John Carpenter's Halloween Was Inspired By a Chilling Real-Life Incident
Carpenter nailed it when he created Michael Myers, but few know he was inspired by a real-life encounter.
John Carpenter, inspired by classic horror and Italian giallo films, made a movie that essentially spawned a whole new direction in cinema.
Halloween became the first canonical slasher movie. It's plot and techniques were used by so many other filmmakers that the original may seem too obvious and banal. In fact, this only shows how influential Carpenter's movie is – to this day, few in the genre can compete with the very first Halloween.
Even if you have not seen any of the movies in the Halloween franchise, you have definitely heard of Michael Myers – the silent killer. Myers became one of the iconic characters of the Golden Era of Horror – the 70-90s of the last century.
Since the release of the first movie, Michael Myers has become a horror icon, thanks in large part to his simple yet creepy image.
Myers is conspicuously different from other horror villains, who over the years have become more and more motivated, overgrown with backstory and psychologism.
Subsequent movies in the Halloween series focus primarily on the haunting. Ignoring the circumstances and common sense, Michael Myers survives a fire, as well as direct wounds to his head and heart. All for the simple reason that he is pure evil, indestructible and omnipresent.
Michael Myers scares the most, not even with his white mask, but with his eyes – absolutely cold-blooded, with nothing but cruelty in them. As the director himself admitted, the creation of Michael was influenced by the cowboy killer from Westworld and a rather terrible event that happened in Carpenter's life.
As a student, he went to a psychiatric hospital where he would meet deeply disturbed people to better understand what they were going through.
There he met a 12-year-old boy whose gaze was so intimidating that he remembered it for the rest of his life. In the scene where Dr. Loomis describes young Michael as having eyes of pure black evil, he is actually speaking in the words that Carpenter used to describe his encounter with the boy – he called it a schizophrenic stare.
Michael Myers has become an icon of horror movies thanks to his unique image – an ordinary person with terrifying eyes. This image of pure evil has become a cult icon, so terrifying that even after so many years, Myers remains the main horror of the genre.