Michael Myers

Michael Myers is the Shape — the original slasher villain, the blank white mask that launched an entire genre. John Carpenter's Halloween invented the rules that every subsequent slasher film would follow: the final girl, the unstoppable killer, the suburban setting where safety is an illusion. And at the center of it all is Michael, a six-year-old boy who murdered his sister on Halloween night and grew into something that is no longer entirely human.

What separates Michael from every slasher villain who followed is Carpenter's deliberate ambiguity about what Michael actually is. Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence) calls him 'purely and simply evil,' but Carpenter shoots Michael like a ghost — appearing in the background, standing motionless in the shadows, tilting his head at his kills with what might be curiosity or might be nothing at all. The William Shatner mask, painted white and stretched, creates the most unsettling face in horror: a face that is almost human but fundamentally empty.

Michael Myers' influence on cinema is foundational. Halloween was made for $300,000 and grossed $70 million, proving that horror could be enormously profitable. The slasher genre that exploded in the 1980s — Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream — exists because Michael Myers walked across a suburban street on Halloween night and proved that evil could look like nothing at all.