scroll to the bottom for a minor update
I want to talk about one detail from John Carpenter's “Halloween” (1978) which is genuinely hilarious but also doesn’t matter at all. Michael Myers might be innocent of a crime that everyone thinks he committed.
In the middle of the movie, Laurie and Annie pull up to the hardware store to chat with Annie’s dad, Sheriff Brackett? He’s shouting over the hardware store’s burglar alarm where someone stole a Halloween mask, rope and a couple of knives.We are meant to think that Michael Myers broke into the store and stole the mask.
But did he? Let’s take a look at the timeline.
At the beginning of the movie, Michael Myers breaks out of the Sanitarium on the night of October 30, and drives to Haddonfield. The next morning he’s watching Laurie Strode on her way to school and he’s already wearing his creepy mask, let’s say this is 8:30am. He stalks Laurie at school, wearing his mask. He stalks Tommy Doyle who is just leaving school, while wearing the mask, let’s say 3pm.
High school is dismissed, let’s say 3:30pm, and Laurie, Annie and Lynda walk home and there’s Michael, in his mask. He stands right outside Annie’s home, wearing the mask. He is in Laurie’s backyard, wearing the mask.
Later, Annie picks up Laurie for their babysitting gig, and that’s when they pull up to the hardware store, burglar alarm still ringing in the background, one would assume since the time of the break-in, where the Sheriff says someone stole a Halloween mask, rope and a couple of knives. The girls drive to their babysitting gigs, with the sun about to set. Chicago sunset on October 31 is typically around 5:30pm. So let’s say they drove up to the hardware store around 5pm.
Perhaps the hardware store closed on a weekday and Michael broke in a few hours before this scene… then how could he have been stalking Laurie as early as 8:30am?
Either Michael broke into the store and stole his mask predawn and the alarm was ringing for ten hours straight OR the hardware store was closed for some reason and someone robbed it right after school was let out (probably Ben Tramer), and Michael somehow had another mask the entire time.
What are we to make of all this? It’s that none of this matters at all. "Halloween" is a masterpiece of horror and suspense, and this scene is just a way to create tension by alluding that someone in Haddonfield broke into the hardware store to steal a Halloween mask, rope and a couple of knives.
The lesson here is that pedantic plot and timeline integrity is not an essential ingredient in making a movie masterpiece.
update 2026/11/01: I was a little off with my timing on Chicago sunsets - for October 31 it's actually around 5:45pm. However, in 1978, the switch from Daylight Saving Time frequently happened before Halloween (until 2007 we switched our clocks back to Standard Time on the last Sunday of October). Indeed in 1978, we moved our clocks back on October 29. That meant that sunset on October 31, 1978 was actually around 4:45pm!
Which makes this other discovery even more curious - I totally forgot about this line in the movie:
Again, none of this matters at all.
