<body><div><figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=0cGUHD_0wE68l3C00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=0cGUHD_0wE68l3C00" width="1140" height="570" ><figcaption>Image via Andrew Borrayo</figcaption></figure>The late 1970s and '80s were all about the slasher craze in the horror genre, with a plethora of masked men hacking their way through cinema screens. He might not have been the first, but the one who made the trend popular was Michael Myers in 1978's Halloween. John Carpenter created an iconic and terrifying villain with a man in a mask who didn't speak and who had no motive (the horrible sibling twist didn't exist yet). We can only guess what really drove him to stalk Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends, or what led him to kill his sister 15 years before. The closest we'll ever get to an answer is from an interview with Carpenter himself, who admitted that Michael Myers is based on a real person he once met.<h2>John Carpenter Was Scared by a Kid He Met in a Psychiatric Hospital </h2>Halloween begins with a twist right off the bat. We open on a dark house on Halloween night in 1963 where the camera is the POV of an unknown character watching a young woman and her boyfriend through a window. When the couple goes upstairs, the person enters the house and grabs a knife from a drawer. After the boyfriend leaves, the presence walks upstairs, puts on a clown mask, and stabs the girl to death. He then goes back downstairs and outside, just as an older couple is pulling up. When they take off the POV character's mask, it's revealed to be a six-year-old boy named Michael Myers (Will Sandlin). He just killed his sister, Judith (Sandy Johnson), and rather than looking angry or scared, Michael's face is completely blank, as if he's not even there. It's a jolting inciting incident, to have been in the eyes of a small child as they kill someone and not know it.The remainder of Halloween picks up 15 years later. Michael Myers has been sitting in Smith's Grove Warren County Sanitarium, but on Halloween Eve 1978, he escapes to kill again. This is not your average slasher, with the standard trope of a killer seeking revenge against those who wronged them like we see in films such as The Prowler, The Burning, Terror Train, Prom Night, and so many more. Michael Myers has no true motivation, which makes him so much more terrifying.In the documentary, Halloween: A Cut Above the Rest, John Carpenter spoke about how he came up with who Michael Myers is. Part of the Shape comes from the robotic killer played by Yul Brynner in Westworld. The other part came from real life. When he was a college student at Western Kentucky University, Carpenter's psychology class took a tour of a nearby mental institution. He said:<blockquote>"There was this kid, must've been 12 or 13, and he literally had this look that I gave the lines to Donald Pleasence to say. It's a schizophrenic stare is what it is. It's a real evil stare. And it was unsettling to me, and it was like the creepiest thing I'd ever seen."</blockquote><h2>Dr. Loomis Sees Michael Myers for Who He Really Is </h2>In Halloween, Michael Myers' doctor is Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence), a character named after one of the protagonists in Psycho, a name carried on by one of the main killers in Wes Craven's Scream. From the very moment we meet Loomis, when he is in his car on his way to Smith's Grove to pick up his patient for transport, he is shown to be scared of Michael, telling the nurse with him, Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), how Michael hasn't spoken in 15 years. He purposely tells Marion not to underestimate "it" instead of "him," and reveals that he wants Michael Myers so drugged up when he sees the judge that he'll barely be able to sit up. Loomis never wants Michael Myers to get out, but as they pull up to the hospital, they discover that he already has. "The evil is gone" Loomis says, which doesn't sound like the best thing for a doctor to say about his patient, but he knows him much better than the audience does.The lines John Carpenter wrote specifically about the boy he met are from when Loomis is in the old Myers house with Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers). As they search the dilapidated home, Loomis describes Myers as having: "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."Alternate Scenes in 'Halloween' Show More of Michael Myers as a Child <figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=1yVSLN_0wE68l3C00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=1yVSLN_0wE68l3C00" width="825" height="413" ><figcaption>Image via Compass International Pictures</figcaption></figure>Dr. Loomis is seen as crazy by a lot of the people he interacts with, but in truth, he's one step ahead. Perhaps he's never seen Michael Myers in the wild killing people, but he's spent years around him and can sense the pure evil that lies within him. It terrifies the man, and as the sequels show, Michael becomes Dr. Loomis' obsession, driving him increasingly mad.One of the most interesting scenes with Michael Myers is one you may have never seen. As Halloween II was being filmed, the original film was going to make its network TV debut. There was just one problem: the movie was too short for its two-hour block. Because of this, additional scenes were filmed just for the TV version. One scene has Loomis in front of a hospital board, where it's decided that Michael will be kept in the sanitarium until he's 21 when he can be tried as an adult. Loomis demands that Michael be moved to a maximum security facility, but the doctors disagree, dismissing Michael as a child catatonic. To Loomis, it's all an act, and Myers is an evil force waiting for something to unleash him.Feeling defeated that he's not being listened to, Loomis visits Michae in his room when he's around 12. Myers sits in a barren room in his chair, not moving a muscle as he stares out the window with a look on his face that is at once blank but filled with something intense and uncomfortable. Is this what John Carpenter saw in reality all those years before? Loomis tells Michael that he may have fooled his doctors, but not him. The boy doesn't respond at all, but just sits there, catatonic, emotionless, his black, devil eyes seeing something we can't comprehend. It's a scene that would have been a vital addition to the original film, as it dives deeper into what Loomis sees and feels, and what Carpenter saw and felt when he was just a college student. Basing a killer on a child with a mental illness might be controversial, but fear is found in the unknown, and Carpenter seeing this child and not understanding him scared him so much that he couldn't forget it.<figure><img src="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?type=thumbnail_580x000&amp;url=212GXY_0wE68l3C00" alt="https://img.particlenews.com/image.php?url=212GXY_0wE68l3C00" width="480" height="734" ></figure>Halloween (1978) is available to watch on AMC+.WATCH ON AMC+</div></body>

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Get Ready To Shiver — John Carpenter Based 'Halloween’s Michael Myers on a Real-Life Child

The late 1970s and '80s were all about the slasher craze in the horror genre, with a plethora of masked men hacking their way through cinema screens. He might not have been the first, but the one who made the trend popular was Michael Myers in 1978's Halloween. John Carpenter created an iconic and terrifying villain with a man in a mask who didn't speak and who had no motive (the horrible sibling twist didn't exist yet). We can only guess what really drove him to stalk Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends, or what led him to kill his sister 15 years before. The closest we'll ever get to an answer is from an interview with Carpenter himself, who admitted that Michael Myers is based on a real person he once met.