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

It’s a place that’s impossible to visit, even though we’ve been there many times: Small-town, USA.

But one Illinois small town from the “Halloween” movies rises above many in terms of its significance to cinema and pop culture.

Many of us go back to Haddonfield, Illinois once a year, while others go back more than once. Some will visit for the first time this Halloween out of curiosity, perhaps even out of obligation and peer pressure, while others will need permission slips from their parents and/or baby sitters.

Regardless of how many times you’ve visited, each trip is just as spine-tingling as the previous one, knowing that (fictional) unspeakable acts of evil took place in a town as ordinary as this one in Central Illinois.

The story goes, on Halloween night in 1963, a young 6-year-old boy named Michael Myers donned a clown mask and, armed with a kitchen knife, proceeded to go upstairs and murder his sister, sending shockwaves throughout the small town community. The movie picks up 15 years later, when he escaped from the sanitarium and returned home to pick up where he left off.

To be clear, Haddonfield, Illinois is entirely fictional and does not exist, but it’s small town charm has very much of a real world feeling.

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

Just A Small Town…Boy

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, not because they thought that man at the insane asylum would come after them, but because they wanted to chase their dreams of being filmmakers. The story goes they went to the library and pulled out a book that listed all the colleges and universities in America. They flipped to the film school at the University of Southern California, packed their bags, and headed west.

Carpenter actually didn’t want to be associated with horror films as he aspired to make westerns, but that encounter at the insane asylum planted a crucial seed inside him that has since germinated into a crucial part of his creativity. Years later in 1978, that seed proved to bear fruit when Carpenter directed what is considered by many film scholars as the most transformative horror movie of all time: “Halloween.”

All Roads Lead Home

Before “Halloween,” Carpenter directed an action/thriller movie called “Assault on Precinct 13.” It was while making this movie where he met a woman named Debra Hill.

Hill eventually became Carpenter’s girlfriend, and the two of them co-wrote the screenplay for “Halloween” with Hill also serving as producer. While Hill had a major role in creating “Halloween,” she never would have thought her hometown would serve much significance to the film.

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, Illinois is portrayed in the Halloween franchise like any typical small town in America, and is essentially 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 in Illinois is Haddonfield 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 many “Halloween” sequels that aren’t worth your time), a map in a bus terminal places Haddonfield just north of Pontiac.

In a scene from the 2021 movie “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. To say the franchise takes place in Illinois is all the more reason to visit Haddonfield every year.

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