darkness – beginning with her friends across the street.
Laurie Strode becomes increasingly unsettled, and eventually secures her two young charges and heads across the street to check on her friend and fellow babysitter. Finding the gruesome corpses of her two best friends and one of their boyfriends, she panics – sobbing loudly as she staggers across the upstairs landing. Suddenly, Michael Myers reaches out from the shadows, and Strode lets outs a hair-raising howl – amplified by her taking a tumble down the staircase.
There are many screams in John Carpenter’s Halloween – most of them from Strode – but it is this one that becomes embedded in the mind of the audience, because it marks the very first moment that our heroine comes face-to-face with a walking nightmare. This is a crucial moment in the film, because we are heavily invested in Strode, and her reaction communicates to us – the audience – exactly how it traumatising it is to turn in that hallway and be confronted with that blank mask, having just stumbled out of a scene of butchery. The moment cemented the power of Michael Myers – a character which then generated nine more movies, a range of novels, comic books and video games, and immediately became an iconic figure in cinema.
– Sarah Myles