“Halloween’s” impassive Michael Myers is one of the most iconic villains in horror history. Sinister, terrifying, and famously unkillable. No matter how many times you shoot, stab, or burn him, he always finds a way to come back and haunt (and hunt) you relentlessly. Unsurprisingly, that particular trait of the character (of being unstoppable) has even been made into hilarious memes about being tenacious and indomitable. But why did his creator, John Carpenter, envision him so unnerving, robotic, and incredibly slow-moving in the first place?
Asked in a Revolver interview in 2018, right before the release of the reboot of the 1978 original, Carpenter gave a very straightforward response. He said, “I have a cheap answer for you. I saw ‘Westworld,’ the original movie, and Yul Brynner’s character was this unkillable robot. I thought, ‘That is a really cool character.’ That’s how I came up with it, but it evolved — it wasn’t exactly Yul Brynner.”
If you’re familiar with Michael Crichton’s 1973 sci-fi Western (which is on our list of ’70s sci-fi movies everyone must watch once) and also a long-time fan of the “Halloween” franchise (13 features and counting), that inspiration makes so much sense. In the original film (which later spawned a widely popular HBO series in 2016), Brynner plays a villain called The Gunslinger, an android in the Westworld theme park, designed to elicit the attention of customers and have an old-fashioned fast-draw showdown with them. Although Myers’ weapon of choice, infamously, is a massive kitchen knife and not a firearm, his sluggish demeanor and ridiculously unhurried walk certainly resemble a robot — in addition to being a cryptic, cold-blooded, and unfeeling serial killer.
Carpenter doesn’t seem to care about his influential slasher’s legacy
It’s no secret that John Carpenter couldn’t be less enthusiastic and more indifferent about the enduring franchise his 1978 original launched nearly five decades ago. By his own admission, the first sequel, “Halloween II,” which he co-wrote with Debra Hill and co-produced, is an “abomination and a horrible movie” (via Cinema Showcase). Geez, imagine if he’d said how he really felt about it.
Carpenter has been consistently that blunt and apathetic about the franchise, never shy to show an overwhelming disinterest in the multiple iterations of Michael Myers. Every time an interviewer dares to ask him about it, the answer almost always comes down to an opinion he expressed straightforwardly in a 2022 interview with Vulture. He said, “I really don’t care. The ‘Halloween’ movie I love the most is the one I made back in 1978, the one I directed. Others are other people’s visions. That’s the way it goes. That’s what happens when you give up. I didn’t want to direct sequels. I didn’t think there was story left. Boy, was I wrong, huh?”
He may have been wrong, but it’s irrefutable that he singlehandedly created one of the eeriest and most memorable horror villains of all time. So much so that Hollywood hasn’t been able to stop milking it ever since.
