What is Michael Myers’ mask from ‘Halloween’ made out of?
Hot on the heels of 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, John Carpenter’s 1978 movie Halloween arguably turned the phenomenon of murderous masked horror villains into a trend. Following its knife-wielding mass murderer, Michael Myers, came Friday the 13th’s Jason Vorhees and Scream’s Ghostface, among others.
Surprisingly, rather than any other masked killer, Michael Myers was really inspired by the real face of a 13-year-old boy whom Carpenter came across while visiting a mental hospital. The boy’s “schizophrenic” stare haunted him until he felt compelled to write it into a film character.
But back to the business of Myers’ covered face. What was his mask actually made out of? Well, in material terms, nothing very interesting. It’s just latex, white paint and synthetic hair.
As John Carpenter explained back in 2017, “My job in making Halloween was to make an exploitation horror film.” The whole movie cost just $300,000 to make. It was destined to have a low-budget feel with tropes typical of exploitation films of the 1970s. The DIY aesthetic of Myers’ mask is simply the result of these budgetary restrictions.
Because the producers “didn’t have any money to make a mask,” Carpenter recounted, “production designer Tommy Lee Wallace went up to a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard.” And just bought a handful of fancy dress latex masks on the heap.
Carpenter and his team first tried out a clown mask used by circus performer Emmett Kelly, adding wild red hair to make it look even scarier. This initial design certainly worked, as it became the inspiration for the appearance of Pennywise in screen adaptations of Stephen King’s horror novel It.
Dressing Myers up as a clown also added coherence to the character’s backstory. 15 years prior to the main events of the first Halloween movie, Myers had murdered his older sister, Judith, in a clown costume as a young boy. Since this event is the first time the audience sees Myers on screen, the idea was to make him easily recognisable when he appears later as an adult.
Halloween’s producers weren’t convinced, though. They didn’t feel the mask reflected Myers’ sociopathic, dissociative character traits.
Beam me up, Laurie?
So, they played around with the other masks Wallace had bought. Incredibly, the one they landed on was a face cast of none other than William Shatner, as his Star Trek character Captain Kirk.
Ironically, the mould the costume company had used to make the Kirk mask originally came from another horror film, The Devil’s Rain, in which Shatner appeared. This bizarre coincidence remained undiscovered until many years later.
Before testing out the Captain Kirk mask for Michael Myers screen tests, Wallace added a few finishing touches. Carpenter has described how the designer “spray painted it” with a can of regular plain-white body paint, as though the mask was a homemade kid’s Halloween costume. He also “cut the eyeholes a little bit different” and “fixed the hair”.
To be more specific, removed its eyebrows, sideburns and some of its scalp hair and made the eyeholes larger and rounder. These more pronounced holes created the illusion of empty eye sockets, making the appearance of the mask more disturbing.
When producers saw the final result, they decided this blank, expressionless and seemingly empty visage was much scarier than anything outwardly more shocking. And when it came to filming Myers in his mask, the fear factor exceeded anything the filmmakers could have imagined.
There was one particular moment when Carpenter realised just how terrifying the mask appears on screen while shooting the movie’s final scene. “You just slowly turn the light up,” as Myers stands behind his primary target throughout the film, Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis. “And it just exposed… just exposed that mask on film. That was creepy. That may be my favourite scene.”
And so, this spray-painted latex Captain Kirk costume turned out to be much more than just an exploitation gimmick. It became the face of a franchise, as Halloween was a $70 million smash hit at the box office and spawned numerous sequels. And the iconic image of one of Hollywood’s most horrifying serial killers.