It was influential, and it has better quality than most of the copycats, so people take it more seriously. Plus, MM looks cool and has a cool theme. That's all I can think of to be honest. It's probably not as impressive anymore since you've seen it all before in other movies, but they probably got it from HW.
I almost never go for the "it didn't age well" but it's so the case with this one.
I suppose it looks good, characters are well written and don't do lots of stupid ****, but apart from that I see the same genre tropes that make the genre almost self-parodic, I know they weren't tropes back then.
Its was really the first of its kind, an actual scary slasher flick, in an age when there were not really a-lot of slasher flicks.
The tone, and cinematography were well above the rest of the standard “horror” of the time. Its set the stage and tone for the rest of he slasher flicks of the 80’s, everything else was just copying it. But I see your point, if you didnt see this film near the time of release or within 10 years after, your could never understand.
It's what I was thinking, without context and not having seen anything like it before, it should've been very effective then.
The current generation feels the same about a-lot of films.. considered classics.
I think this is the first one I can remember that I didn't "click" with, for almost everything else I see the appeal and the excitement holds, or gets better even.
For this I can picture the appeal back THEN, but the excitement is just freaking gone.
I can't imagine fans of this one having it on loop or something, like Predator, Jaws or ROTLA fans have those on loop, I can totally see Freddy and Jason beating this one on that department too.
There's really nothing about it to
see today, is there?
I suppose, on paper, I understand why it was so revered back then... It's just hard to feel it now, it's the first time I can unfortunately say I don't get the fandom for it
today
I suppose all there's left is the respect for having broken new ground? Even if it's not effective today.
/10 - I saw it on tv this weekend. Man, even some of the action is terrible and poorly choreographed. The worst part was the nightmare sequence, how slow and fake the fight looks, with guys with guns just standing around for batfleck to flip them while they clearly assist him with the slow flips. 
