I had to make a video essay for my College film class, so I thought you guys might enjoy! I know I made a few errors in the video, especially where I said that Laurie found the bodies at the Myers house!
Good video. I think the connection between Halloween and Psycho, while a selling point for the film at the time, is ultimately rather light compared to another film that was a big influence on Carpenter, and one that Halloween references diegetically - 1951's The Thing or The Thing from Another World. No, there are no overt plot similarities, but Michael Myers is essentially a human version of James Arness' alien creature - right down to a not entirely dissimilar silhouette achieved with his boiler suit garment. One can even look at the Sam Loomis character as an inverse of the Dr. Arthur Carrington character. In The Thing, Carrington is obsessed with protecting the creature to the point of putting the other men at the base in mortal danger, whereas Loomis is famously obsessed with Michael but in the opposite direction. Lastly, there is the name Michael is given in the script's scene descriptions: "The Shape". That's fairly self-explanatory and tells you how Carpenter saw the character as something other than human...a thing. Addendum: Halloween also takes the skeleton of at least three different urban legends to construct its overall scenario and several of its iconic scenes: The Hook (Escaped lunatic), The Babysitter and the Man Upstairs (Myers' general modus operandi) and (roughly) The Killer in the Backseat (Annie's death). Getting back to The Thing, I'm also fairly confident that Myers lunging out of the closet to impale Bob to the wall is inspired by the famous jump scare scene in The Thing where the soldiers open a door revealing the creature standing right behind it.
@E even carpenter himself recognized it and that the scene of the second murder of psycho was his inspiration,and the same film was the first inspiration to all the slashers of the time
