Michael Myers is one of the most ruthless killers in cinematic history, embodying the essence of evil through his senseless killings.
This horror icon has a long-running series of movies that have remained popular since their initial release back in 1978.
With his massive, lifeless, sauntering body, Myers terrorizes his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois on movie screens across the country.
Is Michael Myers Real?
No, Michael Myers isn’t real and there was never a serial killing that the character or Halloween movies were based on.
Michael Myers was inspired by a young boy that John Carpenter met during a college trip.
To help foster inspiration for fictional characters, John Carpenter took a psychology class at Western Kentucky University.
He visited a mental institution, where the class focused on some of the patients with the most serious cases.
While at the institution, Carpenter met a young boy who was only about 12 or 13 years old.
The young boy wore a pale, blank expression on his face and had the blackest and most lifeless eyes that Carpenter had ever seen.
The dreadful hollowness of the boy’s expression and eyes haunted Carpenter, remaining in the back of his mind for years.
Carpenter spent eight years trying to understand the young man, but what he found was darker and more sinister than he had initially imagined.
After Carpenter had learned what truly hid behind the patient’s lifeless eyes, he knew that it would be unsafe to allow the patient to leave, and he feared what the young man would do if he were forced to live on his own.
When Irwin Yablans asked John Carpenter to help create the villain for a set of Halloween movies that followed the story of a psychotic killer who stalks and kills babysitters, the young patient popped back into Carpenter’s mind.
The blank stare of the patient is still the creepiest thing that John Carpenter has ever seen, and the haunting memory now lives on through the character Michael Myers.
What makes Michael Myers more sinister than other film killers is how young he was when the deep-seated evil began to fester and spill over into his actions and lack of personality.
Do You Ever See Michael Myers’s Face In The Movies?
There are multiple points where you see Michael Myers’s face from beneath the mask in the Halloween movies.
Although Myers has a strong preference to keep his mask on while he is outside of the hospital, there have been multiple scenes where his iconic mask has been taken off.
In the first Halloween movie, Laurie Strode manages to rip off Myers’s mask while she’s fighting to stay alive.
Laurie manages to distract Michael long enough to get out of his grasp as he scrambles to get his mask back on, only for Dr. Loomis to come in and shoot him.
At this point, he was played by Tony Moran, but this would be the last time he would be the true face of Michael Myers.
Viewers wouldn’t be able to see his face again until Halloween 5: Revenge of Michael Myers.
In the 1989 film, Michael Myers is moments away from killing his niece, Jamie.
As a dying wish, she asks to see his face and Myers obliges her wish.
Underneath the mask hides a rat-faced and messy-haired Michael Myers, who is played by Don Shanks.
The light is coming from behind Shanks, giving him the appearance of a shadow with hungry, shark eyes.
You can just barely make out his eyes as tears begin to run down his face.
This is one of the first times we see Myers express any kind of emotional response.
In Rob Zombie’s 2007 and 2008 Halloween movies, you can see Myers’s face as clear as day.
He is now much older, with long, stringy hair and a massive, unkempt beard.
The 2018 Halloween sequel showed Michael Myers without a mask, but you never saw his face.
The 2021 film gave viewers the most recent look at Myers’s weathered and dirty face.
How Old Is Michael Myers?
When Dr. Loomis first introduced audiences around the world to his most dangerous patient, he stated that Michael Myers was only six years old when he killed his 15-year-old sister.
The first movie takes place only 15 years after the death of Michael’s sister, Judith Myers.
In his first film appearance as an adult, he is 21 years old.
Despite math dictating that he was 21 years old, the credits list Tony Moran as Michael Myers at 23 years old.
Most fans see Michael Myers’s listed age as a simple mistake and prefer to do the math themselves.
Halloween II takes place on the same night as the first movie, meaning that he is still the same age.
Some people were initially confused about his age because of the 3-year difference between the movies.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch took place only a year after the sequel movie.
Michael Myers wouldn’t rise again for another nine years canonically when he would appear in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers.
At this point, he was 31 years old.
The fifth movie Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers happened only a year after the events of the previous movie, making the serial killer 32 years old.
During the events of Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, he is 38 years old.
For the 20th anniversary sequel Halloween: H20, Michael Myers is 41 years old because the movie takes place 20 years after his initial attack.
At the start of Halloween: Resurrection, Michael Myers is 44 years old.
The movie quickly cuts to the following year when Myers is now 45 years old and just as ruthless as ever. During the 2018 and 2021 Halloween films, Michael Myers is 61 years old.
How Many People Has Michael Myers Killed?
Through the film series, Michael Myers kills well over 100 people on screen.
The exact number of people Myers has killed isn’t able to be calculated because he does just as much killing offscreen as he does onscreen.
During the 1978 film, Halloween, Michael Myers only kills five people, which is a much lower number than in his later film appearances.
Myers ends up killing Judith Myers, Christopher Hasting, Annie Brackett, Bob Simms, and Lynda Van Der Klok.
By his second film, Michael Myers more than doubles his kill count, killing 11 different people.
His victims include Alice Martin, Ben Tramer, Debra Lane, Mr. Garrett, Budd Scarlotti, and Doctor Fredrick Mixter.
In Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Myers ends up murdering 19 different people.
He gets the same number of kills in Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.
By Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, Michael Myers slows down slightly and kills 17 people throughout the film.
This trend of lowering kill counts continues in Halloween: H20, where he only kills seven people.
By the time that Halloween: Resurrection came out, the downward kill trend had ended, and Michael Myers killed 11 people.
Out of all his kills, the most notable victim is Michael Myers’s long-time obsession Laurie Strode.
When Rob Zombie took over the franchise in 2007 and 2008, he wanted to make sure that Myers slaughtered plenty of citizens of his hometown.
In the 2007 film, Michael Myers murders 22 people and gives Myers a new highest kill count for a single movie.
In Rob Zombie’s 2008 sequel, Myers kills 18 people on screen and ends up dying himself.
When Halloween was brought back in 2018, there were 17 victims.
In Halloween Kills, he killed at least 27 people in that film alone.
What Is Wrong With Michael Myers?
Being able to murder more than 100 innocent people for decades takes a brain that is so twisted that it can’t be neurotypical.
Throughout the films, we hear about what a mysterious and dangerous case that Michael Myers provides for his countless doctors.
Through the Halloween books and films, the audience can get a small peek into the mind of the film’s most ruthless killer.
In the novelization of the first film, Michael Myers talks about the visions of a disabled Celtic boy named Enda who murdered his crush after she refused to even acknowledge him.
While talking about the visions he suffers from, he also hears voices that tell him to hate people and act on his hatred.
After this information came to light, Michael Myers was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder that causes delusions, auditory and visual hallucinations, disorganized speech, and trouble thinking.
Schizophrenia can also cause a person to not be able to speak or express emotion.
Michael Myers also has catatonia, which is a psychomotor disorder that causes him to become paralyzed when his brain is in a state of extreme mental stimulation and is often seen in patients with schizophrenia.
Physical responses to the disorder include refusal to eat or drink, staring, mutism, bizarre posturing, and rigid movement.
While he has been diagnosed with catatonia by some of his doctors, Dr. Loomis believed that Michael was just faking it in order to make the other doctors think that he’s too weak to escape and go back to murdering families.
There is some debate on whether Michael Myers is sociopathic or psychopathic.
Due to his physical tendencies, most people side with the idea that Michael Myers is a psychopath rather than a sociopath.
Why Does Michael Myers Wear A Mask?
Michael Myers wears a mask to instill even more fear into the hearts of his victims, but some fans believe that fake face that the mask provides helps Myers detach from his human nature and all features that make him his own person.
John Carpenter purposely left Michael Myers’s personality as a mystery because he believes that not even Myers himself knows what he is truly like or thinking.
The mask’s tattered, flaking face and soulless, unchanging expression perfectly represent the decaying, yet unchanging state of Michael Myers’s mind.
There’s just as much life in the face of his mask as there is on his uncovered face.
Michael Myers’s mask takes away from his humanity and gives him a more monstrous demeanor.
The identity-less killer uses the mask to ensure that his victims know that whatever they’re dealing with isn’t human.
When designing his most famous character, John Carpenter only wanted Michael Myers to be the shape of evil, not the personification.
Carpenter doesn’t even see Michael Myers as human, which is what often gives Myers his nearly superhuman abilities.
Unlike his victims and the viewers, Myers isn’t deciding on what he does with his body.
Rather than being motivated to move his body through thoughts, evil is working through his body like a puppet.
By wearing the mask, he is giving away his identity as the young boy who murdered his sister to become simply a menacing form looming in the yards and streets of Haddonfield.
The mask is incredibly important to Michael Myers because it allows him to act freely.
When he loses his mask, he has a violent reaction because he was forced to once again be identified as the young murderer of Haddonfield.
Myers makes sure to track whoever has his mask down first and foremost.
Why Does Michael Myers Act The Way He Does?
Every movie seems to have its own theory as to why Michael Myers has chosen to slaughter the peaceful citizens of Haddonfield.
Theories vary from the supposedly troubled childhood that Michael Myers may have had to just blaming the essence of evil that swells inside him and motivates his actions.
In the Rob Zombie Halloween movies, Michael Myers is seen growing up in an extremely abusive situation.
His father abandoned him and his sister when he was young, his mother then remarried a man who was abusive towards the young child.
Myers’s sister doesn’t help the situation with the way that she bullies him, and she prefers to spend her time with a boyfriend who is just as mean to Michael as the rest of his family.
In these movies, Michael Myers is 10 years old instead of six years old.
He ends up killing not only his sister but also his sister’s boyfriend and his mother’s husband before he is caught and taken away to the sanitarium.
These are the only Halloween movies that gave Myers a motivation, but these movies aren’t normally seen as canonical by Halloween fans.
What separated Michael Myers from other 1970s and 1980s slashers at the time of his first film appearance was that Michael Myers didn’t have a reason for his killings.
He had your typical childhood in a small, suburban town, yet ended up becoming a monster.
His senseless, random murders are what make the Halloween movies so terrifying.
The scariest murderer of Haddonfield could have been anyone, at any age.
Michael Myers kills because he has made it his objective to kill anyone he sees, and he won’t stop chasing his objective until he has completed it.
