The conditions were perfect. An autumn breeze whistled through the neighborhood bringing with it the touch of winter’s icy fingers. The last rays of sunlight had vanished, leaving a void where there had once been warmth. I sat alone on the couch in the dark. Shadows of falling leaves danced across the walls in the orange glow of dim streetlamps. I turned on the TV. I cranked up the volume. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for a visceral horror experience. I hit play. Halloween began…and nothing.

As it turned out, preparing to watch the film filled me with more dread than the movie itself. Halloween just isn’t scary. Am I crazy here or does everyone else just have it wrong? Don’t get me wrong, there was a lot to admire about the film. It sits at a bare-bones 91 minutes, telling a tight story without extraneous material. There isn’t a wasted moment. The film is also mercifully free of the jump scares which pepper so many modern horror movies. The film instead opts to take its time and deliver scares through proper craftsmanship. This is an important distinction. The jump scare is often a lazy tactic employed by filmmakers who lack the confidence to use their craft to build a sense of fear. Instead of building real tension, they provoke a primal reflex by introducing a sudden stimulus to a quiet environment. There’s nothing wrong with poking the reptile brain now and then, but too often the jump scare is utilized without any purpose beyond the jolt itself.

Rather than rely on this jack-in-the-box technique, Halloween ratchets up tension with clever camerawork that creates a mismatch of information between viewers and characters. It’s clear that innumerable films in the last 35 years have tried to replicate the techniques used in this film, but few do it with as much elegance and aplomb. On several occasions, we’re presented Michael Myers’ point of view where the camera peers through a window at victims, ducking out of their line of sight. The opening sequence, where a young Michael murders his sister, is particularly effective at this. At other times, we’re treated to clever shots set up so that we can see Michael Myers approaching his victim who remains oblivious until it’s too late. In all of these cases, the film generates fear by taking agency away from us. As we see Michael Myers creeping up behind Laurie [Jamie Lee Curtis] we want to yell at her to turn around. As Lynda talks to the serial killer, thinking it’s her boyfriend in a ghost costume, we want to grab her by the hand and pull her to safety before she’s butchered. Instead we’re left to gnaw our fingers to bloody stumps until the tension is relieved in a horrific act of violence.

Or at least that’s the emotional response I was hoping to experience while watching Halloween. So what happened? Why does a film which I describe as using the camera effectively to build tension fail to make me squirm? Part of the problem was the utter predictability of the plot. From practically the first frame of the film, it’s clear who’s going to live and who’s going to die. Laurie’s friends Annie [Nancy Loomis] and Lynda [P. J. Soles], with their sex and smoking, are surely marked for death. Lynda’s amorous boyfriend Bob [John Michael Graham] is destined to be pinned to a door with a butcher’s knife. The children? Safe, of course. What self-respecting movie serial killer goes after children? That leaves virginal Laurie who, in the tradition of the final girl, will survive to tell the tale. It’s hard to feel tense when you’ve guessed the outcome. Of course you can’t blame Halloween for being predictable; it helped to establish the tropes it leans so heavily on. There isn’t a doubt in my mind that audiences in 1978 found these techniques scary as hell. How ironic, then, that Halloween, due to its own success at scaring the wits out of audiences in the late 1970s, is no longer scary.

This predictability, though, also unmasks a deficiency of the film that was likely not apparent to much of its initial audience in 1978. I like to imagine that its craftsmanship, still fairly novel at the time and so effectively employed, would have allowed the audience to forget that Halloween lacks a disturbing psychological core. Now that audiences have developed a tolerance for these techniques from years of imprudent use, we’re left with an odd beast which has brilliant craftsmanship and no heart whatsoever.

For the first half of the movie, I was hopeful that the film would actually follow a more existentially disturbing path. Laurie repeatedly sees Michael Myers stalking around the neighborhood, but no one else does. Every time she points him out to anyone else, he vanishes. Think about that. Imagine being in a situation where you see a threat, but no one believes you. Maybe you can’t trust your senses anymore. Maybe everyone around you is about to get butchered by a man in a rubber mask and you’ll be helpless to prevent it. The horror isn’t that there’s a threat out there. It’s that there’s something horrible coming, and either no one will believe you or you are going insane. Other films, like Roman Polanski’s classic Rosemary’s Baby, are able to capitalize on this very concept to create something deeply disturbing even now, decades after its creation. Unfortunately, Halloween veers away from this more durable form of horror as it focuses increasingly on the technical aspects of provoking fear. Laurie’s sightings of Michael Myers disappear midway through the film to be replaced largely by shots of him slinking around independently of Laurie’s perspective. For the last act, instead of having to face psychological terror, we’re left with a well-crafted carnival ride which becomes less and less fun the more times we ride it.

So am I crazy to think that Halloween isn’t scary? I don’t think so. Were audiences wrong to elevate Halloween into the pantheon of great horror movies? Absolutely not. While years of copycats have dulled the film’s edge, as a film lover, it’s worth watching for its craftsmanship. As I watched Michael Myers pick off Laurie’s friends one by one, I got the sense that I was observing a blob of protoplasm which spawned a universe of horror movie offspring. I was watching history in the making. My mistake? Expecting to be scared.