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Halloween 2018: Michael Myers Wears His Original Mask
Halloween 2018 will feature Michael Myers wearing the mask he wore during his original rampage. The new Halloween is a sequel to the original only and will ignore the rest of the series. Blumhouse is producing the sequel, and are pulling out all the stops for fans. Jamie Lee Curtis returns once more as Laurie Strode, series creator John Carpenter will executive produce and compose the music, and even original Michael performer Nick Castle will return in a cameo. It was recently clarified Castle will play Michael in a couple of scenes, while actor James Jude Courtney plays the character for the majority of the movie.
Halloween 2018 will also be out in time to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the original, which launched the whole slasher subgenre back in 1978. Halloween’s surprise success led to a host of sequels and imitators like Friday The 13th, but the original is still considered the best. Some fans were a little upset when it was announced the new movie would ignore the other sequels, but co-writer Danny McBride confirmed it will pay homage to the other Halloween movies too.
No story details have been revealed about how Michael will return in the next movie, or where he’s been for the last 40 years. No pictures have been revealed of Michael’s look yet either, but in an in-depth interview with Halloween Daily News, special effects makeup artist Christopher Nelson has revealed Michael will be wearing the same mask he wore during the first movie. Nelson designed the mask for the new film, and it will look appropriately weathered after 4 decades:
The film takes place 40 years later, so you’re not going to have that same mask, it’s not going to be this pristine, beautiful thing that it was in 1978. You have to approach it from that standpoint. I had 40-year-old masks that I studied and looked at how they broke down, how they wrinkled, how they did this and how they did that. I also took into account the context of the film. Where is the mask now and where has it been for these 40 years? Without revealing anything, I took that into context. I had hundreds of photos and books.
The mask in the original was famously a William Shatner Captain Kirk mask spray painted white and altered for the movie. That same mask returned for 1981’s Halloween II, but despite taking place on the same night as the first movie, the mask already showed visible signs of decay in the 3 years it took to the get the sequel into production. The original mask didn’t look much like William Shatner to start with, but subsequent sequels altered Michael’s mask to tone down the resemblance even further.
While Halloween 2018 will feature Michael wearing his original mask, 40-years of deterioration will likely have altered it to the point where it looks suitably different to the first movie. Rob Zombie’s Halloween movies also used a similar plot point, with grown-up Michael returning to his house to retrieve the mask he wore when he killed his sister as a boy. That same mask came back for Zombie’s Halloween II, which had decayed to the point it has a big tear exposing half of Michael’s face underneath.
