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.”
Except when it does.
As far as I can count, for a town of only 40,000 or so (I think; no census data for the place exists), it has seen more than 150 murders since 1978, nearly all during October.
Haddonfield — first put on a map in John Carpenter’s 1978 masterpiece “Halloween,” and for the supposed last time this month in the latest movie “Halloween Ends,” starring Haddonfield’s second most famous resident, Jamie Lee Curtis (aka Laurie Strode) — is the hometown of Michael Myers. He is the most famous resident (and as always, not to be confused with Michael “Austin Powers” Myers). This Michael Myers is not Canadian nice. He is American, red-blooded. Michael Myers, who has appeared in a dozen “Halloween” movies (not including 1982′s “Halloween III,” a sequel in name only), has been blown up, set on fire, decapitated, shot dozens of times, stabbed repeatedly, hit by cars, thrown down a mine shaft, electrocuted, incinerated. Being a Midwestern boy with can-do spirit, he stands back up.
You could say the same of the image of Everytown, USA. It stays on our cultural map — as viewed every holiday season in Hallmark movies, and promised at every Trump rally — even as the real thing is a fantasy. You don’t need to drive far out of Chicago, in any direction, to pass through a Midwest everytown with a quaint, dusty Main Street full of empty storefronts and impressive old architecture that’s been dark for decades.
What makes Haddonfield important, though, is what made Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and Hawkins, Indiana, of “Stranger Things,” and many other fictional Midwest small towns, so indelible. These are places that retain the allure of an America we’re promised, full of kindness and nurturing, alongside the hypocrisy we’ve always known. Like Spoon River, Bedford Falls, Grover’s Corners, Brigadoon, Lake Wobegon and Springfield in “The Simpsons” — some Midwestern, all too good to be true — Haddonfield will be defined not as One of the Best Places in America to Live but One of the Best Places to Remind Yourself That Small Town America was Never a Vacuum.
As a Haddonfield literature teacher lectures her class: Fate never changes.
These will always be mean streets for some, for more than we recognize. Even Winesburg, Ohio, the setting of Anderson’s 1919 classic about the suffocation, isolation and passive aggression of Midwest life, once hailed as the definitive Midwestern town, was inspired by the young artists who lived with Anderson in a Chicago boardinghouse. Your location does not shield you from human character. One of the best gags in Carpenter’s original “Halloween” is that Haddonfield is so oblivious to its place in the world, no one notices that Myers, the killer, spends half the film driving around in broad daylight, in a clearly marked station wagon stolen from his sanitarium.
“These ideas that a small Midwest town can embody the tone of the country itself sometimes come from people who aren’t from the Midwest but impose a narrow-mindedness and idealism on it,” said Liesl Olson, director of Chicago studies at the Newberry Library. “But then if these towns and people don’t exist in real life, it’s an idea worth preserving, I guess.” She thinks of Gopher Prairie, the fictional Minnesota town in Sinclair Lewis’s 1920 milestone “Main Street,” which helped Lewis win a Nobel Prize. “It’s a critique of the small mindedness of American life, but also, that phrase ‘Wall Street versus Main Street’ that politicians use, it comes from this novel. It came as Lewis and Anderson and Edgar Lee Masters’ ‘Spoon River Anthology,’ all around the same time, in the early 20th century, were thinking about the beauties and horrors of Midwest life.”
Haddonfield, a century later, fits nicely.
When the “Halloween” series returned a few years ago — courtesy of the acclaimed independent filmmaker David Gordon Green, with Carpenter producing — Haddonfield was now more than 40 years removed from the violent events of the 1978 original, though more interestingly, the town had become more like the rest of America. It’s a reminder that everywhere in America now feels like everywhere else in America, for better and worse. Notes of gentrification and change are abundant. It’s a mark of how thoughtful and ambitious Green has been with Carpenter’s Haddonfield (even when the rebooted series, quality-wise, struggles with tone). Nichol’s Hardware, the Main Street store that Myers breaks into in the original film and first steals his iconic mask, can be seen going out of business in the new movies. You suspect a big-box landscape just off screen now. A son tells his father that he wants to study dance. A high school couple go to the school Halloween dance as Bonnie and Clyde — except he’s Bonnie and she’s Clyde.
When Myers returns now, he even faces a mob of Haddonfield residents who are more bluster than guts (until they are all guts). Even as mob violence reveals the ugly face of Haddonfield, a woman tells the news: “This was a safe place and now it’s not anymore.” People forget. The new “Halloween” films play pointedly like a future Trump-era artifact.
Not that everyone ignores the posturing. A cemetery worker, referencing nearby Chicago, looks around the gravestones and mentions her cousin works at a cemetery where “they got Bernie Mac, Muddy Waters, generals, philanthropists, a beatnik poet,” but all Haddonfield has to show for itself are the graves created by its murderous son.
After all, Haddonfield’s unspoken centerpiece, for generations, has not been a town square or resurgent downtown or prosperous suburban development, but the old Myers house, the perennially crumbling clapboard home where an adolescent Michael Myers killed his sister, in 1963 — then returned 15 years later, in 1978, to play catch-up. It’s that house every town has that sits abandoned for decades, a gray reminder of ghosts and decline. Across 12 films, depending on the continuity and filmmaker, the Myers House has been vandalized, picketed, turned into a community garden, used for reality shows, or left to rot. In this new series, it’s now owned by a couple who dine out on its lore.
The original “Halloween” film — so successful it led to a cottage industry of far less subtle, much less interesting imitators, namely the “Friday the 13th” movies — is old enough now that it’s easy to forget it was not intended as just a slasher exploitation cheapie but a nod to the unmoored mood among Americans in the late ‘70s. Halloween the holiday had gone commercial, even as the nation heard unsettling tales of serial killers among us — several (such as John Wayne Gacy) in the Chicago area alone. Reports, often unfounded, of poisoned trick-or-treat candy, razor blades slipped into apples and satanic altars out in the woods became foundational myths.
Whenever Carpenter, now in his 70s, is asked why he chose Haddonfield, Illinois, for the setting, he gives an obvious reply: He was thinking of Everywhere, USA, some imagined heart of the nation, but he also cribbed ideas for the town from his own Kentucky upbringing. The name Haddonfield came from Debra Hill, his co-writer and producer who had grown up around Haddonfield, New Jersey (then went on to produce “The Fisher King” and “World Trade Center,” among others; she died of cancer in 2005).
Yet, despite the film’s reminders of Illinois, it could be anywhere.
“For me, as a kid growing up in a small Texas town, I still thought Haddonfield was familiar,” said Kendall Phillips, who teaches courses about the links between controversial filmmaking and public memory at Syracuse University. “Yes, it had a generic similarity to a Middle America of individual homes, front-facing porches and big backyards, but we forget, that came as a shock. Horror had long been set in the wilderness or a Transylvania or somewhere like that, and those shadows were shadows I knew. I knew those streets even though I had never been there before. Plus, unlike even horror movies such as ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ which had teenagers going out and having fun, the teens in ‘Halloween’ stay home. They’re not in spooky churches or stopping by some Bates Motel. They’re just home. But even that’s not safe anymore.”
“Halloween,” which landed on both Gene Siskel and Ebert’s year-end best-of lists for 1978, remains intense and unnerving, largely because of how immersive Haddonfield feels. The place is quiet and chilly. We see empty street intersections and a few stray leaves. Cinematographer Dean Cundey, who would later shoot “Back to the Future,” “Jurassic Park” and “Apollo 13,” follows Haddonfield residents in long, unbroken shots across wide streets and sidewalks, bringing a watchful, free-floating threat to nothing much at all. We walk from homes to school, and schools to homes. We intuit a map of the place.
This atmosphere is so palpable it’s easy to overlook (I certainly did, and do) that we don’t really see all that much of Haddonfield. Also, it’s a little too green to be autumn. There aren’t that many leaves, or Halloween decorations, or even different streets here. It would take Green, decades later, to add decorative ghosts to the trees and actual piles of leaves.
If you take all the “Halloween” films as reference: There are also low-slung elementary schools surrounded by chain-link fencing. Boulevards lined with Victorian and Cape Cod-style homes with welcoming porches and big lawns. There are farms just outside town, and two newspapers and two hospitals inside. The University of Illinois is mentioned but there’s also a community college there and a strip club, tavern and small police force. It’s middle to upper-middle class, but with pockets of inbred poverty. No one mows the cemetery, and despite the violent history, there are more shadows than streetlights.
So indelible was this map that (particularly in regards to the original), online fans now post pictures of filming locations alongside how they looked in the movies. Spirit Halloween sells Haddonfield doormats and welcome signs for your front door. A few years back some ingenious soul on Medium posted a convincing faux-news story about Haddonfield’s reinstating Halloween celebrations. (The mayor said, “We are proceeding with caution. We don’t want a repeat of ‘78, ‘88, ‘89, ‘95 or ‘02.”) No wonder, if you Google “Haddonfield,” requests for its ZIP code and population are among the auto-fills.
The real Haddonfield, of course, is South Pasadena, in California. That explains the lack of foliage (and mountains in the background). According to the Los Angeles Times, the 130-year-old home used for the Meyers house has since been made a historic landmark.
But if Haddonfield existed in Illinois, it would most likely be around the Bloomington-Normal area, said Jim Hansen, a professor of English and critical theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign who also teaches classes on horror. It seems to sit off I-55. That said, Bloomington-Normal is south of Livingston County, the (real) county referenced in the series. On the other hand, isn’t it scarier if we don’t know?
“The thing about the original ‘Halloween,’” he said, “is that space itself is scarier than the monster. It’s everyplace, and also a white neighborhood, so there is an anonymity. You could diagnose that as political. The suburbs in the 1970s were places of white flight — and one of the rules of horror is the safe place is always the least safe.” He noted how much the opening scenes of Jordan Peele’s “Get Out” are set on a suburban street that could be an homage to Haddonfield. Except, unlike Haddonfield, where most of the horror takes place behind closed doors, a Black character gets kidnapped off the street.
In fact, Carpenter wanted the plot and setting of “Halloween” stripped back to almost the elements of a fable. So we don’t know these people or who they were capable of being. There’s a scene near the end were Jamie Lee Curtis, desperate for help, picks up a potted plant and tosses it at a window, to attract the attention of neighbors, who quickly draw curtains closed and turn off porch lights. This would have looked queasily familiar in 1978. The story of Kitty Genovese still had a long cautionary tail then. According to news reports in 1964, the 28-year-old bartender had been raped and murdered on a residential street of Queens, despite neighbors hearing her pleas for help. That story — which has since been largely disproved — became a cultural warning: You didn’t have to move to New York to be murdered. Haddonfield may look nice, but you’re on your own.
All of this builds to the most haunting part of the film.
A simple montage of images of places where bad things happened, removed of people, life or evidence. Except, there is a history there. Haddonfield now is nothing special.
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