Who Is Michael Myers Based On: In all of the Halloween films, Michael Myers plays a pivotal role as both the protagonist and the adversary. Michael was committed to a mental institution at the age of six after he murdered his older sister, Judith Myers.
Myers escaped from the asylum after being locked up for over 15 years and has spent the past 23 years looking for and killing his extended family. All of the murders in the 2018 Timeline take place in different years than they do in the 4-6 Timeline and the H20 Timeline, which track the events of both Halloweens from 1978 and 2018.
Who Is Michael Myers Based On
Since the release of the original Halloween film in 1978, Michael Myers has been a staple of teen babysitter nightmares. The masked murderer terrorizes the fictional town of Haddonfield, Illinois, preying on its inhabitants, particularly its high school kids, by stalking them and stabbing them (as well as strangling them, drowning them, hanging them, and beating them to death).
Along with the “Gainesville Ripper”-inspired Ghostface from Scream and the “Butcher of Plainfield”-inspired Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Myers has risen to prominence as one of the most iconic masked killers in horror history.
Gonna find out who’s naughty or nice… pic.twitter.com/gZnC7FsTl0
— Michael Myers (@RealMMyers78) December 5, 2022
John Carpenter, director, and co-writer of the original picture (and, together with Debra Hill, co-writer and producer of 1981’s Halloween II), claims that a spooky experience he had while a student at Western Kentucky University inspired the character of the fictional serial murderer.
He says this in the 2003 Halloween-themed documentary A Cut Above the Rest, which is featured on the Divimax DVD. Carpenter says the look is best described by the lines he gave to Donald Pleasence, who played Myers’ psychiatrist, Dr. Sam Loomis, in Halloween and four of its sequels, to describe Myers in the first film: “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.”
Fans of the Halloween films have speculated that Myers was inspired by an actual serial killer named Stanley Stiers, who operated in 1920s Iowa and murdered his entire family on Halloween. However, Esquire.com cannot confirm the existence of Stiers.
In A Cut Above the Rest, Carpenter does not discuss Stiers at all. In addition to the original Westworld film from 1973, in which Yul Brynner played a “killing robot that couldn’t be killed,” he says that this helped him elevate Michael Myers “to a mythic stature.”
Carpenter says in A Cut Above the Rest, “Make him human, certainly, but almost like a force…that will never stop. that can’t be denied.”
Carpenter claims that he and Yablans developed the character one day while snacking on tuna fish sandwiches. The moniker “Michael Myers” was chosen to pay homage to the European distributor of John Carpenter’s earlier picture, Assault in Precinct 13.
Is Michael Myers Real?
There was never a serial killer named Michael Myers, and the Halloween movies are not based on any true events.
John Carpenter was motivated to create Michael Myers after meeting a young boy on a study abroad program.
John Carpenter attended a psychology course at Western Kentucky University to better understand how to draw upon real psychological traits for his fictional characters.
He went to a facility for the mentally ill and observed a class discussion about some of the most severely affected inmates.
Carpenter encountered a young child of maybe 12 or 13 years old while working at the institution.
Carpenter said the small boy’s face was ashen and expressionless, and that his eyes were the darkest he’d ever seen.
Carpenter’s memory of the boy’s face and eyes, with their terrifying emptiness, lingered in the back of his mind for many years.
It took Carpenter eight years to attempt to figure out what was going on with the kid, and when he finally did, he discovered something much deeper and more terrible than he had anticipated.
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Carpenter was afraid for the young man’s safety if he were released into the outside world once he discovered the truth behind the patient’s unresponsive eyes.
The young patient came back to John Carpenter’s mind when Irwin Yablans asked him to come up with a villain for a series of Halloween films based on the premise of a crazed killer who hunts and kills babysitters.
John Carpenter has never seen anything scarier than the patient’s blank face, and this eerie experience inspired the creation of Michael Myers.
Michael Myers is more terrifying than other cinematic killers because of his early age when his inherent evil began to develop and flow over into his acts and lack of personality.
How Many People Has Michael Myers Killed?
Over the course of the film, Michael Myers murders over a hundred people.
Myers kills almost as many people offscreen as he does on, thus it’s impossible to know how many people he’s actually killed.
Michael Myers kills a significantly smaller number of people in the original Halloween (1978) than he does in the sequels and remakes.
Judith Myers, Christopher Hasting, Annie Brackett, Bob Simms, and Lynda Van Der Klok all meet their deaths at the hands of Myers.
Michael Myers’ body count doubles to 11 at the end of the second film.
