Parenting & Family Quote by David Arquette

Arquette’s memory isn’t really about Halloween as a title; it’s about the moment the genre recruits you. He points to that opening POV shot - the child’s mask turning the camera into a face - because it collapses the safe distance between viewer and violence. You’re not watching a killer; you’re wearing him. That’s the trick: horror doesn’t just scare you, it compromises you, and Arquette is admitting the exact instant he agreed to the bargain.

The phrasing matters. “Hooked” lands like confession, not critique. It frames fear as a pleasure with a faintly illicit charge, the kind that feels less like choosing a movie and more like discovering a new appetite. And it’s telling he remembers the theatre. Halloween hits differently in a communal space where you can’t pause, can’t scroll away, and your body is syncing with strangers’ gasps. The subtext is about initiation into a shared language: the mask, the gaze, the dread that becomes fun because everyone else is enduring it with you.

There’s also a quiet autobiography here. Arquette’s career is entangled with meta-horror (Scream) and the idea that audiences know the rules even as they break them. By tracing his origin story back to Carpenter’s POV gambit, he’s aligning himself with a kind of pop-cinephile lineage: not prestige film education, but a formative jolt of craft. The intent is simple and savvy: credit the technique, celebrate the surrender.