How William Shatner Reacted to His Face as Halloween's Michael Myers Mask

William Shatner felt more tricked than treated at the sight of his face as the mask worn by Michael Myers in John Carpenter's Halloween. The iconic but featureless face of The Shape (Nick Castle), described in Carpenter and co-writer Debra Hill's script as having the "pale, neutral features of man," is famously the creation of production designer Tommy Lee Wallace. Modifying a cheap and commercially available Captain Kirk Star Trek mask made by Don Post Studios — itself made from a mold of Shatner's face from the 1975 film The Devil's Rain — Wallace created the mask that would haunt Haddonfield and terrify audiences for four decades. 

"I thought, is that a joke? Are they kidding?" Shatner told Jake's Takes about his initial reaction to the Halloween mask. "I don't think I saw the movie, but I saw the mask probably in a picture, and I recognized it as the death mask they had made for me."

Shatner recalled: "They made a mask of my face on Star Trek with clay so that I wouldn't have to be available for the prosthetics that they would put on my face to look old or evil or whatever it was they were making me look like. So that mask existed on Star Trek [and] somewhere along the line, someone got that mask and made a mask of it for [people to wear on] Halloween."

Shatner previously claimed he would take his children trick-or-treating while wearing the mask made famous by the Halloween horror franchise, telling EW in 2018, "When my kids were younger, and they'd go trick-or-treating, and I would go with them, I'd wear the mask. If [people] didn't give them candy, I'd take off the mask, and blow a kiss." 

RELATED: The Halloween 1978 Deep Cut You Might Have Missed in Halloween Kills

The original mask has since deteriorated significantly, as revealed by 2017 photos from owner Mark Roberts. Last year, a resurfaced video from horror expert Sean Clark showed a step-by-step process of Wallace recreating the original Shatner/Myers mask. 

"It was a very simple matter of taking an existing mask and modifying it in a couple of ways, and painting it and changing the hair color," Wallace recalled in the 2014 video. "But that's all there was to that. A good thing came out of it because none of us were prepared for the effect when this innocuous mask, innocent-looking mask, got just those few touches done to it. As we all know, the effect, before we even got to the story, it was damn scary. It was an unbelievably terrifying, visceral effect, and we knew we were in business, that we were gonna have a scary movie." 

Wallace again recounts the history of the original Michael Myers mask in Season 3, Episode 1 of Netflix series The Movies That Made Us, about the making of Carpenter's Halloween. 

Halloween Kills, the 12th film in the Halloween series, is now playing in theaters and streaming on Peacock.