Michael Myers

Who they are

Michael Myers is the masked killer at the center of the Halloween series. In Halloween (1978), directed by John Carpenter and co-written with producer Debra Hill, he comes back to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, on Halloween night, years after a childhood crime, and begins to watch a group of teenagers. The film's credits list him as The Shape, and for most of the running time that is exactly how the camera treats him: a form at the edge of a doorway, a shoulder behind a hedge, a face that is more suggestion than fact.

The name is an in-joke. Accounts of the production say Carpenter named him after Michael Myers, a British film industry figure Carpenter had worked with on Assault on Precinct 13, and Carpenter has said he felt he owed the man. Carpenter also wanted the character to feel almost inhuman. He has cited the unstoppable gunslinger played by Yul Brynner in Westworld (1973) as an influence on the idea of a figure that simply keeps coming.

Why they became iconic

Michael works because the films give the audience almost nothing to hold onto. He does not speak, and the first film offers no stated motive beyond the idea of pure threat. A psychiatrist in the story, Dr. Loomis, supplies the language of evil, and the film leaves the audience to decide how much to believe. This blankness is deliberate. A face and a reason can be argued with, but a pale mask and a steady walk cannot.

The design is simple enough to copy at home. A white mask, dark coveralls and a kitchen knife are things almost anyone can assemble for Halloween, and that is part of why he is one of the most reproduced costumes in American culture. A 2005 study in the Journal of Media Psychology, led by Stuart Fischoff and surveying 1,166 Americans, placed him at the top of a list of movie monsters when people were asked who embodied pure evil.

Defining traits

• Silent, patient and methodical.
• Wears a white, expressionless mask and dark coveralls.
• Usually seen at a distance, half hidden, or standing very still.
• Treated by the story as closer to a force than a person.
• Credited as The Shape in the 1978 film.

Creation and development

Carpenter and Debra Hill co-wrote the script for a film about a babysitter menaced on Halloween night. Hill had babysat as a teenager and wrote much of the female dialogue, while Carpenter drafted the speeches of Dr. Loomis. The film was made for roughly $300,000 in Southern California, standing in for a small town in Illinois, and it earned a reported $70 million worldwide.

Carpenter has described wanting the killer to be a figure that appears and disappears in the frame. Much of the character was built in staging rather than script. The camera frequently holds a wide shot with a small shape in the background, then returns to the same space and finds the shape gone. A theme that Carpenter composed himself does the rest. The result was a villain whose power came from how little the film explained, an approach later horror films copied and often failed to match.

The mask

The mask has a famous history. Production designer Tommy Lee Wallace bought a rubber Captain Kirk mask based on William Shatner from a Hollywood shop, reportedly for under two dollars. He widened the eyeholes, removed the eyebrows and sideburns, teased the hair and sprayed the whole thing white. The result, lit from the side, looks like a face drained of expression. The mask used in the original was later sold, and its owner, Mark Roberts, identified himself in 2017, reporting that it had badly deteriorated.

Later films kept changing the face. For Halloween 5 (1989), director Dominique Othenin-Girard commissioned new latex masks partly because he wanted to move away from the look of the hockey mask in the Friday the 13th series. Subsequent sequels and remakes each remade it, sometimes more angular, sometimes more weathered. Fans compare the versions closely, and the shape of the brow or the angle of the eyes is a common point of argument.

The performers behind the mask

Nick Castle played the adult Michael in 1978 and was paid $25 a day. Carpenter's one piece of direction, as Castle later recalled it, was to look at a body as if it were a butterfly collection. The unmasking scene used another actor, Tony Moran, who is credited as the unmasked Michael Myers, because the filmmakers wanted a more angelic face under the mask. Will Sandin played Michael as a six-year-old.

After that, the role passed from hand to hand: Dick Warlock in Halloween II (1981), George P. Wilbur in Halloween 4 (1988), and Don Shanks in Halloween 5 (1989). Rob Zombie's remake series (2007 and 2009) cast Tyler Mane as Michael in both. James Jude Courtney took over from 2018, with Castle returning for a few masked moments. Castle, Wilbur, Mane and Courtney are the only actors to have played the role in more than one film.

Four versions of the same man

Few characters have been rebooted as many times as Michael. The first line of sequels runs from Halloween through Halloween II (1981), Halloween 4 (1988), Halloween 5 (1989) and The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), and in those films he is revealed to be related to Laurie Strode and is tied to a cult-like curse. Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) leaves him out entirely and tells an unrelated story. Halloween H20 (1998) and Halloween: Resurrection (2002) ignore the middle sequels.

Rob Zombie's 2007 remake and its 2009 sequel offer a detailed, brutal childhood, so that the killer is a product of an unhappy home. The most recent timeline, produced by Blumhouse, began with Halloween (2018) and continued with Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), all directed by David Gordon Green. It treats the 1978 film as its only predecessor and drops the idea that the two main characters are siblings. Each version asks a different question about the same figure: is he fate, a sickness, a family tragedy or a rumor?

Reception and scholarship

Critics were quick to see what Carpenter had done. Historian Nicholas Rogers, in a 2003 book on Halloween traditions, described him as a mythic, superhuman bogeyman who fits an older folk idea of the night as a time when the dead and the dangerous walk. Film scholars have also noted that the character is rarely seen alone: the camera adopts his point of view, so that the audience shares the stalking before it sees the stalker.

The scholarly conversation often links him to Carol J. Clover's work on the slasher, in which the killer and the survivor mirror one another. Pat Gill read the 1978 film as a critique of suburban life, with its absent parents and unwatched children. Some critics have disliked the way the series turned a once-unknowable figure into a star, with later films adding rules and origins. Others argue that the changing explanations are part of his legend, because each era has supplied the reason it needed.

Influence and spread

The Halloween films are the highest-grossing horror series in the United States when adjusted for inflation, according to a compilation of box office figures, with the 2018 film earning about $260 million worldwide on a $10 million budget. Michael has also spread beyond cinema. Curtis Richards wrote a 1979 novelization that added a Celtic prologue, young-adult novels by Kelly O'Rourke appeared in 1997 and 1998, and comics have come from Chaos! Comics and Devil's Due Publishing.

His legacy is also structural. The idea of a masked, near-silent killer who walks rather than runs shaped the Slasher cycle that followed, and later series such as Friday the 13th copied the pattern of building sequels around the killer instead of the victims. In this library, Michael can be read beside Leatherface, another figure who hides his face, and against Norman Bates, whose killer is a person with a visible mind. The Halloween franchise page lists each film in order.

How to approach the character

The cleanest introduction is the 1978 film itself, since most of the later reimaginings are responses to it. Watch it with attention to what the camera does when Michael is on screen: how often he is only partly in view, how rarely he runs, and how the soundtrack announces him. Then read about Halloween for its production history. How Horror Films Use Sound to Create Fear explains why the score does so much of his work, and Psycho and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre show two earlier ways of building a killer. Laurie Strode is the other half of the story.

Verified details

• Michael Myers is credited as The Shape in the 1978 film.
• Nick Castle was paid $25 a day to play the masked Michael in 1978.
• Tony Moran played the unmasked Michael in the 1978 film.
• The mask was reportedly a Captain Kirk mask bought for under two dollars and painted white.
• Carpenter has cited Yul Brynner's robot gunslinger in Westworld as an influence.
• Only Nick Castle, George P. Wilbur, Tyler Mane and James Jude Courtney have played Michael in more than one film.
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) does not include Michael Myers.
• A 2005 study of 1,166 Americans ranked Michael highest among movie monsters as the embodiment of pure evil.
• The 2018 Halloween opened to about $76 million in the U.S. and Canada.
• Curtis Richards wrote the 1979 novelization of the original film.

Sources and further reading

• Michael Myers (Halloween), Wikipedia
• Halloween (1978 film), Wikipedia
• Halloween (franchise), Wikipedia
• Halloween (2018 film), Wikipedia

Connections

• Franchise hub: Halloween.