The following contains spoilers for Halloween Ends, currently in theaters and available to stream on Peacock.

Masks go with the slasher genre like steak goes with potatoes. The various mad killers of the genre's heyday in the 1980s all had signature gimmicks to help them stand out from the pack, which invariably included a covering for their faces. One of these killers is Michael Myers from the Halloween franchise, but it's never stated why he wears his mask.

The masks in horror films help dehumanize the villains and make them scarier, as well as provide an instant hook for the advertisements. Most of the slashers also had actual reasons to hide their faces, whether it was to disguise a deformity or hide their identity if and when the police came calling. It's ironic, then, that the progenitor of the slasher mask -- Michael Myers in Halloween -- had his reasons for doing so left extremely vague.

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Where Michael Myers Got His Iconic Mask in Halloween

Halloween's Michael Myers standing on the porch of his house

Michael actually has two masks in the original Halloween, with the first being a clown mask he puts on in 1963, just before murdering his sister. It's part of his costume, sized for him and matching the baggy multicolored jumpsuit he's wearing. When he escapes from captivity 15 years later, he breaks into a hardware store and steals a number of items, including a white Halloween mask. Years later, for the 2007 reboot, director Rob Zombie didn't beat around the bush. His Michael trades up to the iconic white mask as a boy when his sister's lover brings it to their tryst. After murdering him and his abusive stepfather, he puts the mask on to finish off his sister, and it's waiting under the floorboards of his childhood home when he returns 15 years later to begin his new rampage.

Why Does Michael Myers Wear a Mask?

Michael Myers reclaims his mask in Halloween 2018

How Michael got his mask is less important than why he got it, which both movies are rather coy about. Zombie's version attempts to ground Michael's story in the sadly ordinary horrors of familial abuse and psychosis. He develops a fixation for masks after his murder spree as a child, making them out of papier-mâché in the asylum before his escape. That places it in the context of an explainable mental condition, something the Carpenter film had no interest in.

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Indeed, the original Halloween hinged its terrors on their inexplicability. No one knows why Michael suddenly decided to kill, and the lack of fathomable reason becomes a terror of its own. His mask is tied up in that, as he can't seem to kill without it -- not only with his sister and the clown mask but in the finale when Laurie rips it off his face, and he pauses in his attack to put it on again. Even Halloween Ends suggests that Corey Cunningham couldn't exact revenge and become the next fearful slasher if he had never donned Michael's mask. It emphasizes the darkness in Michael's soul beneath the surface and suggests Michael himself is just an empty mask for something far more terrifying.

Samuel Loomis' dialogue backs this notion by saying, "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 compounded by the movie's famous credits, which cite Michael simply as "The Shape." To put it simply, Michael's mask became a representation of his evil, something Halloween's competitors took as a given for their boogeymen and eventual sequels couldn't move past.

Halloween Ends is currently in theaters and available to stream on premium tiers of Peacock.