Halloween (1978 John Carpenter)

One of Carpenter's very best films glides knowingly through the suburban Autumn using the widescreen brilliantly in a way few others bother to do, so the shocks are often coming out at you without an edit in sight. Jamie Lee Curtis is clearly the star of the show, Donald Pleasance having a non part really ('I'll just wait outside this house all night').

Wonderful camerawork from Dean Cundey - if the night light is blue, on this occasion I'll let it go. Carpenter clearly had watched Hitchcock - it has Psycho written all over it, and he does a good moving POV scene like the Master would. It was one of the most successful independent films of all time, grossing $47m from a $300k production budget, half of which was spent on the Panavision cameras and the Panaglide system (a competitor to Steadicam) - more about this here. Certainly the way it is filmed is wonderful:

Debra Hill, who wrote it with Carpenter, is also the producer.