Curtis Richards' 1979 novelization of John Carpenter's Halloween opens on the eve of Samhain in ancient Ireland, where a druid king's shaman curses a murderer's soul to roam the earth until the end of time. Centuries later, in Haddonfield, Illinois, six-year-old Michael Myers has started hearing voices that tell him to say he hates people.
A NOTE FROM DARREN: This is the full novelization of the 1978 horror film classic, John Carpenter's Halloween. The novel I'm sharing here has been out of print since the n1980s, and I had to pay a pretty penny just to get a used paperback version just so I could bring this to you. Well worth every penny! It's very true to the film, but has a lot of added elements that make it even more disturbing and exciting. This novelization, written by Curtis Richards, is so good, in fact, that John Carpenter took elements of this novel and used them in the script for the film's sequel, Halloween 2. Richards tweaks the film's story with a few minor but crucial changes to the original screenplay, which was written by John Carpenter and Deborah Hill. In this novelization, Michael Myers is given a supernatural reason for his actions as a child and as an adult, and it ties in directly to the dark paranormal origins of Samhain, the Druid Festival of the Dead, which eventually evolved into what we now celebrate as Halloween. This isn't really a spoiler, as it's all laid out in the prologue before getting into the main story, but it is an excellent addition by Richards. As we all know, the film Halloween begins with eight-year-old Michael Myers stabbing his older sister to death, which leads to his being admitted to a mental hospital for the next 15 years. He breaks out to terrorize a bunch of teen babysitters before he's finally brought down, or, so it seems, by the determined Dr. Loomis. The movie was very risque with explicit scenes of sex and nudity. If you've read the novelization, you know that Richards takes it to an even more erotic, edgy, and borderline pornographic direction in these scenes. But I prefer to keep things as PG-13 as possible here, so I've edited those sections to make them less edgy or indecent, or just removed them entirely if they didn't impact the story.
CHAPTER TIME STAMPS=====
00:00:00.000 = Prologue
00:10:42.089 = Chapter 01
00:21:11.768 = Chapter 02
00:33:20.063 = Chapter 03
00:42:12.102 = Chapter 04
01:02:56.503 = Chapter 05
01:15:46.155 = Chapter 06
01:31:00.280 = Chapter 07
01:37:36.115 = Chapter 08
02:12:07.275 = Chapter 09
02:17:23.504 = Chapter 10
02:48:21.477 = Chapter 11
03:06:21.683 = Chapter 12
03:25:12.231 = Chapter 13
03:49:45.829 = Chapter 14
04:11:25.242 = Chapter 15
EPISODE BLOG PAGE (includes sources):
https://weirddarkness.com/HalloweenNovelSOURCES and RESOURCES: BOOK: “Halloween” the movie novelization by Curtis Richards:
https://amzn.to/3NM2TCR,
https://amzn.to/3UTkP2DMUSIC: “The Shape” by White Bat Audio:
https://weirddarkness.tiny.us/WhiteBatAudioWeirdDarkness® is a registered trademark. Copyright ©2026, Weird Darkness.
Midnight In The Macabre (MITM), originally aired: October 17, 2026
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