Halloween (1978) - 38 mistakes

Continuity: In the scene when Michael is carrying Annie's body into the house her head is on the left side of his body. After they show the boy looking out the window they cut back to Michael and suddenly Annie's head is on the right side of his body.

Factual error: Even though the story is set in Haddonfield IL, all of the cars have California license plates.

Revealing: There is a scene where Michael Myers is hiding behind a hedge bush and Laurie and her friend go to investigate. Laurie turns around and talks and you see cigarette smoke go by the camera. It came from one of the camera crew members shooting the scene.

Continuity: In the closing credits, Michael Myers is said to be 23 years of age, he was actually 21.

Continuity: When Laurie is walking home the sidewalk instantly goes from wet to dry.

Continuity: When Laurie is beating on the door to Tommy's house and telling him to open it, the door knob is on the right side of the door. When it shows Tommy opening it from the inside, the door knob is also on the right side (it should be on the left).

Visible crew/equipment: Just before Laurie stabs Michael with the knitting needle you can see that one of the window shutters is open and that the wind is ruffling the curtain. When the camera gets closer and the curtain is out of the way you can see the huge fan in the studio being used to simulate the wind outside.

Continuity: There is a scene involving Michael Myers breaking the closet in order to get to Laurie, then why near the end of the film does it show you the closet in tip-top condition?

Visible crew/equipment: When Annie is locked in the laundry room, there's a scene where the phone is ringing incessantly and the camera pans slowly to the right showing little Lindsay Wallace who's too busy watching television to answer the phone. If you watch this scene in widescreen, you'll see a crew member lurking in the shadows (left side of the screen) on the wall. It appears they are trying to avoid being seen.

Continuity: In certain shots, you can see that the William Shatner mask had not been fully painted white, because you can see the flesh coloured neck, but in other shots it is fully painted.

Continuity: After Laurie asks Annie what she is going to wear to the dance (while Annie is driving with Laurie), we see Annie turn the steering wheel to the left, yet the car turns right as seen on the green screen in front of them. As the car is turning right, it cuts back to Annie still turning the steering wheel left.

Plot hole: Michael stabs the teen boy who goes to get a beer for his girlfriend. In the closeup, even though the teen boy was stabbed pretty much straight through the heart clear through to the wall, there is no blood whatsoever dripping on the floor or down his pants. If you cut the major arteries to the heart, there would be great volumes of blood streaming down both the front and back of the teen.

Continuity: During the beginning of the movie, when Laurie is talking to the police officer, the sun is shining bright as if it is a perfect day, then when Laurie walks to her house, the trees look as if it has just quit raining.

Continuity: When Laurie is in the bottom of the closet hiding from Michael, you can see that a purple dress is in front of the rest of the clothes. However when she stands up to grab a hanger, a pink sweater is in front only to be behind the purple dress again when she sits back down.

Factual error: When Dr. Loomis is at the pay phone talking to someone at the mental institution, the background of the scene has mountains, which in fact Illinois does not have any mountains.

Continuity: Toward the end of the movie, Dr. Loomis comes up the stairs and starts to shoot Michael six times, sending him spiraling to the terrace. Take notice that Michael is about to go over the ledge of the terrace head first. In the next shot it shows him carefully backing off the ledge, while facing the house.

Continuity: Laurie's hair keeps changing throughout the movie. Her hair changes from wavy to straight while she babysits the kids. It is wavy again when she is going to Lindsey's house, and straight again when she is running back to Tommy's house. It stays straight until Michael starts to strangle her,where it becomes wavy again, having been straight in the previous shot. It all ends with straight hair. Surely all of this could not happen in a matter of hours.

Factual error: It's supposed to be late autumn, but in most scenes the leaves are still very green. [This is because it was shot in California during the summer. Carpenter imported leaves for every shot that you saw leaves blowing on the ground and blew them with a giant fan (this also killed any ambient sound takes); there are also a few shots where you can see palm trees (most prominent the one right in the front yard of Michael Myers' house).]

Revealing: During the scene when Michael steals the station wagon from Dr. Loomis and the nurse, when she is lying across the seat you can see the passenger window is clean and very much transparent. However in the very next scene where Michael goes to smack his hand on the window, it is now foggy - a side effect of the glass alternative used for the effect.

Continuity: When Lynda is talking about how she forgot her books (at the beginning of their walk home) we see Michael Myers drive by, then speeds up and drives passed a driveway, then it cuts to Annie (Myers is still driving) and she says, "Hey Jerk. Speed Kills." We see Michael driving again and he is just a bit behind the drive-way he drove by before, he should be much farther ahead down the road at the speed he was going.

Visible crew/equipment: During the opening sequence, the scene is shot in first-person point-of-view from the young Michael Myers. As he walks through the house, the shadow of the camera can be seen several times. After he picks up the knife in the kitchen, the camera's shadow is visible on the door frame leading into the dining room. It can be seen again just before he turns to go upstairs.

Revealing: In the scene where Dr. Sam Loomis is calling from a pay phone warning of Michael Myers return to Haddonfield, a Southern Pacific freight train passes by blowing its horn (you can't see the train in the standard version). While SP trains are quite common in Southern California where the film was made, they don't actually travel through any part of Illinois.

Revealing: When Bob and Linda arrive at the Wallace house, the exterior shots show the doorknob on the front door to be on the left side which would mean the door would swing inward to the right. However, when the shot cuts to the inside of the house as the door opens, the door swings inward to the left and the doorknob is now on the right side.

Continuity: When the girls are walking home from school, Annie says that she is babysitting Lindsey Wallace and Laurie says she is babysitting Tommy Doyle. Laurie also claims that the Wallace's and the Doyle's house are 3 doors down, but when Annie drops Laurie off the houses are right across the street from each other.

Continuity: In the scene where Laurie comes downstairs after taking a shower, she is at her front door singing to herself and she is looking out a window directly to the left of the door. Then there is a shot of the front of her house outside and you see her exit through the door that had the window next to it, but there is no longer a window there.

Other: When we see the Wallace house from the outside, the front door is on the far right hand side. Yet when Lynda and Bob walk in later on, they enter the house through the front door, and the living room is on the right when it should be on the left.

Revealing: In the scene outside of Smith's Grove mental institution, where Michael jumps on top of the station wagon, he attacks the nurse, but she manages to wrangle free. A few moments later, he smashes the passengers side window. If you look closely, the actor's arm has a wrench taped to it in order to effectively break the glass injury free.

Continuity: In the beginning of the movie, Laurie runs into Tommy while she is walking to school, meaning that they live near each other; however, later on in the movie, when Laurie has to babysit Tommy, Annie has to drive her to Tommy's house, which is located on the other side of town.

Continuity: In the scene where young Michael Myers sees the clown mask, the closest piece of clothing is a red shirt. When he puts it on, the closest piece of clothing is now a blue piece of clothing.

Continuity: At the very beginning, Michael Myers' sister and her boyfriend "go upstairs." Michael then sneaks around the house, picks up a knife, and follows them. As he is about to go upstairs, his sister's boyfriend leaves. He then proceeds upstairs, and finds his sister nude. The actual time elapsed from proposition to his exit is about one minute and fifty seconds. Is this really enough time to go upstairs, get undressed, go about your business, and get dressed again?

Factual error: When Laurie and Annie are on their way to babysit, and they see Annie's dad, the cop, as soon as they pull up to say hi and roll the window down, he mixes the two names up, and calls Laurie Annie, and Annie Laurie. You'd think he knows his own daughter's names.

Continuity: In the beginning, when the doctor is talking to the new nurse for Michael in the car, the nurse is smoking a cigarette, but seconds later she has just lit one up. If she smokes one in 45 seconds then lights up another she is one worst chain smoker I've ever seen.

Deliberate "mistake": The opening camera scene, that's supposed to be shot from Michael's POV as a child, is too high as noted that he's almost face to face with his parents at the end of the scene and then is only mid-chest up to the father when he removes the mask.

Continuity: In the scene where Tommy Doyle looks out the window and sees the shape outside of the house across the street, the porch light is off and the jack o lantern is not lit. When he attempts to show Laurie, the next shot of the house shows that the porch light is on and the jack o lantern is lit.

Continuity: There is a scene that's supposed to take place at 6pm and it's still very light out. At the end of October, it's dark by 5 pm.

Continuity: When Laurie is in the closet she stabs Michael with the hanger and leaves it up there. When they show all the locations at the end of the movie, in the shot of the living room look near the floor up close - you can see part of the hanger there, even though it was left upstairs.

Factual error: In the scene when Laurie gets stabbed by her bro Michael in the arm she falls over the banister the camera shows a view of what she sees, falling at that angle Laurie would have broken her neck, spine and hip. But it is still weird how she managed to turn 180 degrees in such a short fall.

Continuity: After Laurie has been spooked by seeing Michael behind the bush she keeps walking and stumbles into the sheriff. If you look at her expression as she turns and yelps in "fear" you'll notice she's laughing! She even puts her hand over her mouth to hide it.