- "You'd think that after fifteen years, the hurt would go away, but it only seems to change shape."
- ―Leigh Brackett to Samuel Loomis[src]
Leigh Brackett is a character in the Halloween franchise. He first appeared in the original Halloween, played by Charles Cyphers.
In the movie Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, a retcon was established which removed Halloween 4, 5, and 6 from continuity. As a result, the biography of this Leigh Brackett is drastically different to the one who appears in the other version. This incarnation of the character appears in Halloween, Halloween II and a number of Halloween comic books.
Biography[]
Leigh Brackett was born in Columbus, Ohio. It was there that at some point in his life he became a deputy and witnessed some grumesome crimes such as rape and murder. At some point he met a woman named Joanne and married her. They lived in the town of Peoria, Illinois where they had a daughter named Annie. The family decided to move to the small town of Haddonfield where Leigh became the sheriff. On October 31, 1978, Sheriff Brackett responded to a call about a break-in at Nichol's Hardware Store. Accompanied by his deputies, he determined that only a few items had been stolen, including a mask, a length of rope and a knife.[1]
He soon learned the identity of the perpetrator when he encountered a psychiatrist from Warren County named Doctor Samuel Loomis. Loomis told Sheriff Brackett that "evil" had come to his little town in the form of an escaped mental patient named Michael Myers. Although Brackett took Loomis' warning with fair measure, there was little action he could take. Sam advised keeping a look-out for Michael Myers and the two agreed to conduct a stake out at the old, abandoned Myers house.[1]
By the following evening, nothing had occurred to give Sheriff Brackett any further cause for alarm, but Loomis insisted that his men and he should conduct an intensive city-wide search for Myers. He recounted how Myers had stolen the headstone of his late sister, Judith, but Sheriff Brackett dismissed his concerns, citing it as nothing more than a Halloween prank.[1]
Brackett quickly discovered that Loomis' concerns were warranted, for on that same evening, Michael Myers brutally murdered the sheriff's daughter, Annie.[1]
Leigh learns that his only daughter is dead
It was his own deputy Gary Hunt, who discovered Annie Brackett's body and informed her father. Sheriff Brackett blamed Loomis for the crime, accusing him of letting Michael out in the first place. Now that he was ready to take the psychiatrist seriously, Brackett called in all of his resources to conduct a search for Michael Myers. He then went home to tell his wife of the news about their daughter.[2]
On November 5 of that year, Sheriff Brackett attended his daughter's funeral. Afterwards, he angrily told Dr. Loomis to leave Haddonfield forever.[3]
Leigh's marriage began to suffer some time after Annie's death as Joanne started to blame Leigh for their daughter's death. She eventually left him, and Leigh lost his family because of Michael Myers, although Leigh mostly blamed Loomis for letting him out in the first place. In 1993, Brackett met with Loomis and told him that he still held him responsible for the destruction of his family and what happened on that 1978 night. He went on to tell Loomis that he could never understand the pain he was in until Loomis himself lost someone he cared about to Michael.[4]
Leigh eventually got over his anger towards Loomis and even wanted to wish him well when Loomis suffered a heart attack in early 1995.[5]
Notes and trivia[]
- Although Michael had ruined Leigh's life, Leigh has not encountered Michael. This also makes Leigh the only main character who never met Michael.
- In the 1979 novelization of Halloween, Sheriff Leigh Brackett divulges some information on the Myers family history when he and Dr. Loomis are on there way over to the Myers house on Halloween night 1978. Sheriff Leigh Brackett tells Dr. Loomis that the sheriff of Haddonfield in 1963 was Ron Barstow. On Halloween night 1963 when sheriff Ron Barstow was at the Myers residence he overheard Edith Myers say "Its come back" or "Its happened again" over and over. Shortly after he went to the town hall and researched the Myers family's history. He discovered that in the 1890s Michael and Judith's maternal great-grandfather attended a grange dance on Halloween and shot a couple who was in attendance for seemingly no explicable reason. The grandfather had been arrested and hung. How sheriff Leigh Brackett gained this information is not explained.
Appearances[]
- Halloween (1978)
- Halloween novelization
- Halloween 1978 (Extended Edition)
- Halloween II
- Halloween II novelization
- Halloween II
- Masks and Grotesque Figures
- Halloween: Autopsis
- Halloween: Sam