Halloween1978

John Carpenter Q&Amp;A (October 31, 2014):
The opening shot was inspired by Touch of Evil. Orson Welles did a couple of one-take sequences, but the most astonishing is not the opening sequence which everybody remembers. In a motel room, in the middle of the movie, a man is broken by Orson Welles’ character. It’s almost a reel-long one-shot. It’s astonishing. I was inspired by the idea of that. So in the opening scene, we were coming up on the outside of the house, around and up the back steps, and as we passed through a room going into another room the crew would re-light it behind us. We were just flying on the edge, but that was the spectacle, the money shot. Plus we had a naked girl upstairs! You couldn’t ask for more than that. There are a couple of cuts in that first shot. The mask allowed us to do a cut, and there were botched takes — we didn’t make it up the stairs, there was a camera shadow, something would happen. But it was fun.