10:00 — 11:35: Halloween

The Holy Bee has already dedicated a “Halloween Special” post to his ill-advised, but ultimately successful, attempt to watch all eight original Halloween films in a row. I’m pretty sure we need only bother with the first one here, 1978’s Halloween, directed, co-written, and scored by John Carpenter. That three-note synth riff has become synonymous with slasher films, and almost as well known as the Jaws theme. Film historians have had a long-running debate about what constitutes a true “slasher” film, or what the first one was. Whether or not Halloween was the first slasher film, it certainly put all the tropes together in a stylish way, and more importantly, it was a pretty solid commercial success.

Success breeds imitators, and wherever Halloween’s place is in the origin of the genre, it opened the floodgates to the Golden Age of Slashers. Halloween’s superhuman…