The successful debut film spawned 12 additional films in five decades

NEED TO KNOW

• Halloween premiered 48 years ago on Oct. 25, 1978
• Jamie Lee Curtis made her film debut as Laurie Strode at age 19 and earned just $8,000 for the role
• John Carpenter and Debra Hill developed the script from producer Moustapha Akkad’s babysitter-slasher concept

Halloween premiered in a Kansas City, Mo., theater on Oct. 25, 1978, and went on to become one of the most influential horror films of all time.

The iconic slasher flick was directed by John Carpenter and co-written with Debra Hill, following teenage babysitter Laurie Strode — played by then-19-year-old Jamie Lee Curtis in her breakout role — who is stalked by evil killer Michael Myers after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital.

The film took 20 days to shoot on a modest budget of around $300,000. Despite the budget, the film grossed more than $47 million domestically, per Box Office Mojo. The movie’s success led to 12 additional movies over the next five decades.

Still, following its release, Halloween received mixed reviews, with the Los Angeles Times calling it a “well-made but empty and morbid thriller,” while The Washington Post harshly called the movie a “plodding exercise in sham apprehension.”

In more positive takes, The Miami News said the horror film was a “terrifying movie” that was “on its own level.” The Chicago Tribune, meanwhile, added that Halloween works “because director Carpenter knows how to shock while making us smile.”

In an essay for PEOPLE in 2022, Curtis, now 67, wrote that the original idea for Halloween came from film producer and financier Moustapha Akkad, who “wanted to make a ‘babysitter-slasher movie.’” Carpenter and Hill then developed the script from that prompt.

“They added high school girls who strolled down tree-lined streets and teased each other about boys. They threw in children who needed babysitters and then a carnival, which led to dressing up in costumes on Halloween night,” Curtis wrote. “The final ingredient in that idyll: a man in a white mask who would become the embodiment of pure evil. This was a powerful recipe.”

The actress was famously paid just $8,000 for her role in the 1978 flick, taking home around “$2,000 a week, which at the time was a fortune,” she told PEOPLE in 2025, noting that she was also given $200 to find her own wardrobe.

The actress also shared that the whole shooting experience was a humbling one, looking back.

“[There were] 20 people, maybe 15 [crew],” Curtis told PEOPLE. “The oldest person was 30. Every other person was under 30. It was magic. A friend of somebody cooked the food each day and we all ate on the ground together.”

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Curtis said there were no trailers on set either — instead the cast worked out of one solitary Winnebago RV.

“There were cabinets in the Winnebago,” she continued. “Each girl got a drawer with her name on it to put her purse in. The makeup and the hair and the wardrobe were all in this one Winnebago that we all shared.”

Curtis went on to star in seven Halloween sequels: Halloween 2 (1981), Halloween 3 (1982), Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), reprising her role for the final time.

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