CHICAGO — Haddonfield, Illinois, does not exist.
It has never existed. It is arguably the most famous place in Illinois that is impossible to visit. But I have been there. I have visited often since 1978, several years before I was old enough to visit. I know a few of its streets, buildings and its downtown as well as I know the topography of my childhood. Sometimes I can see it all in my mind’s eye even more clearly. A map of Haddonfield has been imprinted on my brain for 44 years. Roger Ebert once described Haddonfield well: “A slice of life that is carefully painted (in drab daylights and impenetrable nighttimes) before its human monster enters the scene.”
Haddonfield, Illinois, like other small Midwest towns planted into books, movies, TV shows and plays, is a stand-in for Everytown, USA — which never existed, either. It is mundane and idyllic, the right place to live if warmth, routine and a certain comfortable complacency are a priority. It is Our Town, yet No Town. It is, as a Haddonfield police officer says just before he’s killed, “a simple town where nothing exciting ever happens.”
