The Many Pale Faces of Halloween's Michael Myers
David Gordon Green
June 8, 2018
Swipe through for a brief visual history of Michael Myers's masks.
Halloween (1978): The original and still the best. Unlike, say, Freddy’s gurning sadism, Michael’s mask displays no emotion. He’s beyond good and evil, right and wrong – an unstoppable force that cannot be reasoned with or even reached. It’s the perfect representation of that character. Something the sequels failed to recreate.
Halloween II (1981): Arguably it’s the closest we ever got to the original. That is, until the new movie. You can still see shades of the Shatner mask in there, albeit one that’s taken more damage because of the events of the previous movie.
The Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988): This is where things start to go off the rails. While the original mask has no discernible emotion, it had features and definition, but Halloween 4’s mask gets rid of that. The result? A bland death mask, far too pristine to ever be threatening.
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989): A strange tendency of the sequels is to make the neck inexplicably longer. Not sure why that is. Instead of adding menace, it just makes the mask look ill-fitting. Seriously, examine this still from the movie’s climactic sequence when Loomis confronts Michael face-to-mask. He looks ridiculous – the mask might as well be perched on the top of a mannequin.
The Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995): In Halloween 6, inexplicably Michael received massive ears. Even those finely drawn eyebrows can’t conceal how shambolic this offering was.
The Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998): Much like Blumhouse’s forthcoming entry in the series is doing, Halloween: H20 jettisoned several of the preceding movies from its continuity. And with Jamie Lee Curtis returning, it was a wonderful opportunity to make another great Halloween movie. But the mask became a point of conflict during production. H20 contains no less than four variations of the mask. Execs allegedly didn't want the mask to resemble the original since the rights were held by a private estate that would've wanted royalties. Instead, they wanted an approximation of the original to avoid incurring any costs. Similarly, director Steve Miner wanted a more white and featureless mask than used in the original. But according to the crew, during screenings of dailies, one exec exclaimed, "That's not the Michael Myers's mask." Panic ensued, and a new mask was quickly created that was somewhere between the original and the footage that had already been shot on H20. Apparently this was done
Halloween Resurrection (2002): After the absolute farrago that was H20, Halloween Resurrection has a pretty decent mask. Arguably it’s the best since the original. Sadly, the same can’t be said about the movie which revolves around a very dated reality TV show conceit and has Busta Rhyme’s Freddie Harris delivering the immortal line, “Looking a little crispy over there, Mikey. Like some chicken-fried motherf****r. Well, may he never, ever rest in peace”, over this image.
Halloween 2007: Rob Zombie’s movies seem to willfully miss the entire point of Carpenter’s original, which placed Michael’s psychopathy beyond clinical comprehension. He was the product of severe abuse from an early age. Similarly, it was happy to remove the mask and let us see Michael as a human being, one who had suffered abuse. It made him sympathetic, a monster that had been made. The mask looks good enough, but in the context of the movie, it means very little.
Halloween 2 (2009): In the sequel, the mask means even less. It begins to fall apart, revealing the tormented human beneath it, as you can see from this shot of hobo Michael Myers. I don’t really have much more to say about this one.
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