10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween (1978)

At first glance, one could say Nick Castle is practically absent from Halloween. He doesn't speak a single line of dialogue, he's replaced by another actor in his character's biggest scene, and his face never appears on-screen.

And yet, he is very much the beating heart of the film. Listed in the credits as playing The Shape, Nick Castle was the actor behind the iconic bleached William Shatner mask for the entirety of the shoot, playing Michael Myers. What Castle brings to the role is a physicality and a sense of movement within the frame that indicated he would have been perfectly at home alongside silent film stars like Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin.

The only real direction that Carpenter gave Castle came from a motivation he would later reiterate as;

"To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster."

Which left Castle with a lot of room to craft a visual presence for the character and he absolutely knocks it out of the park. There's a reason that none of the subsequent Halloween films have ever been able to quite capture that lightning-in-a-bottle, perfect mixture for Michael Myers as an on-screen presence, and the reason is the distinct lack of Nick Castle.

Between his physical performance and his improved heavy breathing, Castle crafted a genuinely horrifying performance from beneath the mask.