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The opening scene of John Carpenter’s classic, Halloween (1978), is one of those scenes so surprising upon a first viewing, it can’t help but stick with you. Carpenter masterfully chooses to leave the audience in the dark on what sort of menace is lurking in the shadows, but he does so by forcing them to see things from his perspective quite literally.

A POV shot places the audience out in the bushes around a house, giving the view of a prowler peering through windows and curtains. When what seems to be our own hand picks up a knife, we all know something terrible is coming. A mask is found and put on, obscuring things even more. Now, not only can we not see the face of this killer, but neither can anyone else and our view of the action is obstructed save for the slits of two little eyeholes. The feeling is almost claustrophobic.

When the camera finally spies our victim we begin to realize who we are as the girl screams, “Michael!” over and over. Our faceless killer finally has a name and it’s not long after that, as the bloody knife is carried in hand and the POV shot has us wandering outside, that we get a face and it’s certainly not the one we expect. When the camera finally swings around, leaving the POV shot behind and going back to its objective distance, we see that murderous Michael is nothing but a little boy. As his parents stand in horror and little Michael looks off in a daze, the camera pulls backwards and upwards, as if even the camera were shrinking back in horror. For us as the audience, the distance between us and him brings relief and with that Halloween’s now infamous piano theme begins to play and the opening credits roll.

It seems that few other horror films (including the subsequent Halloween sequels and the remake) bother to take the time to be quite so cinematically brilliant. Halloween, as the very first of its kind and as a model for all stalker films that followed, certainly knew what it was doing. To horrify us, it begins by linking us with what we are afraid of and that is simply brilliant.