Nancy Kyes, the Halloween actress who never liked being scared

Nancy Kyes

Photo via The Movie Database (TMDB)

Born	December 19, 1949 Falls Church, Virginia, United States
Occupation	Actress
Known for	Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween Kills

Ask Nancy Kyes whether she likes scary movies and the answer is one word long: “No.” The actress who played Annie Brackett in John Carpenter‘s Halloween, the sarcastic babysitter who is the first of Laurie Strode’s friends to die, has said plainly that she does not enjoy being frightened. That is the odd fact at the centre of her career. For a few years she worked inside the most influential low-budget horror circle in American film and gave it some of its funniest minutes. Then she stepped away from the camera almost completely, toward sculpture in Los Angeles and a classroom where, by her own account, she teaches theatre history.

Kyes was born in Falls Church, Virginia, a few days before Christmas, went to high school in Riverside, California, and trained in theatre at Northwestern University, outside Chicago. Stage work was the plan. Film arrived through friendship rather than an audition circuit. Carpenter’s early crew was a tight group, several of them friends from film school at the University of Southern California, and Kyes was close to them. “John and I were friends,” she has said, and that friendship shaped every screen role she took in the years that followed.

Her first screen part, released in 1976 when she was twenty-six, shows how the group worked. In Assault on Precinct 13, Carpenter’s siege thriller about a nearly abandoned police station under attack by a street gang, she played Julie, one of the two secretaries trapped inside. She also handled the wardrobe. The credits split her in two: Nancy Loomis for the performance, Louise Kyes for the costumes. The screen name stayed with her through every Carpenter film, which is why horror audiences still know her as Loomis, the same surname Halloween would give to Donald Pleasence‘s psychiatrist.

Halloween made that name stick. Carpenter and the producer Debra Hill shot it in Southern California on a budget of about $300,000, and it grossed around $70 million, one of the most profitable independent films ever made. Jamie Lee Curtis, in her film debut, played Laurie; P. J. Soles played Lynda; Kyes played Annie, Laurie’s outspoken friend and the daughter of the town sheriff, played by Charles Cyphers. By the time cameras rolled she was dating Tommy Lee Wallace, Carpenter’s childhood friend, who designed the film and co-edited it. She has described the role as close to home. “I was playing myself to a certain degree,” she told Halloween Daily News, explaining that Carpenter “wanted to take advantage of my sense of humor.” The set ran loose. “We made up a lot of stuff right on the set,” she recalled.

Annie’s death is the hinge of the film. Michael Myers waits in her car, and once she climbs in he strangles her and cuts her throat, the moment when the comedy of the first half drains out of Haddonfield. The scene was shot in a closed garage thick with stage fog, and Kyes remembers the physical cost more than the fear: “It’s very hard on your throat, and I was screaming.”

Carpenter kept her close. In The Fog she played Sandy Fadel, in a cast that put Curtis on screen alongside her mother, Janet Leigh, with Cyphers back in the ensemble. When Halloween was sold to network television, Carpenter shot extra material to fill the broadcast slot, and Kyes filmed a new scene for that cut. She also returned briefly, as Annie’s body, in Halloween II. Then came Halloween III: Season of the Witch, written and directed by Wallace and the only entry in the series without Michael Myers. Kyes played Linda Challis, the ex-wife of Tom Atkins’s doctor. That made her the only performer to appear in each of the first three Halloween films, in two different roles. Critics disliked the third film on release; it has since picked up a strong cult following.

The trivia flattens her. Critics have argued for decades over whether Halloween and the slashers that copied it punish teenage girls for their freedom, and Annie, killed on her way to pick up her boyfriend, fits that reading too neatly. Watch the performance again and the reading looks thin. Kyes plays Annie as the funniest person in town: impatient, mocking, treating babysitting as a chore and Laurie’s nerves as a joke. That energy is what makes the empty streets of the second half feel so cold. She is also unsentimental about why the film lasted. “I really attribute a lot of the phenomenon that we experience now to the internet,” she said. The scream-queen label sits oddly on someone who, asked about horror, answers that she would rather be challenged than scared.

After Halloween III the credits thin out: the television film Not in Front of the Children, a segment of the 1980s revival of The Twilight Zone, and a doctor in the miniseries Lady Boss in 1992. Then she stopped. Kyes and Wallace married and had two children, and later divorced. Her working life moved to sculpture in the Los Angeles area and to teaching. In a 2015 conversation at Flashback Weekend in Chicago she spoke about her theatre-history students and named Mark Rylance as “one of the finest actors working today anywhere in the world,” a choice that says more about her taste than any horror credit.

She has never disowned the film. She appears in the documentaries Halloween: 25 Years of Terror and Halloween: The Inside Story, recorded an interview for the 2013 collector’s edition of Assault on Precinct 13, and at that Chicago convention joined Wallace and the cinematographer Dean Cundey on a reunion panel. When the franchise went back to Haddonfield with Halloween Kills in 2021, Annie returned only as archive footage.

The surprise came in 2024. Parker Brennon cast her in Hauntology, a first feature built as a chain of local ghost stories that an older sister tells a 12-year-old girl to talk her out of running away from home, and Kyes plays Josephine Cashel, a member of the family whose history ties the tales together. The film premiered at the Dances With Films festival in Los Angeles that June and screened at FrightFest in London in August. It was her first film role in more than four decades. Nothing new has been announced since, which fits the shape of the career: a handful of performances made among friends, which the horror audience refuses to let go of, by a woman who never needed the genre to love her back.

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