You may or may not already know but the mask worn by Michael Myers, the serial killer from the Halloween movies, is actually based on the face of Star Trek icon William Shatner.
Created by horror visionary John Carpenter, Myers has been terrorising teenagers on the big screen since 1978 and the twelfth film from the franchise, Halloween Kills, has just hit cinemas. The intimidating and seemingly unstoppable murderer is best known for his expressionless pale mask and shaggy hair which gives him a completely emotionless complexion.
Bizarrely, this mask was actually a cast of Shatner’s face used for prosthetic purposes on Star Trek, where he is best known for playing Captain James Kirk. It seems odd that one of pop cultures biggest villains could have the same face as one of its biggest heroes but the two do seem uncannily tied together.
Myers reemergence in cinemas has coincided with Shatner’s return to the headlines after the actor recently became the oldest person to ever go into space after travelling onboard Jeff Bezos’s last Blue Origin flight. However, when recently asked about the Halloween mask, Shatner admitted that he had a hard time accepting it was actually his face.
Speaking to Jake Hamilton on the Jake’s Takes YouTube channel, the 90-year-old recalls thinking it was a prank that someone was trying to pull on him when he heard about the origins of the mask.
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“I don’t remember the exact moment but I thought, ‘Is that a joke? Are they kidding?” he said.
Shatner added that “the death mask” was created so that he wouldn’t have to be available every time they needed his face on Star Trek. “They made a mask of my face on ‘Star Trek’ out of clay so I would not have to be available for the prosthetics they would have to put on my face to look old or evil or whatever it was they were making me look like,” said the star.
“So somewhere along the line, someone got that mask and made a mask of it for [the holiday] Halloween.”
As documented in the Netflix series The Movies That Made Us, Tommy Lee Wallace, who was the production designer and editor on the original Halloween, was looking for a mask in a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard.
“Up on the shelves were these full face masks of Richard Nixon, and down at the end was Mr Spock. And right next to it was this blank face Capt. Kirk,” said Wallace on the docuseries.
To make the mask look a bit scarier Wallace cut larger eyeholes, removed the eyebrows and sideburns, painted the face a ghoulish white, and darkened the hair and with that Michael Myers was born.
Thankfully, that seems to be where the connection between Myers and Shatner ends, unless Bezos wants to fund another Halloween movie set in space, which sounds kinda fun.
