William Shatner was as shocked as anyone when he learned that the mask worn by slasher Michael Myers in Halloween was actually a manipulated Capt. James T. Kirk mask.
In an interview with the YouTube channel Jake’s Takes, the TV and screen icon said he could not recall the moment he was told about the Halloween mask, but he remembered the reaction: “I thought, ‘Is that a joke? Are they kidding?'”
Shatner saw the creepy white, featureless Myers mask for the first time in a picture, noting that he did not see the 1978 John Carpenter classic.
“I recognized it as the death mask they had made for me,” he explained. “They made a mask of my face on Star Trek out of clay so I would not have to be available for the prosthetics they would have to put on my face to look old or evil or whatever it was they were making me look like. So somewhere along the line, someone got that mask and made a mask of it for [the holiday] Halloween.”
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As for how the Capt. Kirk mask ended up in Halloween, that is detailed in the recently released third season of Netflix’s The Movies That Made Us.
Halloween production designer and editor Tommy Lee Wallace was tasked with finding a creepy mask for the killer, so he visited a magic shop on Hollywood Boulevard with a large display, he said.
“Up on the shelves were these full face masks of Richard Nixon, and down at the end was Mr. Spock. And right next to it was this blank face Capt. Kirk,” Wallace said in the episode.
Wallace purchased the Kirk mask along with an Emmett Kelly clown mask, which the crew agreed was creepy — but not creepy enough for the killer. So, he went to work on the Kirk mask, enlarging the eyeholes, removing the eyebrows and sideburns, painting the face white and darkening the hair. The rest is history.
A version of that iconic horror staple appears in the franchise’s latest installment, Halloween Kills, which opened No. 1 at the box office over the weekend. Ironically, Halloween Kills features only the second time in the Halloween series that Myers’ face is shown to the audience; the first time being in the 1978 original featuring the Kirk mask.
Watch the Shatner interview below.
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