John Carpenter’s 'Halloween': Things to Look For

Horror movies don’t come simpler or more effective than Halloween, director John Carpenter’s 1978 classic that helped revitalize the slasher genre and, of course, created one of the most popular costumes of all time. Halloween sends chills down your spine with nothing more than a few piano notes and long shots of the masked Michael Myers looming in the background, stalking his victims. (Today’s masters of horror could learn a thing or two from its less-is-more potency). To paraphrase Donald Pleasence’s Dr. Sam Loomis talking about Myers: This is a story about a man made up of pure evil.

After countless sequels and franchise reboots, it can sometimes feel like there’s no fresh ground in Myers. But it’s worth revisiting the movie that started it all to see how many deeper nuances were hiding just below the surface of Carpenter’s sublime terror. We rounded up the strange facts, goofs, and hints to catch next time Halloween inevitably pops up on a TV screen near you.

1. The Halloween theme song is its own character.

The opening credits set the mood with an image of a jack-o’-lantern and the movie’s theme song, which instantly communicate that Michael Myers is on his way and you should not underestimate him. The thing about that theme song: John Carpenter, who scored the movie himself as he did with many of his movies, clearly understood its power. It plays six different times throughout the film, along with variations on it (enough to make its own drinking game).

2. Halloween exists because of one rich man in the credits.

After seeing Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13, Syrian American financier Moustapha Al Akkad put up the $300,000 budget for the director to make a movie about a psychopath who stalks babysitters. Today, the Akkad family is still involved with production of movies in the franchise.

3. Jamie Lee Curtis was a nobody when Halloween came out.

It seems hard to fathom now, but Halloween was Jamie Lee Curtis’s feature film debut. Curtis, of course, is the daughter of Janet Leigh, who had one of the most memorable roles in a scary movie ever with Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. If you look closely, Myers’s knife of choice even resembles the one from Psycho.

4. The towns in Halloween don't exist, though they're (sort of) based on real places.

Halloween is mostly set in Haddonfield, Illinois, the sleepy Midwestern town where young Michael Myers begins his murderous mayhem. He later escapes from a hospital in Smith’s Grove, Illinois. Both places are fictional, but Smiths Grove, Kentucky, is close to where John Carpenter grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Haddonfield is a reference to co-writer and producer Debra Hill’s hometown of Haddonfield, New Jersey. And the shooting location for the haunted Myers home was actually Pasadena, California.

5. Michael Myers had an early obsession with masks.

We watch a six-year-old Myers put on a clown mask that’s been discarded on the floor in the earliest Halloween scene, before he tragically kills his own sister Judith. The masks help make Myers seem human-like, yet somehow beyond human thought and reason. “The idea was to make him almost humorless, faceless,” Hill said.

6. Michael Myers clearly has a tortured relationship with sex.

All of the murders we see happen in the original Halloween are tied to sexual activity: Myers stabs his sister to death after she’s been fooling around with a boy. Later Annie, Lynda, and Bob all suffer similar fates after they’ve disrobed or slept together.

7. Laurie Strode seems downright conservative for 1978.

According to common horror movie logic (which Halloween helped usher in), the more of a prude you are, the more likely you are to make it through the night. So it is here: Curtis’s Laurie, especially for her age in the late 1970s, stays covered up and doesn’t kiss a single person. She also expresses embarrassment when confronted about her feelings for a classmate.

8. Dr. Loomis isn't very good at parking.

Loomis pursues Myers after the killer has escaped a hospital, using his deep knowledge of the patient to track him down. But Loomis does something un-doctorly in the process: He parks in a handicapped spot, despite not having any noticeable handicap.

9. Laurie gets a schooling in fate that hints at the film's final ending.

While she’s in a high school class and Myers is lurking outside, Laurie answers a teacher’s question about destiny. It might seem like filler dialogue, but it speaks to how Myers is constantly driven back—including in later movies—into the lives of the people in Haddonfield. She says, “Costaine wrote that fate was somehow related only to religion, where Samuels felt that fate was like a natural element, like earth, air, fire, and water."

10. A matchbook holds clues to Myers's past (and future).

You can see Loomis looking at a matchbook in a car with his colleague Marion Chambers early in the movie. It says: The Rabbit in Red Lounge. Loomis later finds the same matchbook after Myers steals the car, which helps lead him to the killer. The Rabbit in Red Lounge nightclub makes an appearance in Rob Zombie’s 2007 reboot of Halloween, as the place where Myers’s mother works as a dancer.

11. There are two brief glimpses of Myers underneath the mask in Halloween.

We barely see Myers in profile as he jumps on top of a car outside the hospital where he’s being held early in the movie, but you get a much better look at his face when Laurie pulls off his mask near the end. That is the face of actor Tony Moran, who didn’t go on to do any of the sequels, though he still became a cult icon. The masked Myers is played by Nick Castle, who’s credited simply as “The Shape."

12. Laurie sings a really creepy song that might be about her and Michael Myers.

While Laurie walks around town and Myers pursues her, she sings a couple lyrics that sound sweet but are haunting in context: “Wish I had you all alone / Just the two of us.” Internet digging reveals that it’s not a pop song, but rather it could be a reference to her repressed romantic feelings, or a nod to what will become her ongoing connection to Myers.

13. Tommy Wallace, the kid Laurie babysits for, looks weirdly like young Michael Myers.

Myers as a six-year-old is played by Will Sandin, with blond longer hair. The actor playing Tommy, the boy Laurie is babysitting, bears a striking resemblance to Sandin.

It could be a coincidence, but somehow we think not.

14. Michael Myers's ghoulish mask is actually just William Shatner.

As Halloween didn’t have a lot of money to go around, its art director Tommy Lee Wallace bought a cheap mask at a costume store, which happened to be of William Shatner’s Captain Kirk from Star Trek. Apparently the mask didn’t look much like Shatner, anyway, which worked for the best: The filmmakers painted it and adjusted the eyeholes to provide the unsettling visage for their maniac.

15. The Myers home magically transforms over time.

In the opening sequence of Halloween, we see Myers walk through his family’s home on his way to killing his sister, and there’s floral wallpaper.

In a later shot, we see Loomis and Sheriff Brackett walk through the very same area of the house, and it has a different floral wallpaper. But Brackett says no one has lived in the house since the incident in 1963. So did Myers redecorate on his trip back into town?

16. John Carpenter previewed one of his next movies in Halloween.

Halloween has two movie-within-a-movie moments: The teens and the kids they’re babysitting are seen watching The Thing from Another World (1951) and Forbidden Planet (1956), both of which undoubtedly influenced Carpenter. In fact, Carpenter went on to make The Thing (1982), an adaptation of Who Goes There, the same novella on which The Thing from Another World is based.

17. A neighbor doesn't help Laurie when she's in trouble.

One of the more unnerving moments in Halloween is so brief that you could easily miss it: As Laurie is being chased by Myers later in the movie, she runs to a neighboring house and screams for help. You can see an outside light turn on and an arm of someone inside looking through a window. But the person quickly walks away, leaving Laurie in harm’s way.

18. Michael Myers is hard to kill—even by horror movie standards.

It became a running joke in the Halloween franchise that Myers is impossible to kill. In fact, he seems to resurrect himself on the spot, a trope that was reused in many later slasher films. In the first movie, we watch Laurie stab him once, then again in a closet with his own knife. Then Loomis shoots him multiple times, leading him to fall off the second floor of a house. But when Loomis goes to check on the body, Myers is already gone. As little Tommy puts it best, “You can’t kill the bogeyman."

19. Michael Myers's age doesn't quite add up.

Myers is supposed to be age six when Halloween begins in 1963. In 1978, then, he should about 21 years old. Yet in the end credits, the older Myers is said to be 23, which is impossible. Except, of course, in a movie.

20. John Carpenter gave himself a code name.

In the end credits, the music is listed as being performed by The Bowling Green Philharmonic Orchestra. Well, there is no such orchestra. Carpenter is from Bowling Green, Kentucky, and decided to gussy up his music credit. (To be fair, he did get help on the songs from a few friends.)

All screenshots via Anchor Bay Entertainment. This story has been updated for 2020.