Trick or Treat Studios Offers New Look at ‘Halloween’ 2018 Replica Mask

Trick or Treat Studios, best known for their high-quality replications of horror-themed iconography, have made available for pre-order an exact replica of the aged mask worn by Michael Myers in the upcoming Halloween.

The officially licensed mask is available for pre-order for $59.99 and ships in September/October.

For the 40-years-later sequel to iconic John Carpenter-directed horror hit Halloween, the new mask was "always going to be the forty-year-old version of the original mask," Halloween 2018 FX artist Christopher Allen Nelson told HalloweenMovies.

Nelson, in his nearly 30 illustrious years in the business, has worked as special makeup effects artist on The Walking Dead, Avengers: Infinity War and the upcoming Captain Marvel, winning his first Academy Award in 2017 for his work on Suicide Squad. He previously won two Primetime Emmy Awards for his work on horror anthology American Horror Story.

For his prominent works, crafting a faithful and weathered Michael Myers mask for the newest Halloween was "probably one of the most difficult things I've done in my career," Nelson said.

"I've done a lot of stuff, and this was difficult because every photo you look at of that mask is different, and every angle is different," Nelson said. "[The original] mask was such a perfect storm of who was wearing it and the shape of his face and how his hair was and how they shot it. There were so many factors that made up why that mask looked the way it looked, and I took that into account [in sculpting this]."

That original mask — an altered William Shatner Captain Kirk mask from TV's Star Trek — has since suffered the effects of aging, a process Nelson aimed to replicate in bringing the Shape back four decades after his recapture at the hands of Haddonfield police.

Of the process that went into this mask, Nelson said, "It was clay, sculpted on [stuntman and actor] Jim Courtney's life cast. I mean, don't get me wrong, I had thousands of reference photos from the first movie, and a little from the second, and all of them from every single angle, and I also had a pull from the Kirk mold that I used as reference as well."

Nelson said he "looked at a lot of 40-year-old masks, and the various stages they were in" when crafting the newest Michael Myers mask, "to see how they aged, [and to] see what kind of decomposition they had and what folds and wrinkles they had depending on how they were kept, and we took in mind in the context of this story how this mask was stored over all these years, and just kind of combined all of that."

"[We] accentuated it a little for cinematic purposes, because a lot of the wear and tear on a mask probably wouldn't show up unless it was really decomposed, and we really didn't go that way because in our minds it was kept in a bag, in a box, in an evidence room for quite a long time, so being covered and away from UV light, it was a little more protected than a mask that was just laying out would be. So we took that into account," Nelson said of the mask, which is reunited with Michael who, in this continuity, has spent the last 40 years imprisoned in a sanitarium.

"Oddly enough when you take it, stretch it out and look at [the original masks], they organically had this old age kind of wrinkle here and sag there. The latex warped and gravity kind of took over, just like a human face would," Nelson said.

"We really liked that and tried to incorporate that into it without it looking like old age makeup [because we] didn't want that to read through, but we definitely wanted it to look forty-years old. But the key concept was form. It had to have that original form."

"Without the original form of the Michael Myers mask, that Kirk-esque thing, the way the dirt was smudged on the nose and lips, and with the eyes kind of warped down, [which] gave it that kind of tragic, lifeless kitty-cat face, without that you don't have Michael Myers," he explained.

"It needed to look aged and dirty with all of the oil and soot and all the mileage that it had. And again, a lot of thought was put into it. I'm hoping that people see that and that they like it."

Halloween, starring Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, and Nick Castle and James Jude Courtney as Michael Myers, opens October 19.