In the battle of scary movie masks, “Friday the 13th”‘s Jason Vorhees and “Scream”‘s Ghostface don’t hold a candle to that forefather of fright, Michael Myers.
The all-time greatest slasher’s cold, pale, deflated, emotionless face covering debuted in John Carpenter’s 1978 classic “Halloween,” starring Jamie Lee Curtis as tortured suburban babysitter Laurie Strode. And his mug was instantly unforgettable.
In a review, Post critic Archer Winston described Michael, also known as “The Shape,” as “the very incarnation of evil, the Devil himself.”
And it was vital that poor Laurie’s stalker had a paralyzing look to match his menace.
The surprising origin of Michael’s first mask in the low-budget horror flick, oddly enough, is the final frontier. It is an altered Captain Kirk costume from “Star Trek.”
“It was a very simple matter of taking an existing [William Shatner] mask and modifying it in a couple of ways,” its creator Tommy Lee Wallace told Horror’s Hallowed Grounds’ Sean Clark on YouTube.
“A good thing came out of it, because none of us were prepared for the effect,” he added.
“It was an unbelievably terrifying, visceral effect. And we knew we were in business — that we were gonna have a scary movie even before we got to a scary story.”
Shatner, however, was none too pleased when he saw his roughed-up reflection on-screen in Carpenter’s masterpiece.
“I thought, ‘Is that a joke? Are they kidding?’,” the 93-year-old “Star Trek” actor said on his YouTube Channel.
Watching 1981’s “Halloween II,” at first glance it appears that Myers’ mask got an artistic revamp. But it’s actually the same piece used in the original, only with some wear and tear.
Legend has it that producer Debra Hill stored the object in a shoebox beneath her bed in the years between productions.
Her heavy smoking lent the item a yellowish color.
Also, “The Shape” changed shape. The actor playing Michael was no longer Nick Castle, but Dick Warlock, a stunt performer who had a much larger head.
After a one-film break (No. 3, “Season of the Witch” in 1982, had an entirely Michael-free plot), 1988’s “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers” brought the OG baddie back. Nonetheless, “Return” was and is controversial among fans.
The killer’s face became laughably white, and for a fleeting moment the mask practically heads to Barbie Land — turning pink with blonde hair. The blip was all due to a factory mix-up.
“I didn’t get a chance to see those masks till we actually got on set,” makeup designer Ken Horn said in a making-of video.
“I opened the box and there were six of them, and they were pink with [blonde] hair. And I was going ‘This is not right! It’s supposed to be white with brown hair.’ And I told the producer it should be changed.”
Ultimately, “I had to actually repaint the mask white and streak tip the [blonde] hair brown to reverse it to make it look like Michael Myers,” Horn said. “And that’s why it had the bumpy texture to it.”
But the bright and colorful mistake was accidentally worn in one quick scene.
“I remember somebody saying at some point ‘Michael Myers doesn’t have blonde hair! The mask is brown!,” scream queen Danielle Harris, who played young Jamie Lloyd, said in the video.
“And there was some kind of scrambling and s—t going on.”
The Shape caused an uproar again in 1998’s “Halloween H20: 20 Years Later,” when Curtis returned to the franchise. Viewers absolutely loathed Myers’ new accessory.
“It became a nightmare,” Curtis admitted during a chat onstage years later.
“If you ever see ‘H20,’ the truth is we shot the entire movie, and [then] the last week of the movie Miramax called and said they hate the mask. And we reshot, I think, 10 days of work to kind of make the mask look different. And it became this insane, insane process.”
The extra work didn’t help matters. And, today, Curtis sides with the film’s detractors.
“You look at the movie and, I’m sorry, it stinks!,” she said. “Not the movie, but the mask. Doesn’t look good. They chose the wrong mask.”
Then came Rob Zombie’s “Halloween” and “Halloween II.” Both were pummeled by critics and rejected by audiences, but viewers have generally complimented his embrace of the slasher’s iconic appearance.
“It was my decision to keep the classic Michael Myers mask and make [the setting] Haddonfield and keep Dr. Loomis and all these things,” Zombie told Cinema.com. “I kept trying to think about it as a fan.”
However, everybody was onboard for David Gordon Green’s acclaimed franchise reboot in 2018.
For that film called — wait for it — “Halloween,” makeup artist Christopher Nelson took charge and wanted the covering to fit not only the actor, but the new narrative as well.
“The mask in the context of this story is 40 years old, so I’ve studied a lot of 40-year-old masks, and how they warped, and how they rotted, and how they weathered, and just tried to do that with a cinematic license, and bring that character back to life,” Nelson told Entertainment Weekly.
“It’s made out of slip latex, like all Halloween masks are. So, we went old school. We wanted it to be a Halloween mask and that’s what it is.”
As that trilogy was wrapping up with 2021’s “Halloween Ends,” Nelson again took a visual left turn.
“When it comes to the mask, I certainly didn’t just want to just redo 2018 or ‘Kills’,” he said in a DVD featurette.
“Michael Myers in this movie has a completely different vibe. It was hard with this one because you could easily go too far and have this wreck of a mask and wreck of a character that blend into the background. You have to maintain a silhouette that fans recognize. So the idea for me was to strip it down to the bare latex.”
And, to think, five decades of memorable scares all began with the captain of the starship Enterprise.