It isn’t every day your face becomes tied to a horror movie icon, so you can imagine how shocked William Shatner was to see Michael Myers mask for the first time. In an interview with the YouTuber Jake Talks, the actor revealed that when he learned that a manipulated Captain James T. Kirk mask was used in the Halloween movies, at first he thought it was “a joke”.
John Carpenter’s 1978 flick Halloween follows a masked serial killer who terrorises the quiet suburban streets of Haddonfield. According to Entertainment Weekly, Halloween’s art director, Tommy Lee Wallace, picked up the Shatner mask for their main killer at “Bert Wheeler’s Magic Shop on Hollywood Boulevard”. He went on to enlarge the eyeholes, remove the eyebrows and sideburns, and paint the face white – creating the creepy Myers face we all know and love today.
Shatner saw the mask for the first time via a picture, instead of watching the movie. Although the actor, couldn’t remember the exact moment he found out about Michael’s mask being a manipulated version of his face, he could recall his reaction. “I thought, ‘Is this a joke? Are they kidding?'” the actor says. Shatner then explained how Carpenter’s crew managed to get their hands on the Star Trek mask in the first place.
“I recognised it as the death mask they had made for me,” he revealed. “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. So somewhere along the line, someone got that mask and made a mask of it for [the holiday] Halloween.”
Michael’s masks have changed over the years since the original from the ‘70s. While filming the latest entries in the slasher franchise, director David Gordon Green opened up about the difficulty of capturing the rubber mask on camera while keeping a creepy atmosphere.