Opinions have varied on David Gordon Green’s take on the saga of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers. 2018’s Halloween had stellar reviews and a massive box office haul of $255.6 worldwide. Many loved the film, but some criticized how there was little of the watching from the shadows Boogeyman of the 1978 original. Critics and fans were less kind to last year’s Halloween Kills, with it disregarded as an over-the-top gore fest that served only as filler as we waited for this year’s finale, Halloween Ends.
What almost everyone agreed on, however, was how scary Michael Myers looked. So many of the endless sequels got the look of The Shape all wrong. Emmy and Oscar award-winning makeup artist Christopher Nelson got the mask right better than any film since the original by simply modeling it after that look. No matter what you think about the plot, there’s no doubt that Michael Myers was terrifying again. Sadly, twenty years earlier, the seemingly easiest but most important aspect, the Myers mask, was butchered horribly in 1998’s Halloween H20.
It was huge news when Jamie Lee Curtis, after a seventeen-year absence, returned to the franchise as the iconic final girl Laurie Strode. This new film promised to strip away the absurdity of the outrageous sequels as if they had never happened (sound familiar?), instead focusing on only the first two films, stripping the plot down to the bare bones. Halloween H20 is about a traumatized woman in hiding and the maniacal brother who tracks her down.
Curtis was phenomenal in her return to the role that made her a household name. With the inclusion of young actors like Josh Hartnett and Michelle Williams, Halloween H20 rode the wave of 1996’s Scream, becoming a fun slasher for a whole new generation of teens. There was only one massive issue that stopped Halloween H20 from reaching classic status: Michael Myers looked absolutely awful.
The Masks of 'Halloween H20'
Whereas all the previous films had, for better or worse, only used one mask design, Halloween H20 used at least four. The first design was from a mold from 1995’s Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers. It was a placeholder mask. The filmmakers didn’t think you could use the previous film’s mask when you’re acting like that film never existed. It’s a shame. Say what you want about the bizarre sixth entry, but the mask worked. It was void of emotion with black eyes, reminiscent of the original William Shatner mask.
Unfortunately we only get to see it in a few quick scenes at the beginning of the film when Michael is hunting down nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens). It’s glimpsed only in quick and dark shots, but the effect is chilling. Michael Myers looks scary as hell. Confusingly, the mask design disappears after this.
KNB's Mask
Next came a mask designed by the stellar special effects company KNB. Having some well known effects company be in charge of reimagining the look of Michael Myers seemed like a perfect idea. Instead, the group somehow created the worst mask of the series. Everything about the mask is flat and cheap looking. You could find scarier imitations at your local Wal-Mart. The mask has a perpetual angry frown etched across it, as if the filmmakers wanted to tell us that Michael Myers is mad and scary rather than showing it. The end result is a Shape that resembles a pissed off alien.
Even the filmmakers realized that the KNB mask was bad, fortunately, and scrapped it during shooting. However, it still shows up in several scenes, in long shots of Michael walking toward the camera. Just because he’s in the background doesn’t mean that viewers aren’t going to notice that Myers’ look changes not just from one scene to another, but in some instances, from one shot to the next.
Stan Winston's Mask
The mask you remember, and the one used for the vast majority of filming and in reshoots, was designed by effects legend Stan Winston. If the man could design something as complicated as The Terminator and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park, he could surely handle one white mask. He, too, failed the simplest of tasks, giving us a mask that is only marginally better than the KNB monstrosity.
There is more shape to Winston’s mask. The flatness is removed. The angry eyes are gone. Still, Winston committed two crucial errors. One is the hair. It shouldn’t be a big deal what Myers’ hair looks like. That’s not what we remember. You remember it here, though, because it sticks out wildly at every angle, making Michael Myers look like a goofy clown who is so frustrated that he’s literally pulling out his mask hair.
The biggest failure lies in the eyes. Every previous Halloween mask, even the bad ones in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5, got the eyes right, by making them small and black, with the real eyes of Myers hidden behind them. You might get a quick glimpse of The Shape’s eyes here and there, which only upped the creep factor, but for the most part you see only darkness.
It was Myers’ doctor, Dr. Samuel Loomis, after all, who said in 1978, that when he first met Michael, “I met this six-year-old child, with this blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes, the Devil’s eyes.” When you meet Michael Myers as an adult, the mask conveys every part of this quote. One wonders if Stan Winston was not a fan of the film, for his final mask has the eyeholes wider than ever, with Michael’s eyes prominent in every shot. In one scene, after taking a shot to the groin, Michael’s eyes grow wide, the pain of being hit in the testicles evident. It’s a laugh out loud moment where one should never exist with The Shape. One small decision totally changed the effect that Myers has. There are no black eyes of the Devil. He is no longer The Boogeyman, but simply a man.
The Infamous CGI Mask
As bad as the decision to have three starkly different masks was, with two of them failing to recapture the essence of the original, the biggest sin committed in the entirety of the franchise is the infamous CGI mask. This came about because one shot from the alien-like KNB mask couldn’t be erased. This shot includes a big kill of one of the film’s supporting characters, with a close up on the mask.
While the filmmakers thought that they could leave in long shots of the KNB mask without anyone noticing, there was no way to hide a mask that takes up the whole screen. A reshoot with the Winston mask was impossible. The next best thing would have been to do a quick cut. We see the doomed character turn, we know Myers is there, but before we see him, we cut away. Instead, Halloween H20 makes the most 90s movie move ever, by covering up the KNB mask with a CGI mask. Movies of the 1990s and early 2000s are littered with lazy, fake looking CGI, all to save time and money, even though practical effects would have been much more effective. For a few very long seconds, we hold on what looks like a cartoon mask drawn over Myers’ body.
The horrible look takes the viewer completely out of the moment. What should have been a suspenseful scene becomes another unintentional, laugh out loud moment, showing that director Steve Miner and everyone else involved didn’t take who Michael Myers was seriously. Miner had previously directed Friday the 13th Part 2 and Friday the 13th Part 3. Perhaps he saw Myers as indistinguishable from Jason Voorhees, as if he was just another killer in any white mask.
Michael Myers' constantly changing look is not only confusing and jarring, but a slap in the face to those watching the film. Though we’re given a fun and thrilling final product, it doesn’t feel like a Michael Myers film. It would be more convincing to be told that it was a copycat killer all along than to buy in that this big eyed, wild haired, CGI alien is the Boogeyman who haunted our nightmares for decades. This failure to get the most basic element right took away from the mystique of The Shape, hindering what was supposed to be a big event that promised to bring us back to the original classic’s roots. What should have been the final battle of a creepy, supernatural Boogeyman and the baddest final girls ends up feeling like a film about a woman being stalked by just some guy with sister issues.