In John Carpenter’s Halloween, Michael Myers is said to come from Haddonfield, Illinois.
Haddonfield is a fictional Midwestern town created for the Halloween series. The film opens there on Halloween night in 1963, when six-year-old Michael Myers murders his teenage sister Judith. Fifteen years later, he escapes Smith’s Grove Sanitarium and returns to Haddonfield, beginning the central stalking narrative.
The town’s name is not meant to identify a real setting for the story. Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill developed Haddonfield as an ordinary American suburb, which makes Michael’s violence more disturbing: the danger emerges in familiar streets, homes, schools, and backyards rather than in an isolated gothic location.
Haddonfield is sometimes confused with other fictional horror towns. Woodsboro is the setting of Scream, Springwood is associated with A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Derry is the Maine town in Stephen King’s It. Haddonfield remains one of the best-known fictional locations in slasher cinema, appearing throughout the Halloween franchise.