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The question comes about like clockwork during the spookiest time of year: where is Haddonfield, Illinois?
It’s the place where Michael Myers embarked on a reign of terror in the long-running horror franchise “Halloween,” more than a decade after killing his 15-year-old sister Judith Myers — when he was just six years old — on a chilly Halloween night in 1963.
Michael returned 15 years later, terrorizing the quaint community with numerous killings over decades.
Haddonfield, Illinois, isn’t a real place, though it resembles many features of “small town America” that can be found in other communities.
Its name comes from another Haddonfield – Haddonfield, New Jersey, a borough in Camden County, where Halloween producer Debra Hill was born.
“Haddonfield was a place that I loved,” she told the Courier-Post newspaper in 1999. “It’s really a beautiful community…Basically, I used the name to pay homage to the town where I grew up.’
The fictional Illinois community was the setting for the vast majority of the films in the franchise, including the most recent installment, “Halloween Ends,” which premiered in 2022.
“We were looking for a mythical, small-town America where this whole drama could play out. So we invented Haddonfield, Illinois,” John Carpenter, who wrote and directed the 1978 film and has executive-produced the more recent films, said in an October 2022 by WGLT radio in Bloomington-Normal. “The name hit perfectly for us.”
Carpenter said, in his mind, Haddonfield had around 30,000 residents, though the later movies – which he didn’t direct – offer conflicting views.
Despite its setting in the peaceful Illinois community, the majority of the scenes in the initial film were actually shot in Pasadena, California.
“When we shot the movie, we just had to watch out for palm trees, which don’t really occur a lot in Illinois. We did not succeed in getting rid of all the palm trees, but we tried,” Carpenter told WGLT.
If Haddonfield was real, where would it be located?
A map pictured in a bus terminal in “Halloween 6” shows Haddonfield north of Pontiac but south of Dwight, leading one to guess it may be located along Interstate 55.