 Michael Myers returns to Haddonfield after 40 years to re- Reve- Ahem Ahem F**k Michael Myers is back for another slasher happy semi-reboot thanks to Jason Bloom and the unlikely duo of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride But with so many incarnations of the killer listed simply as the shape How much do we really know about the man behind the mask and how he was created? Welcome to another edition of Classic Characters where we investigate the story of Michael Myers. In 1978, John Carpenter released the first ever Halloween to the big screen. It became the most successful independent film of the decade and paved the way for the slasher genre that we know and love today. The original idea came from producer Irwin Yablans, who approached Carpenter with an idea for a horror film named The Babysitter Murders in which, yeah, you guessed it, babysitters were stalked by a killer. Carpenter loved the idea and drafted a script with his long-esteem colleague Deborah Hill. Yablans then made another suggestion that the murders occurred on Halloween night, a concept that had not yet been exploited in film. Michael Audrey Myers was born. What? Audrey? As a boy, Michael has sent to Smith's Grove Sanitarium for the brutal murder of his older sister Judith. He escapes 15 years later and returns to his hometown to finish what he started. Carpenter's described the character as an almost supernatural evil force that is unkillable. His inspiration for that evil came when he was in college. While on a class trip to a mental institution in Kentucky, Carpenter visited the most serious mentally ill patients at the facility. Among those patients was a young boy who gave Carpenter a schizophrenic evil stare which he found unsettling, creepy and completely insane. With the limited booby, boobies, budget, f***! With the limited budget of only $325,000, Carpenter had to use what little resources he had to create the look for Michael. Production designer, art director and co-editor Tom Lee Wallace created Michael's mask from a willing Shatner Halloween mask purchased for $1.98. There have been several different versions of the mask in the sequels but none have been as quite as good as the original and none have been as near as bad as Halloween 4's. Yikes! In the credits, Michael was referred to as the shape. This was taken from the original script where Carpenter describes a shape jumping in the back of Marion's car. For script consistency, he was referred to as the shape for every scene. He's also known as the Bogeyman and weirdly, the Nightmare Man. Michael has appeared in six sequels in the franchise and a reboot from Rob Zombie that we don't like to talk about. Halloween 2 followed on directly from the original film with Michael terrorizing Laurie inside a hospital and Loomis hotening his heels once again. Carpenter took a step back from the director's chair but stayed on as writer and producer. The studio then decided to go into a bizarre direction and released a Michael-less Halloween 3 season of The Witch, also without the presence of Carpenter. It's safe to say that that didn't work out as Michael made a comeback for the aptly named Halloween 4, The Return of Michael Myers. Again, Carpenter remained absent. Two more sequels followed, Halloween 5, The Revenge of Michael Myers and Halloween, The Curse of Michael Myers. While each sequel offered its own take on the story, what it didn't offer is continuity. Michael has died a number of times in the franchise only to make a miraculous return. This is probably down to the ambiguous nature of his existence as an unstoppable, unkillable force. However, it is Jamie Lee Curtis' character Laurie who apparently also possesses these supernatural healing abilities. In Halloween 4, it is suggested that she is dead, wanting to make a return in Halloween H2O in 1998 and then killed off again in the final movie of the franchise, Halloween Resurrection. Now, Laurie has returned in Jason Bloom's 2018 sequel, Halloween, which is a direct sequel to the original 1978 film and dismisses all other Halloween's that followed. Carpenter is back on production duties and we even get a cameo from the first ever actor to play Michael, Nick Castle. What a time to be alive. Michael Myers has appeared in many forms of literature including novels and his own comic book, even as his own badass video game. Many a fan theory surrounds the existence of Michael, is he supernatural? Is he a zombie? Or is it just bad writing? Carpenter's original diagnosis is that Michael is pure evil and the scariest explanations to his origins are the ones we don't get, not naming any names. I spent eight years trying to reach him and then another seven trying to keep him locked up because I realized that what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil. That's it for another episode of Classic Characters. What's your favorite Michael Myers movie moment? Tell us your thoughts in the comments box below and if you'd like to see more from Movie Nerds then don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Until next time, I'll see you Nerds at the Movies. Off.