One of House Crazy Sarah’s all-time favorite Halloween movies (a close second behind The Shining,) is none other than the original Halloween movie from 1978. Mostly because of the creepy old houses.
And yes, the filming took place in real old houses!
Below is the infamous childhood home of Michael Myers, as depicted in the film:
In real life, the home was built in 1888 and was owned by a nearby nursing home when the location scouts found it. It was being used at the time to store old wheelchairs. Creepy!
The Myers house, as it has come to be known, was built in American four-square style and has since been remodeled.
Here’s how it looks today:
If it looks a little off from scenes in the movie, you are correct. The house was actually picked up and moved from its original location to a sharp corner lot to make way for a condo development.
This is in southern California after all, not actually Haddonfield, Illinois, as the movie claims (there is no real town in Illinois called Haddonfield.)
The movie was not filmed in Illinois because of a very meager production budget. Instead, it was filmed in parts of LA, like the historic district of South Pasadena to give the film that old Midwest-America small town feel.
Here’s a still from the 1978 film:
And today in real life:
The heroine, Laurie Strode, is depicted in the film in and around her supposed home in South Pasadena.
Here’s how that house appeared in the movie:
And today, the white paint has been replaced with a sage green treatment and blue-purple front door.
Two of the other infamous houses from the movie – known as the babysitting houses from the last half of the movie – were scouted on Orange Grove Avenue, just north of Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood.
The Doyle house (above), where Laurie ends up in a grueling battle for her life with Michael Myers, was built in 1920 and remains pretty much the same today as it did in the film.
The Wallace house right across the street where Annie was babysitting and where she and her friends were murdered, was built later (in 1962) and looks rather different today than it appeared in the 1978 film.
The home has since been remodeled and the former open carport has been transformed into an enclosed garage over which a second floor addition was built.
All of these homes are private residences so lookiloos need to respect that fact when snapping pictures.
House Crazy Sarah is still smitten with this scary movie, all these years later, because the filming locations ring so true as a little old Midwestern town on Halloween night.
Remakes don’t even come close to the low-budget magic of the original Halloween!
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