Halloween: Everything You Need To Know About Michael Myers

Unlike certain other masked maniacs who've spent several decades-worth of sequels hacking and slashing their way through teenage victims, Michael Myers doesn't wear a mask for any logical reason.

He isn't a monster, he's just a man. Or more precisely, just a boy. That's exactly what makes the reveal in the opening of the original film, that the POV audiences have been watching murder a young woman is actually a six-year-old boy, so powerful. He's not deformed, he looks just like your average suburban kid.

And this remains true, for the most part. While later films would go on to give him some scarring from various explosions and stab wounds over the years, Michael is just a normal guy. He has the ability to speak and is not hiding any deformity under the mask, he's simply shy.

After being exposed and thrown into correctional facilities at such a young age, the mask was a way for Michael to feel comfortable. This demonstrated pretty clearly in the original film, when Laurie takes his mask off and he has a brief mental breakdown, having to stop everything he's doing to put the mask back on. It's also why Michael very rarely, if ever, takes the mask off, with the only other time in franchise history that he takes it off on-camera being in the climax of Halloween 5.

Of course, Rob Zombie's films took this to an even more literal extreme, having Michael spent all of his time incarcerated crafting masks for himself.