Haddonfield, Illinois: How ‘Halloween’s’ iconic small town of horror came to be

( WGN-TV ) — One of Illinois’ most famous cities is one you’ve been to many times but you can’t actually visit in person. Few fictional towns have the same significance in cinema and pop culture history as Haddonfield, the picturesque suburban town featuring across many films in the “Halloween” franchise.

Haddonfield made its first appearance John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic “Halloween,” which established the town as one of lush fall foliage and sleepy streets — at least before former resident Michael Myers returns to finish the holiday killings he began 15 years earlier.

All-in-all, Haddonfield appears in 11 of the 13 films in the “Halloween” franchise, except for “Halloween III: Season of the Witch” (an anthology film not related to the rest of the series) and “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later,” which follows original protagonist Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) in California. When director David Gordon Green brought the series back with 2019’s “Halloween,” he brought back both Curtis and Haddonfield.

So how did it come to be the setting for sheer terror — and where in Illinois would Haddonfield exist if it were real? Let’s explore.

Haddonfield origins

To understand Haddonfield, we first need to understand its origin and creator.

Director John Carpenter, born in Upstate New York in 1948, moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, when he was five years old after his father accepted a teaching job at Western Kentucky University.

From an outsider perspective, Bowling Green seems a lot like a typical suburban American small town, with its share of coffee shops, pharmacies and schools, but it’s here where Carpenter found horror, even in a setting as conventional as Bowling Green.

While a student at Western Kentucky University, Carpenter’s psychology class took a field trip to, of all places, the county insane asylum. He describes the moment that stuck out to him in a podcast titled “Halloween: Unmasked.”

“There’s this one guy. He looked like evil incarnate, just the expression on his face. I don’t know what was wrong with him. I don’t know what his problem was, but he looked like he wanted to kill me and eat me,” Carpenter recalled. “He looked like a murderer, and that was kind of the backstory for Michael Myers and ‘Halloween.'”

Not long later, Carpenter and his friends decided to get out of Bowling Green to chase their dreams of being filmmakers.

All roads lead home

Before “Halloween,” Carpenter directed the action/thriller “Assault on Precinct 13,” where he met a woman named Debra Hill.

Hill eventually became Carpenter’s girlfriend, and they co-wrote the “Halloween” screenplay, with Hill also serving as producer. Her hometown? Haddonfield, New Jersey.

Carpenter has said he wanted “Halloween” to take place in small-town America, a place where you wouldn’t think twice about something bad happening, and the name “Haddonfield” sounded perfect.

Terror in the suburbs

Haddonfield is typically portrayed like any “normal” small town in America, and its assumed “safety” is an essential part of what makes “Halloween” so scary nearly 50 years later.

Prior to “Halloween,” horror films usually involved mythical creatures, such as monsters, vampires and werewolves. Essentially, they dealt with villains the general public had a hard time relating to.

Much of Alfred Hitchcock’s masterpiece “Psycho” takes place at a creepy motel, while Tobe Hooper’s “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” involves a group of teenage hippies who experience car troubles and wander off to find help, only to meet their demise in the form of a chainsaw-wielding lunatic wearing a mask made of human skin. Still, while scary, both are set in atypical areas members of the public are not known to frequent.

“Halloween” changed all that, terrifying audiences who now realized not even the most ordinary places are immune to evil.

Where is Haddonfield, Illinois located?

If Haddonfield, Illinois really existed, certain clues sprinkled throughout the “Halloween” movies reveal it would be along I-55 near Pontiac in Livingston County.

For example, in the sixth film of the franchise “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers,” (one of the franchise’s most divisive sequels) a map in a bus terminal places Haddonfield just north of Pontiac.

In a scene from 2021’s “Halloween Kills,” a Haddonfield resident trying to find and kill Myers takes a look at a map to think of his next move. The map, instead, looks eerily similar to a map of the eastern portion of Bloomington, Illinois.

The resident points to an address on Carl Drive, the same street where Bloomington’s most infamous crime took place in 1983. Susan Hendricks and her three children were murdered with an ax and kitchen knife. Husband and father David Hendricks was convicted but later re-tried and acquitted.

Other clues sprinkled throughout the franchise suggests Haddonfield is large enough to have a decent-sized hospital, a fairly large high school (with pretty sweet letterman jackets) and even a country club, but it’s also small enough that the Warren County Sheriff’s Office is the main law enforcement agency.

The “Halloween” franchise continues to haunt and scare people nearly 50 years after the world met Michael Myers. Unlike most film franchises, the “Halloween” timeline can be a little confusing, with some sequels ignoring previous films or being reboots. Curious which order to watch the “Halloween” movies in ? We’ve got you covered.

Happy Halloween!

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