Trivia

The four main boys all wear masks of the Crimson Ghost character, most popularly known as a logo for the horror-punk band the Misfits. As they put the masks on, the line is said "Come on, to a violent world with me", which is a lyric from the Misfits song "Violent World". Later, when three other boys are seen huffing glue they discuss a man being in "a rock band in Jersey" with an album coming out called "Teenagers From Mars". Both of these are also explicit references to the Misfits.

Final film released through Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer before the founding of Amazon MGM Studios.

Based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Norman Partridge.

In a 2023 interview with Bloody Flicks, David Slade spoke about disagreeing with the studio on a key aspect of the film and what changes were made from the novel: "In our first meeting with MGM publicity, they asked us to play down Halloween and make it a kind of weird cult harvest, they were afraid that making a Halloween movie would be difficult to sell as the Halloween (1978) franchise was still alive and thus would limit them to releasing the movie at Halloween only. We agreed to disagree on this point and went for a gritty small-town Halloween gathering in the early sixties. Michael Gilio had the flash of genius to make the film sort of a sequel to the book with Richie in the shadow of his brother who had won the annual Halloween event 'The Run' which I thought brought great tension... The script I read was already plotted out this way and I was excited about it, I remember very few fundamental changes to Michael's interpretation until we hit post-production. My main drive was to keep as much of the film immediate as possible."

Cameo from Mark Boone Junior as the town butcher, Ralph Jarrett; Boone Jr played Beau Brower in 30 Days of Night, directed by David Slade.