On the audio commentary, Jared Harris asks John Carpenter why he did not compose the soundtrack. John replies "Quite frankly, I'm just too old". Carpenter would go on to compose the music for the short film The Noise (2013), and eventually returned as composer for the Halloween (2018) reboot assisted by Cody Carpenter and Daniel A. Davies.
The flashbacks were filmed after principal shooting on the movie had wrapped.
John Carpenter's first full-length feature film since Ghosts of Mars (2001), and his first feature not shot in Panavision since his debut Dark Star (1974).
Sandy King, John Carpenter's wife described this movie as John's "Chick Flick".
One of the black and white scenes the girls see on television, which has a severed head yelling "Tom Stewart killed me," is from the 1960 B-movie, Tormented (1960), in which a jazz pianist is haunted by a former girlfriend who he let die by refusing to help her before she fell from a lighthouse.