After a Q&A panel was held with Wallace for a 30th-anniversary screening of "Halloween" at Los Angeles' New Beverly Theater in 2010, the director claimed he was "flabbergasted" by the crowd's enthusiasm. "That was the first inkling I had that anyone cared," he said in an interview included on the Scream Factory DVD and Blu-ray for the film, per Fangoria.
While many dismissed it and others eventually came around to it, "Halloween III" has long been a outsiders' favorite. It probably wasn't the film the average video store stocked, and that made seeking it out and watching it all the more elusive. In the years since its release, countless fans have made the pilgrimage to the Humboldt County town to see where Silver Shamrock's masks were made, and to this day, replicas are coveted among collectors.
"It's got everything," Jared Tipton, the host behind "Then & Now: Movie Filming Locations" on YouTube, said in a video he filmed of his visit there in 2020, when the building went up for sale. "It's got world-dominating witches, it's got B-movie coolness, it's got John Carpenter's score. It's got it all in a horror film for me."
Production took place in Eureka for a week in the spring of 1982, and the cast and crew were shuttled south daily to Loleta for exterior shots of the middle-of-nowhere factory and various surroundings, including the now-shuttered Raffety's Gas Station and the motel across the street, Atkins wrote in the forward for Wallace's 2022 book on the film. He recounted how hectic and late the shooting schedule was.
"Most of Loleta was a blur for me," Atkins wrote. "It seemed I was on the call sheet every day, every night, every scene. ... Somewhere in the endless night work of that week I got walking pneumonia and did some of the film with a handkerchief handy, constantly trying to stop the Niagara Falls of my nose."
Atkins had collaborated with Carpenter and Hill two years prior for the Bay Area-shot horror film "The Fog". At the time, they were so taken by the lighthouse — and the cape, known as the second-foggiest point in North America — that Carpenter decided to buy a house in the area and lived there for many years, calling it "one of the most beautiful areas in the entire world." It didn't come as a surprise that they would scout Northern California once again, combing over hundreds of miles for "a little jewel of a village" that packed the same mood their previous film had. "Preferably with a mask factory adjacent," Wallace wrote.
Ferndale, with its Anytown, USA, ambiance and offbeat Victorian architecture, jumped out as a possibility. But after Wallace crunched the numbers on how much it would cost to dress the set, hire extras and scale the place, he found a better answer about 7 miles north in "a tiny, lonely hamlet on a gentle slope facing the Pacific."
There, he found a row of storefronts, most of them shut down and flanked by overgrown lawns and wispy shrubs. The streets were quiet, with no children playing in sight, but the crew sensed unseen eyes were watching them. "I felt a familiar 'foggy' tingle," Wallace wrote.
Then he saw it: the deserted building on the northern horizon, its red paint fading in the afternoon sun: "a presence so dominant as to be the obvious reason the village sprang up to begin with." It was, as Wallace put it, exactly what they weren't looking for.
The town turned out to be a "friendly and willing community" that was happy to let the crew utilize its scenery as a back lot for the week before they returned to Los Angeles to finish the film, Wallace wrote. But for some residents, the Hollywood glamour had worn off by the time the project wrapped. In the final hours of the shoot just before dawn, one shopkeeper angrily shouted at the "movie people" for allegedly "ruining his business," the Times-Standard reported at the time, and some motorists got "testy" with the traffic controllers tasked with guiding them around filming locations. Several locals who were cast as extras grew disenchanted by the 12- to 16-hour workdays that culminated in just a few minutes of time on camera.
"It seems people think the movies should be as magical in the making as they are on the silver screen," wrote Cheryl Gibbs, a reporter who was cast as an extra.
In the years since that fateful shoot, the aging Loleta Creamery has been falling apart, said Cassandra Hesseltine of the Humboldt-Del Norte Film Commission. "You couldn't even go inside," she said. Yet, when she opened up the Redwood Coast Museum of Cinema last October, she was surprised to find that someone had mysteriously left an assortment of bricks from the factory on the museum's front door, hoping she would display them in memory of the building as its inevitable fate loomed.
"You wouldn't believe how many people care about this movie," she said. "We have 'Star Wars.' We have 'ET.' We have 'The Lost World.' I get just as many calls about 'Halloween III.'"
She said people have traveled from all over to film reenactments of their favorite scenes and made short fan movies in the area. The dilapidated factory is part of the film commission's Map of the Movies tour and has a sign screwed into one of the walls denoting its significance in horror film history. Whether a portion of it remains or the building is razed completely, Hesseltine plans to come up with a solution.
"We'll do something like the Globe Theater in London does," she said, noting that on a recent visit, she discovered the original building was destroyed by a fire, though a marker on the ground labels its original location where an apartment building stands today. "Maybe the owners would be excited about it. There's definitely a strong following, and it's interesting that a tiny little town like this was discovered in the way it was. It's part of our film history."
