Ah, the Halloween franchise. The ultimate case of, “Well, the first one made money, so let’s keep it going.” Of all the iconic slasher and horror franchises that exist, the Halloween franchise feels the most inexplicable, with the notable exception being the Psycho films (most people forget that's a series) I’m not the first to point this out, but Michael Myers is a perfect movie monster for a standalone film, but he's not something you build a film series around. His entire personality boils down to being evil and killing indiscriminately. No motive. No passion or prejudice. If you’re in front of him, that’s all it takes for him to kill you—or not. That’s what makes him scary, and any growth or change from this simple premise pretty much dilutes the whole idea, which is why building a franchise around him feels counterintuitive.
However, like most horror villains, he has a very distinct and instantly recognizable character design. Everyone knows about the famous mask and its origins as a modified Avery Brooks mask from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—if you don’t catch everything inaccurate about that sentence, you can’t call yourself a Halloween fan—but something that’s always bothered me is why that mask became the default.
Before I get into it, I’ll go back to its initial appearance in the 1978 film. So, if you care to roleplay with me for a minute, please be like Marvin Nash, and lend me your ear. Something that’s always driven me up the wall about the original movie, is why Michael wore a mask in the first place. The series has always featured a recurring theme of masks, down to Michael wearing one as he killed his sister, but I’ve never understood why he wears one when he’s terrorizing Laurie Strode and her friends.
What bothers me about him wearing the mask is that, whereas in the Halloween remake, where the character is a psychopath rather than evil in a philosophical sense, and enjoys masks and has a deep-seated connection to the famous white mask, the original Michael just wears one... because.
Maybe you could argue that he wore it since he was fleeing from the police and needed to hide his face, but that would imply he has a higher level of self-awareness and an awareness of his surroundings than I believe he would have. For the sake of Halloween as a standalone movie, I can accept that explanation, similar to how he wears a mechanic’s jumpsuit simply because he needed clothes and a mechanic was probably what he came across first, and he wasn’t in a position to be picky, nor would he really have cared. As a standalone film, I can believe all that, but here’s the rub: what about the rest of the franchise?
Cynically, I understand why he wore the mask in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. After Halloween III: Season of the Witch, when fans were upset that Michael Myers wasn’t in it, they were sure to take no risks (down to getting rid of roman numerals for the numbers in the title) and bring it back to things people know, and that includes the return of the main character and a lesser version of his iconic mask. It’s especially frustrating because the Thorn Trilogy (4-6) still considers the events of Halloween II as canon (except when it doesn’t), and Michael is supposed to be badly burned. Because of that, early in Halloween 4, his face is fully bandaged, and that could have been a cool alternative and a natural progression for the character design. Sure, he would’ve looked like Darkman, but at least it would have been something different that retained the blank, inhuman feel of the original mask.
But no, he stops at a drugstore and coincidentally picks up a nearly identical version of the mask from the original two movies. That's where my leniency starts to wear thin with why he keeps returning to that specific mask. I always got the impression that the mask from the original film was just a cheap, disposable mask that Michael chose randomly. Similar to how in Scream, the Ghost Face costume was one you could find at any store. So, him coming across it so easily ten years later seems a bit far-fetched.
In Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, I can sort of buy that he would wear the same outfit since he was asleep for a year—yeah, whatever—and the guy who was nursing him kept everything by his bedside—I’m being generous—but by the time it gets to Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers, where a five-year time jump occurs, that recurring outfit choice feels completely pointless from a story perspective. According to the logic of the sixth movie, Michael has been housed and lodged with the Thorn cult for five years, and he just always wears the mechanic suit and mask?
He’s even wearing it during the cult’s ritual. Why? Couldn't the cult give him some fancy robes or something to set him apart as their mascot? By the end of The Producer’s Cut, he’s in Wynn’s coat and hat, which would’ve been pretty cool. Give him a ‘Jack the Ripper’ look. But they reset the timeline after Halloween 6—for the better—so that idea went nowhere. It’s like almost every movie tries to change his look, but they just don’t follow through.
By the time you get to Halloween H20, that’s the straw that breaks the camel’s back (even though the movie is pretty decent). They don’t even try to come up with an excuse for why Michael looks the way he does. It’s just from the start, he’s in his classic getup. There’s no explanation for it; I don’t think there’s even a mention of a store being burgled. He’s just in the attire, complete with a mask that makes his eyes highly visible, which… no. Don’t do that.
This is a minor complaint, but eyes are an important feature for giving a character humanity, and the point of the original mask is that it’s completely featureless and helps maintain the allure that Michael is a force of nature rather than a human. Aside from that one awesome shot of him and Laurie looking at each other through the door window, being able to see his eyes feels like a significant misstep and just ends up making him look pretty goofy.
Back to business, what’s so irritating about the outfit is that within the context of the movies, there’s no real reason for him to keep returning to it, aside from the obvious franchise logic of what he wore in the first movie, which is what audiences recognize. You can compare it to something like Jason in Friday the 13th, where, yes, he does primarily wear a hockey mask, but at least his clothes change from movie to movie and it makes each appearance more distinct. If you’re a big enough fan, you can tell which movie he’s in based solely on what he’s wearing.
And, unlike Michael Myers, Jason is deformed, so he has motivation to wear the mask, and he doesn’t get it until halfway through his second movie. Before that, he wore a bag over his head, presumably because the producers didn’t think ripping off Halloween was enough, so they might as well copy The Town That Dreaded Sundown too.
The mask in Halloween just seems like a case of a franchise imbuing something with meaning because it’s recognizable to the audience. All at the expense of it not making sense within the story. By the time you reach Halloween (2018), which otherwise does a decent job of not romanticizing the original movie—unlike some other legacy sequels—you still have the True Crime podcasters who present the mask to him as if it’s the source of all his power, when it never was.
The same goes for Karen in Halloween Kills, when she takes it off him and uses it to lure him into the trap because she knows how important it is to him… for some reason. Seriously, in that timeline, he only wore that thing once for a couple of hours forty years earlier—why does everyone assume it’s so important to him? And if it’s important to him… why?
One of the few instances in these movies where I can understand why someone would think the mask is important is in Halloween Ends (a film I genuinely enjoy despite its flaws). Corey wearing the Michael Myers outfit makes sense when you consider he’s literally a mechanic and steals the mask from Michael in the third act, almost to force him into passing the torch. He doesn’t need the mask; he just wants it. The whole film is about him trying to feel empowered after years of the town walking all over him and what better way to do that than to take away the symbol of Haddonfield's biggest monster?
If they had continued the story with Corey as the main villain—which I believe they should have—I wouldn’t mind assuming that would be his chosen outfit. They could have kept him out of costume when he’s not killing, but when he does, he gets his gear on, like a reverse superhero. They could even call him The Shape, and that could be his serial killer nickname. That way, you keep the iconography of the series, but give it new meaning... come to think of it, why didn’t they do that? This wasn’t the direction I planned to take, but we’re here now, and I’m rolling with it.
Not to paint with a broad stroke, but besides being genuinely scary in the original film and having a few intimidating moments in the recent sequels, does anybody actually care about Michael Myers as a character? They just like his mask and how it’s scary that he walks everywhere and still manages to kill people. Also, the creepy breathing noises he makes. Looking back, I think the mistake of the series is that they kept the character of Michael Myers alive, when they should have focused on the idea he represents (i.e., personification of evil).
They could have kept the mask and had different characters take over, each with their own reason for why the mask has meaning. Almost like an evil version of Batman or the Dread Pirate Roberts. It’s not a Freddy Krueger situation where the character is tied to a specific actor (the original movie couldn’t even settle on a single actor, considering six different people playing the part), and the character can’t grow in any meaningful way without losing what made his original appearance scary (though that didn’t stop the sequels from trying).
So, I think changing the character but maintaining his basic mannerisms and character design would’ve been a good middle ground to keep the franchise alive. Bringing it back to Scream, people talk about Ghostface as if he's a singular killer, but he's been played by eleven different characters, so it can be done. As it is now, I have no idea why, in canon, the mask became Michael's go-to uniform.