Plot
The story begins on October 31, 1963, in fictional Haddonfield, Illinois, with Michael Myers (Will Sandin) looking through a window, at his older teenage sister, Judith Myers (Sandy Johnson), and her boyfriend kissing in the living room. The two teenagers then decide to go upstairs. When Michael sees the light go off in Judith's bedroom window, he enters the kitchen and takes a butcher knife out of a drawer. After Judith's boyfriend goes home, Michael enters Judith's room and stabs her repeatedly until she falls down dead. He then walks downstairs and out the front door with the knife in his hand. Once outside, a car pulls up, and the Myers' parents get out as Michael comes into the drive. His father takes off the mask (a clown mask) and reveals the face of Michael.
Fifteen years later on October 30, 1978, Dr. Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasance), Michael's primary psychiatrist at Smith's Grove where Michael had been committed since the murder, accompanied by nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens) arrives at the sanitarium to a court hearing, but he escapes, stealing the car that Chambers was driving, attacking her in the process. She is unharmed, but Michael manages to escape, murder a trucker and steals the uniform of the dead man and leaves for Haddonfield with Loomis in pursuit. On reaching Haddonfield, Michael breaks into a hardware store and steals a halloween mask, a knife and a rope.
The following day--Halloween--high school student Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) continually sees Michael, now wearing dark blue coveralls and a white mask, first at her school, then on the street. Laurie's friends, Annie Brackett (Nancy Kyes) and Lynda van der Klok (P. J. Soles), dismiss Laurie's concerns. Then, later at her house, she sees Michael outside, in the yard, staring into her room. Laurie is startled and unnerved. Meanwhile, Dr. Loomis goes to the local cemetery, and is guided by the groundskeeper to the grave plot of Judith Myers where both discover her headstone missing. Dr. Loomis mutters under his breath, "He came home." Later on, Annie's father, Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), is approached by Loomis, and the two quietly look for Michael.
That night, Laurie babysits a boy named Tommy Doyle (Brian Andrews), while Annie babysits a girl named Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards) across the street from the Doyle house. When Annie gets a call from her boyfriend, Paul, to pick him up, she takes Lindsey to the Doyle house. Annie gets in her car to pick up Paul but she is killed by Michael, who was hiding in the back of her car. Meanwhile at the Doyle House, Tommy spots Michael carrying Annie's body and tries to tell Laurie, who dismisses his claims. Later, Lynda and her boyfriend, Bob, enter the house and head to the bedroom, where they have sex. While downstairs, Bob is impaled on the wall with a kitchen knife, then Michael heads upstairs and strangles Lynda with a telephone cord as she talks on the phone with Laurie.
Feeling unsettled, Laurie heads over to the Wallace house. With Annie's body is Judith Myers' missing headstone. Suddenly, Laurie is attacked by Michael and falls backwards down the staircase. She runs out of the house, screaming for help, but to no avail. Eventually, she flees back to the Doyle house, but the door is locked as she sees Michael approaching in the distance, Laurie screams for Tommy to open the door quickly. Luckily, Tommy opens the door in time and lets Laurie inside. Laurie then instructs the children to hide and then realizes that the phone is dead, and that Michael has gotten into the house through a window. As she sits down in horror next to the couch, her hand falls on a knitting needle. Michael appears and tries to stab her, but she counterattacks his move, and stabs him in the neck with the knitting needle.
Laurie makes her way to an upstairs bedroom and locks herself in a closet, but Michael breaks a hole in the door. Laurie attacks by stabbing Michael in the eye with a clothes hanger. Michael collapses and Laurie exits the closet. Meanwhile, outside, Dr. Loomis sees Tommy and Lindsey running away from the house and suspects that Michael could be in the house. Michael gets up and tries to strangle Laurie, but Dr. Loomis arrives in time to shoot Michael six times in the chest. Michael falls from the second-story window, onto the lawn below.
When Dr. Loomis looks over the balcony, Michael's body is missing. Laurie begins to cry as Loomis looks out suspiciously into the night.
Read more about this topic: Halloween (1978 Film)
Famous quotes containing the word plot:
“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)
“Trade and the streets ensnare us,
Our bodies are weak and worn;
We plot and corrupt each other,
And we despoil the unborn.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)