Oh yeah, I’m not saying you’re wrong about Texas Chainsaw not having much influence on Halloween. Remember Carpenter had already made a student film (“Captain Voyeur” I think it was called?) about a man following a college student home and stabbing her to death. So clearly he was already thinking about these themes as early as 1969/1970. However I think it’s clear that the Texas Chainsaw Massacre was a big influence on the wave of slashers that followed in Halloween’s wake.

The Hills Have Eyes definitely owes more to TCM than Halloween ever did, and that whole subgenre of “hillbilly horror” is basically all because of TCM. However I would say that so many films of the slasher boom attempted (and failed) to marry the simple structure of Halloween (what Ebert used to call “the dead teenager formula”) to the tone of TCM, you know that unclean, voyeuristic, “wrong” tone that the film has? For me that’s the main influence of TCM on the slasher genre.

I’d also argue TCM proved there was an audience for well made, horrifying cinema that crossed lines