HALLOWEEN by Curtis Richards, based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill- Film vs. Novel


http://www.amazon.com/Halloween-Curtis-Richards/dp/0553132261/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1403307486&sr=8-1&keywords=halloween+curtis+richards
PUBLISHER: Bantam, 10/1979
GENRE: Fiction/Contemporary Horror
SETTING: Illinois, USA 1978
WIKIPEDIA: link
MOVIE TRAILER: link
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A++

FROM PUBLISHER: Based on the screenplay by John Carpenter and Debra Hill.

Tricked by his cunning ... Treated to his savagery ... Annie, Linda and Laurie ... fresh, pretty, ready to be taken ... stalked by a sadistic power who has returned to claim new victims, on this ... the most frightening night of the year.







THINGS NOT IN THE FLIM: This book was actually released a year after the film. Not sure why. I love the film but the book's so much better! It's only 166 pages but boy is it packed with extras. It's more graphic sexually and the murders are more gory, especially the murder of his sister. The best part is that we get to learn a little about Michael Audrey Myers' life before and during the fifteen years he was away at Smith's Grove Sanitarium for the murder of his seventeen-year old sister, Judith, when he was six years old. We learn his thoughts before and during her murder and what he did immediately afterward, before his parents came home to find him standing outside.

We meet Michael's mother's mother at the beginning of chapter one. It's Halloween and he shows her his Halloween clown costume that he got from Woolworth. I love his granny. She's sassy. She was offended by his cheap store-bought non scary costume and even referred to Michael once as 'Mister Woolworth Clown Costume'. She began to reminisce to him and his mother Edith about what Halloween was like when she was a child. She said if it was a tame Halloween only your chickens would get beheaded, or as Michael said, unheaded.

We learn that Michael had started wetting the bed after not doing so for three years. He'd been getting into fights at school and with his sister. He'd been having violent dreams and scariest of all, he'd been hearing voices that were telling him to say he hates people. Later in the book Loomis and Sheriff Brackett were discussing how Michael's great-grandfather Nordstrom (his mother's father's father) had heard voices too and had even murdered two people at a harvest dance in the 1890's and was hanged for it.

Shortly before murdering his sister, he goes trick or treating at his own house on Peecher Street with other kids from the neighborhood. His sister jokingly asked the kids what they'd do if she didn't give them candy and Michael said he'd kill her. She said, 'Was that you Michael Myers?!' and he said, 'I'm not Michael Myers. I'm a clown'. Every time I've read that line its caused me to laugh out loud, for some reason.

Soon after that Judith's boyfriend Danny comes over. Michael is spying on them through the window. They're kissing downstairs then later upstairs in her bedroom. Michael can hear the sounds they're making through the open windows and 'the sounds filled him with a murderous hatred.' He doesn't understand why they're making those sounds. While he's standing outside listening to them we learn of a recurring dream he's been having. In the dream two people who look like Judy and Danny are dancing around a fire outside with other people. He's jealous as he watches them dance and voices are telling him to kill the lovers.

After Danny leaves he goes into Judy's room and stabs her over thirty times while she's sitting at her vanity, brushing her hair, naked except for bikini underwear that have red hearts on them. He stabs her in her wrist, hand, breasts, arms, legs, groin and throat. He goes into the kitchen, eats a cookie, drinks milk out of the bottle, then goes outside and that's when his parents show up and find him holding the knife.

Earlier that day he told his grandmother, in response to her suggesting he disguise is face with white clown makeup, that he wasn't going to play any pranks, and was just going to ask for candy and in response she told him to have an 'innocent, Woolworth kind of Halloween.' Oooh, it was anything but!

Loomis is remembering all the times at the sanitarium over the past fifteen years where Michael got revenge on other kids for some slight but was never seen doing it. One kid got food poisoning after playing a joke on Michael by loosening the salt shaker top so the salt would pour out when you went to use it, one boy was scalded in the shower after repeatedly turning the TV volume down when Michael kept turning it up, a nurse fell down the stairs and fractured her pelvis days after an argument with Michael, a boy who forgot to return a game to Michael got a mysterious rash and had to be hospitalized, and worst of all, Michael suggested one year that they be allowed to have a Halloween party, of all things. A girl was bobbing for apples when the lights went out. Soon after when the lights came back on the girl was laying there, almost dead, from someone, Michael, trying to drown her. Loomis looked over at Michael, who smiled at him, but his costume was dry and Loomis had no proof Michael did anything to the girl.

When Laurie's walking home from school with Annie and Lynda (it's spelled Linda in the book) and goes inside, her red-haired mother is there, making candied apples and they have a short conversation about evilness. This is right before Laurie goes into her room and sees Michael staring at her from the clothes line. In the film, she walks though the front door and is shown walking straight into her bedroom.

Laurie's father is Chester Strode. Film credits say his name is Morgan though it's never spoken in the film.

In the book, several people who see Michael are close enough to tell he may be wearing a mask, but they aren't sure. In the film, most aren't close enough to him to wonder if it's a mask until they're being murdered by him.

When Loomis and Sheriff Brackett (Annie's father) go into Michael's old house and find the dead dog, they say his intestines are hanging out.

Shortly before Annie's killed, she's at Lindsey's, brushing her own hair. Michael's watching through the window and is staring at her 'large' breasts and becomes sexually aroused. 'The sex between his legs throbbed in an unpleasant way.'

Annie asks Lindsey why their laundry room is in a separate building outside. Lindsey tells her that her mother wanted it outside because of the noise they both make. That's not mentioned at all in the movie.

Toward the end when Laurie goes to Lindsey's looking for Bob and Lynda and finds Annie's dead body in bed with Judith's tombstone, her stomach had been cut open up to her throat and her intestines were out.


I usually repost this review every year.

MY THOUGHTS: I've always been a fan of the film and got a copy of the book in May 2009 from a friend. The book is so great. Unfortunately it's so expensive that most fans of the film will probably never get to read it. I don't know if the added stuff that I've mentioned was in the original screenplay or not or if Curtis came up with it on his own. Either way, I'm glad it was in the book and not the film. It makes reading the book so much more exciting.



PAPERBACKS FROM HELL: The Twisted History of '70s and '80s Horror Fiction by Grady Hendrix


PUBLISHER: Quirk Books, 9/2017
GENRE: Nonfiction/Horror novels
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A

SYNOPSIS: Take a tour through the horror paperback novels of the 1970s and ’80s . . . if you dare. Page through dozens and dozens of amazing book covers featuring well-dressed skeletons, evil dolls, and knife-wielding killer crabs! Read shocking plot summaries that invoke devil worship, satanic children, and haunted real estate! Horror author and vintage paperback book collector Grady Hendrix offers killer commentary and witty insight on these trashy thrillers that tried so hard to be the next Exorcist or Rosemary’s Baby. It’s an affectionate, nostalgic, and unflinchingly funny celebration of the horror fiction boom of two iconic decades, complete with story summaries and artist and author profiles. You’ll find familiar authors, like V. C. Andrews and R. L. Stine, and many more who’ve faded into obscurity. Plus recommendations for which of these forgotten treasures are well worth your reading time and which should stay buried.


MY THOUGHTS: This book is worth the price just for the book covers alone. The author is very funny and entertaining. The book is a large and heavy paperback. It's full-color with thick pages. The cover has French flaps. It has eight chapters: Hail, Satan, Creepy Kids, When Animals Attack, Real Estate Nightmares, Weird Science, Gothic and Romantic, Inhumanoids, Splatterpunks, Serial Killers, and Super Creeps. My favorite section is called Toys 'R' Death, from the Creepy Kids chapter, about killer dolls/stuffed animals.

Humorous spoilers are given for most of the books mentioned so be careful not to read too much if it's a book you're interested in.

Brief biographies are given for thirty-one authors and some for publishing houses.

Too many titles were mentioned in the book to list here but you can see photos of the titles from the "credits" section here. Click on each image to enlarge. Edit- Someone created a list on Goodreads of all the books mentioned, here.

You can see many images from inside the book here. Click on each photo to enlarge.

The only things this lacked was a list of films that were based on horror novels and maybe a listing of all the horror novels published during the 70s and 80s. A large task, I know.



LET'S GO PLAY AT THE ADAMS' by Mendal Johnson


PUBLISHER: Crowel, 1974
GENRE: Fiction/horror
SETTING: Maryland, USA
PURCHASE: link
READ FREE: link
MY GRADE: B

FROM PUBLISHER: Surely, it was only a game. In the orderly, pleasant world Barbara inhabited, nice children -- and they were nice children -- didn't hold an adult captive.

But what Barbara didn't count on was the heady effect their new-found freedom would have on the children. Their wealthy parents were away in Europe, and in this rural area of Maryland, the next house was easily a quarter of a mile away. The power of adults was in their hands, and they were tempted by it. They tasted it and toyed with it -- their only aim was to test its limits. Each child was consumed by his own individual lust and caught up with the others in sadistic manipulation and passion, until finally, step by step, their grim game strips away the layers of childishness to reveal the vicious psyche, conceived in evil and educated in society's sophisticated violence, that lies always within civilized men.

More than a terrifying horror story, Let's Go Play At The Adams' is a compelling psychological exercise of brooding insights and deadly implications.


MY THOUGHTS: I can't think of much to say about this one. It left me feeling emotionless. I was after a print copy for years and finally got one in 2018 for almost $13 total. I have the cover shown, which is from 1993. I'm almost positive I learned of this on the now defunct IMDB forum years ago. While very disturbing, it wasn't as disturbing as I'd anticipated and I'm really let down. I found ten-year-old Cindy to be very annoying. Seventeen-year-old Dianne is quite disturbed but I just don't buy it. The ending wasn't what I was expecting either. The epilogue sucked majorly and is implausible and it kind of ruined the book.

Basically the point of this post is to let you know you can get on a wish list at Archive.org to read this and you can also read about the author here.

Edit- The book I'm currently reading, Paperbacks from Hell, dedicated a page to this novel. Read it here. Click on image to enlarge.

Edit 2: This came back into print 3/2020.


WITCHES FOUR by Marc Brown

PUBLISHER: Parent's Magazine Press, 10/1980
GENRE: Children's Fiction
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A

FROM PUBLISHER: Four witches discover their lost magic hats have been turned into houses by four homeless cat.











MY THOUGHTS: This is a very short full-color, fully illustrated rhyming picture book that's beyond cute. I wish this one in particular had more text and was a bit longer. Four witches are flying upside down and their magic hats fall off. They search and find that four anthropomorphic cats are living in them. "It's raining houses!" said the cats. "How nice." They moved right in and dined on mice." The cat's won't give the hats back but the witches win in the end and the cats go with them.












THE WITCH WHO WAS AFRAID OF WITCHES by Alice Low

PUBLISHER: Pantheon, 9/1978
GENRE: Children's Fiction
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: A

FROM PUBLISHER: Wendy is a little witch who is afraid of her mean, bossy witch sisters—until one special Halloween night when she makes a magical discovery and outwitches her older sisters.















MY THOUGHTS: Another cute children's book that has a lot of text and is fully illustrated in full color. This is about Wendy, younger than her two sisters who don't seem to want her to learn to fly on her broom or cast spells. She learns how to on her own but in the process, on Halloween night, meets a child dressed as a ghost who's out trick-or-treating and hangs out with them (don't know the gender) and their mother. I wouldn't say this is suitable for the youngest of child because Wendy casts two negative spells on her sisters and in one of them, her sister could have been seriously injured.







THE WITCHES' SUPERMARKET by Susan Meddaugh

PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Company, 10/1991
GENRE: Children's Fiction
PURCHASE: link
MY GRADE: B

FROM PUBLISHER: On their way to a Halloween party, Helen and her dog Martha happen upon a very creepy supermarket for witches.














MY THOUGHTS: Helen saw a woman drop something, a coupon, so followed her inside a supermarket that turned out to be for witches only. The products they sold were quite humorous, such as baby brown bats, iguana chops, poison apples, poison mushrooms, apples with or without worms, just to name a few. Chaos ensued when they discovered Helen's dog in the shopping cart. The very end is pretty funny but the book isn't all that exciting. The artwork is very nice. The book is full color and age appropriate of the smallest child.