Is Michael Myers Real? The truth behind the masked man

Michael Myers is the central antagonist in the Halloween horror movie franchise, which began in 1978. The masked killer is known for stalking and killing his targets.

Since his debut, he has become a well-known character in pop culture. The realistic nature of his killings has made fans wonder if the character actually exists. Many years after the first movie, the question ‘is Michael Myers real?’ still runs through the minds of many.

Many fans have wondered about the origination of the character because of the way kills people. They have been viewed as quite realistic.

According to Esquire, the original film’s director and co-writer, John Carpenter, said he had a creepy encounter while attending Western Kentucky University, which inspired the fictional serial killer.

In a 2003 documentary on Halloween, ‘A Cut above the Rest’, he said, “I had a class—psychology or something—and we visited a mental institution. We visited the most serious, mentally ill patients. And there was this kid, he must have been 12 or 13 and he literally had this look.”

Carpenter described the look as “This blank, pale emotionless face. Blackest eyes. The devil’s eyes. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized what was living behind that boys’ eyes was purely and simply evil.”

When film producer, Irwin Yablans, approached Carpenter with the idea to create a horror movie set on Halloween night about babysitters stalked by a psychotic killer, he thought about the boy at the institution with the creepy face. They then discussed Michael’s character.

Michael Myers was the name of the head of a movie distribution company called Miracle Films. The company acted as an English distributor for Carpenter’s film ‘Assault on Precinct 13’, which helped him succeed globally. He decided to name the masked killer after Michael to honour the success of his previous film.  

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Michael Myers can be described as almost immortal or supernatural as he never gets hurt. In the documentary ‘A Cut above the Rest’, Carpenter credits Yul Brynner’s portrayal of a ‘killer robot that couldn’t be killed’ in the 1973 West world film as additional inspiration for raising Michael Myers from just a character to mythic status. “Make him human, yes, but almost like a force…that will never stop. That can’t be denied,” he said.

Speaking with Games Radar on Myers immortality, director of the recent movies David Gordon Green said, “In my mind, Michael is a spectacular and resilient human being that doesn’t feel pain.”

According to PopSugar, what made the 1978 original stand out was the fact that at that time, it was unheard of for a film to showcase such an unsettling and graphic murder from a first-person perspective. The biggest shock to the audience was that the murderer was a young boy.

Many theorists have tried to create different reasons behind Myers’s motivation to kill, but the directors have refuted such claims.

Green, the director of the 2018 reprise, describes Myers as a remarkable person with no motive and no emotion. There is no specific reason why he kills people. As he does not exhibit any emotion, it is almost impossible to see him as a rational human. That is what makes him horrifying.

Green told the L. A Times that “Michael Myers hasn’t evolved as a character in any way, shape or form. He’s the essence of evil.”

“He has no character. He has no personality. He has no interests. He never has. He’s someone that is moving forward and reacting to the world around him, but not with any sort of conscious objective. And how the world around him reacts to his behaviour is where our story comes to life.”