Halloween

David Robert Mitchell has talked about Carpenter as the reference, and the film is built out of his grammar: a wide frame with too much empty space in it, so the audience searches the background before the characters do, and a walking figure that never runs. The suburbs are shot as the same unwatched autumn street, here in Michigan rather than in an Illinois built on a California backlot, and the synthesiser score does the same job of telling you the threat is present when nothing is visible. What is rewritten is the threat itself, from a man who will not stop to a thing that is passed from person to person.

Craven has described Elm Street as a deliberate answer to what the slasher had become by 1984: the suburb, the babysitting teenagers, the final girl and the killer who cannot be stopped are all Carpenter's, and Craven keeps every one of them. What he changes is the one rule the form depended on. Halloween's terror requires staying awake and watching the dark; Freddy can only reach you when you sleep, which turns the survival strategy into the danger.

Carpenter put the debt on screen rather than in an interview, three times over:

• The psychiatrist is called Sam Loomis, the name of Marion Crane's lover in Psycho
• Laurie Strode is played by Jamie Lee Curtis, Janet Leigh's daughter, cast for exactly that reason
• The film opens inside the killer's eyeline and holds it there, extending the identification Psycho made possible in 1960

Psycho is the reason a mainstream audience would sit with a murderer at all. Halloween is what the genre built on top of that permission.