What went down when we played the Halloween (1978) drinking game

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To celebrate the arrival of spooky season, here's a throwback to the time in 2018 when Sophia Moss and I sat down to roadtest an all new drinking game for John Carpenter's Halloween. We revisited the slasher classic with two bottles of red and a bottle of gin and live tweeted our descent into drunkeness. Here's what happened...

The short story: The drinking game was much more lethal than we intended. Having finished one bottle of wine around the twenty minute mark, we began to doubt whether we'd make it to the end.

Early inebriation

Drinking for every 30 seconds of the Halloween theme was a bad idea. Carpenter may have composed one of the most iconic horror themes ever, but he doesn't half know it. The tinkling piano and groovy synths were popping up pretty much constantly, and as a consequence the wine was quickly disappearing.

We also drank each time Michael could be seen spying on potential victims - considering the first half of the film is Michael popping up all over Haddonfield, we were quickly wishing he'd just give it a rest so we could stop relentlessly introducing alcohol into our bloodstream.


Murder shots

When we were already feeling worse for wear, the murder started proper. Perhaps for the first time when watching a horror film, I was wishing the various interchangeable teenagers would stay alive so I wouldn't have to do a shot for each of their deaths.

Mercifully, there are only four onscreen deaths in Halloween. Imagine if we'd done Friday the 13th! Eesh.

Murder being as inevitable as it is, we were soon forced to down gin shots in quick succession when we'd really rather not.


Suffering commences

By this point all the alcohol was starting to have a most unpleasant effect. My head was feeling like it was filled with cotton wool and walking in a straight line was a challenge.

Alas, since most of my evenings are spent staying in and watching horror films rather than hitting the clubs, my tolerance was not up to the rigours of the drinking game.

I begin to feel worse for wear
Sophia was also suffering ill effects:


Bitter failure

This was extraordinarily bad timing, as the movie was just reaching its climax. Ideally we would now be knocking back shots every time Michael inexplicably comes back from the dead.

As you all know, this is a lot. That man is somehow immune to bullets and sharp implements.

Admitting defeat, we more or less gave up drinking with around 15 minutes to go. Naturally we were extremely disappointed with ourselves.

With the film finally over, we offered up some advice to anyone else foolhardy enough to tackle our drinking game:


Thankfully, because we are both sensible twentysomethings, we drunk gallons of water before bed and so surprisingly ended up feeling relatively OK the next morning.

Final thoughts

If this has inspired you to attempt the Halloween drinking game, the rules are here. Because we are good people, we've amended them based on our own (difficult) experiences.

We'll leave you with some final post-drinking game reflections from Sophia and I:


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