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The Insane Legal Issues That Plagued the Production of Michael Myers Halloween Masks for Many Years

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While Halloween took a couple of weeks to gain word of mouth and become one of the most successful independent movies of all time, as soon as that popularity struck, Michael Myers became a cinematic icon. In a shockingly small amount of time, he became widely accepted as one of the biggest cinematic villains of the twentieth century. Like Darth Vader the year before, Michael Myers was an immediately striking image and it was that design, that effortlessly frightening look of the character, that led him to become the massive pop culture figurehead that he has grown to be over time. Visually, Michael’s design is simple. There aren’t any of the elaborate individual pieces of a character like Freddy Krueger or even Leatherface. Michael’s design is so simple and streamlined that it’s truly representative of what makes Halloween so powerful in general. It’s just a white mask and plain, dark coveralls.

Because that look took off and because of the movie’s basis around the holiday, a Michael Myers Halloween mask was truly a no-brainer. The surprising thing, however, is that it actually took several years to happen. Fans weren’t able to get their hands on a Michael Myers mask until the Halloween season of 1986. That’s stunning, considering the fact that Michael had already become a huge icon long before that point. Even in the early ‘80s, after the release of Halloween III, which at that time promised a totally different direction for the franchise, fans regularly wrote letters to Fangoria to demand Michael’s return to cinemas.

It’s amazing that it took that long for a Michael Myers mask to become available, and even when it did, it wasn’t official. This mask, created by Don Post Studios, was not an officially licensed Halloween mask. You wouldn’t find the name “Michael Myers” anywhere on the tag, even though everybody knew what it was. It was just called “The Mask.” This mask became legendary and, for some Halloween fans growing up, it was their Michael Myers. Sometimes kids would even see it in stores around October before ever seeing any of the movies. For a lot of young fans, Don Post Studios’ “The Mask” was the first thing they identified with The Shape.

And Don Post had the monopoly on Myers masks for a long time, over a decade, before Cinema Secrets released their own Michael Myers mask in 1999. This mask looked very similar, but that probably didn’t surprise anyone. Mass-produced masks based on this franchise were bound to have similar characteristics, as they both conveyed a plain white face with brown eyebrows and brown hair. Nonetheless, Cinema Secrets had one thing that Don Post didn’t: the license.

Cinema Secrets’ mask was the first to actually have the name Michael Myers on the tag, even if the other mask (still in production at this point, though updated over time) was still clearly identifiable as the same character.

Don Post Studios, however, did not see the Cinema Secrets mask as simply another mask based on the same character. They believed that the new mask infringed on their own and was ripping off their design, so they sued Cinema Secrets, citing that the new mask was simply a carbon copy of their own, despite the fact that the Cinema Secrets mask was officially licensed and theirs was not.

Don Post claimed that Cinema Secrets’ mask was a direct ripoff, which the latter company naturally disputed. Cinema Secrets claimed that their mask was simply based on the same source material, so it was therefore bound to have similarities, but that it was not directly lifted from the mask that Don Post had produced. There are a couple of other noteworthy details that warrant mentioning, however. Chief among them being that while Don Post did not have the official license for their mask, The Mask was claimed to be created at the behest of the producers and rights holders of the Halloween series. Apparently, they just didn’t think an official license would be necessary. So while it was unofficial, it wasn’t made without the involvement or knowledge of the people that owned the Halloween franchise.

In 1997, Don Post Studios actually did attempt to obtain the license for the Halloween title to make their mask an official representation of the series, and that’s where things get really muddy. Don Post’s mask had always been unofficial, but they had never simply taken a popular franchise and attempted to produce their own unlicensed off-brand version of it. Don Post Studios was and had always been intimately tied to the Halloween franchise.

Because they had created the original mask in the first place.

It was a Don Post Studios Captain Kirk mask that production designer Tommy Lee Wallace had painted white and customized to create the iconic look of Michael Myers in the original Halloween. Their attempt to take some ownership over the look of the character was not unfounded. If they weren’t directly responsible for the design of Michael Myers, they at least had a significant role in the character’s creation.

Don Post Studios took this evidence with them when they tried to file a copyright for The Mask, presenting both a copy of the mask used in the original Halloween and an original Captain Kirk mask. Their attempt to copyright the mask was denied, however, because the Michael Myers mask, which they were attempting to copyright, was nothing more than a customization of a separate mask with different color, hair, and other signifying details that were crucial to their attempt to obtain ownership.

They couldn’t copyright the Michael Myers mask because the design itself was a customization—of a mask that they had originally created.

With that in mind, it’s easy to see how Cinema Secrets had a much easier time obtaining the Halloween license just two years later. They didn’t have the muddy, complicated history with the franchise that Don Post Studios had. They were just a company who had already licensed several classic horror figures, such as the Universal Monsters and Jason, Freddy and Leatherface, with great success. They wanted to simply obtain the Halloween license and produce a mask of their own that would comfortably represent the Michael Myers brand. They succeeded because, unlike what Don Post appeared to be doing, Cinema Secrets was only after the license and was not attempting to copyright the mask itself.

Still, Don Post Studios, who had just been shot down a second time for trying to obtain copyright for The Mask, claimed that Cinema Secrets’ brand-new Michael Myers mask was a ripoff of their own design and sought legal action. Chris Hanson, who sculpted the mask for Cinema Secrets, claimed that he was given three pictures of the mask and a videotape of Halloween as his working materials. He did not, by any accounts, have access to the mold used for the Don Post mask to rip it off as deliberately as Don Post Studios claimed had been done.

Because the Don Post mask was not officially licensed, in order to obtain copyright for The Mask, they had to eventually provide proof that their mask was not directly influenced by the look of Michael Myers in the original Halloween. To do this, they had to point out the inaccuracies in their own design and present them as evidence. They noted that the mask used in Halloween had dark brown hair and dirty white skin, while theirs had light brown hair and plain white skin. Don Post himself even claimed that the mask was simply molded from his own head as he provided the sculpting bust—of himself—to be used for the mask that his studio produced. Don Post even went on record to testify that any similarities between The Mask and Michael Myers were happenstance, and that the two were entirely unrelated.

This is, of course, ridiculous. But it’s also sad and ultimately shows what a complicated legal mess absolutely anything can become. All Don Post Studios wanted to do was copyright their mask, initially having the approval of the producers of the Halloween films on their side, and had attempted to provide proof that they could technically be entitled to some ownership of the design of Michael Myers in general, only to then have to point out the inconsistencies in their design to retain copyright over their own mask.

The Mask continued to be unrelated to the Halloween series, more so than ever, in fact. Cinema Secrets, on the other hand, was allowed to keep producing its own officially licensed mask. Other companies, like Illusive Concepts, obtained the Halloween license as well. Thankfully, Don Post Studios also got the go-ahead to produce officially licensed Halloween masks in the 2000s, which they continue to do today.

Cinema Secrets even helped form the foundation of our current age of authentic replica masks based on specific Halloween films—thanks largely to Trick or Treat Studios—in 2002, with their replica mask based on the then-new Halloween: Resurrection.

When you walk into Spirit Halloween this year, you’ll see Michael Myers all over the place, maybe more than ever. From life-sized animatronics to light-up decorations, window stickers and mugs… but the masks will always be the attention grabber. This year, you’ll often see masks that are not only officially licensed, but based on specific movies like Halloween II, Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers and this year’s upcoming sequel, all in the same store. It’s easy to see all of this and take it for granted. But as we celebrate not only the season, but the fortieth anniversary of this franchise, it’s worth remembering a time when Michael Myers masks were a little harder to come by; when claims to ownership became tangled in insane legal technicalities and—ultimately—spiraled into utter nonsense.

I’d recommend anyone to just read over the case for themselves, as we’ve only even covered the tip of the iceberg, and there’s so much more to unpack for those willing enough to dig deep into this legal rabbit hole that—perhaps most bafflingly of all—is also a part of franchise history.

Editorials

‘The Fog’ 19 Years Later: There’s a Reason You Don’t Remember This John Carpenter Remake

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The Fog remake
Pictured: 'The Fog' (2005)

John Carpenter’s illustrious catalog of horror and non-horror classics has already seen three remakes (Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13, and this column’s focus), with at least one more kinda-sorta confirmed on the way (Escape from New York). If you consider 2011’s The Thing enough of a remake, notch another on the bedpost. It makes sense; Carpenter turned his no-bullshit attitude into a masterful filmmaking style, and those listed titles harbor nostalgic admiration. We’re probably closer than we think to seeing Bryan Fuller’s Christine remake for Blumhouse or a contemporary They Live, while Dwayne Johnson’s Big Trouble in Little China sequel project fades away. Imagine Julia Ducournau’s Christine should Fuller exit, or what about if James Gunn booked a brief horror vacation away from the DCEU for his take on They Live?

Carpenter’s brand of down-and-dirty storytelling mixed with societal commentaries make his works perfect for generational updates, but they can’t all be winners.

Take 2005’s woefully tragic The Fog, for example.

Rupert Wainwright’s disastrously shallow remake lacks the finesse of even a crusty barnacle attached to the underbelly of Carpenter’s original. During a period of horror cinema inundated by remakes, The Fog asserts itself as one of the worst. The 2000s had a very “show, don’t tell” approach to horror filmmaking and leaned on grisly violence popularized by Saw, all exploited in their lowest forms throughout The Fog. Bless both Carpenter and the late Debra Hill for serving as producers, but Wainwright and writer Cooper Layne do their salty source shanty zero justice.


The Approach

‘The Fog’ (1980)

Carpenter’s The Fog is successful because of the auteur’s influence. Between his stronger emphasis on churchly greed, eerie musical score, and abilities as a simplistic yet impactful visionary, viewers get plenty of “bang for their buck” in 90 minutes. Wainwright doesn’t possess those qualities and relies on archaic horror templates without any investment. In an era where computer graphics were still advancing, and some producers only valued horror as gory inserts within a lax narrative, Wainwright’s direction equates to background noise. There’s nothing spectacular or signature about the filmmaker’s approach, as recyclable as the plethora of 2000s horror films plagued by the same churned-out doldrums.

Smallville heartthrob Tom Welling follows in the footsteps of fellow WB/CW stars like Supernatural’s Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki to shepherd his own horror remake, playing Tom Atkins’ role of fisherman Nick Castle. He’s a descendant of Norman Castle, one of the founding fathers of Antonio Island, which is located off the Oregon coast. It’s been over 100 years since the island’s bustling Antonio Bay community was established, and to celebrate an upcoming anniversary, a statue is commissioned that displays its founders as a dedication to their contributions. Mayor Tom Malone (Kenneth Welsh) wants everything to be perfect, but little does he know Antonio Bay is about to have an undead problem to confront when a mysterious fog rolls in thick as sauna steam.

The bones of The Fog are all there, but both needlessly overcomplicated and disparagingly unkempt. Carpenter introduces his film with an eerie ghost story told around a campfire that becomes a grave truth for Antonio Bay — Layne’s remake screenplay does backflips to try and explain the unexplainable. Nick’s charter fishing vessel unleashes the curse when second-mate Spooner (DeRay Davis) rips open a burlap bag concealing curse items with the boat’s anchor because the film doesn’t trust audience comprehension past any viewer’s eyesight. One of the biggest scourges upon 2000s horror cinema was creators believing their audiences were as dumb as algae-covered rocks, causing them to spell the obvious out in even more blatant and less captivating methods.


Does It Work?

The Fog remake carpenter

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The adjustments Wainwright oversees in 2005’s remix are a bungle of what out-of-touch producers presumed horror fans wanted to see at the time. Carpenter’s quaint coastal atmosphere is eradicated by Spooner’s Girls Gone Wild behavior or the need to belabor flashbacks that lay out every grim detail about Captain Blake (Rade Šerbedžija) and his lepers. Antonio Island’s tainted history is still prevalent as a driving force behind the weather-based haunting, but where Carpenter leaves us to imagine the atrocities founding fathers committed, Wainwright and Layne lean on time jumps that detract from overall moods for cheap betrayal thrills. The remake retains less reflection, whereas Carpenter’s original better depicts a town reckoning with its horrifying heritage — an example of hollow vengeance versus frightening introspection.

Maggie Grace co-stars in Jamie Lee Curtis’ hitchhiker role, except she’s no longer affable nomad Elizabeth Solley; she’s Kathy Williams’ (Sara Botsford) daughter, Elizabeth Williams. Her ties to Antonio Bay are supposed to represent how we can’t escape our fates, fair enough. What’s unfortunate is Layne’s need to shoehorn relationship drama because she’s (apparently) the love of Nick’s life despite his handful of hookups with KAB radio DJ Stevie Wayne (Selma Blair) while Elizabeth fled her hometown for six months — a love triangle situation that adds no special sauce and is practically forgotten. Carpenter is fantastic when letting his characters exist without bogging their arcs with fifty reasons why they’re exactly where they are in any given scene. Wainwright is no mimic, nor does his film’s desire to tangle characters together as friends, lovers, or family members add further intrigue. If anything, it adversely tanks character development because there’s no resident we intimately care about.

Which brings us to the “fog” of it all. Carpenter’s maggot-ridden swashbucklers from the deep are memorable and creepy, while Wainwright pulls his haunted visuals from a grab-bag. Sometimes, they’re atrocious see-through animations made of mist — other times, indiscriminately human entities. One victim contracts leprosy as his punishment, another fried to ash upon touch, and yet another is dragged underwater by invisible hands — there’s zero continuity to Wainwright’s justifiably antagonistic forces. They become a Mad Libs gaggle of props fitting whatever scare-of-the-hour The Fog decides is necessary at that moment, none of which ever collaborate in unison. That includes Captain Blake’s parting climax, in which he abandons his group’s attack on Antonio Bay because he claims Elizabeth as his ghost wife after it’s clear she’s the spitting image of Blake’s 1870s lover [insert seventy thousand question marks].


The Result

The Fog remake tom welling

‘The Fog’ (2005)

The Fog remake is everything I despise about thoughtless horror outputs rolled into a briny clump of seaweed and misbegotten reinventions. It’s hardly scary, unable to let audiences invest in atmospheric spookiness, and so wildly incompetent. Each scene gets progressively worse, starting with the reveal of evil personal belongings stamped with identifiable “Hallmarks” that become pieces of a puzzle that never gets finished. Carpenter makes you feel the offshore breeze rolling in with his fog, sending chills up your spine as these scurvy-soaked scoundrels start stabbing and hooking Antonio Bay residents. Wainwright doesn’t ever grasp what his iteration of Blake’s demons should look like or how they should cause havoc, so he starts throwing basic horror visuals at the screen out of desperation.

Revolution Studios’ The Fog downgrade sinks thanks to primarily messy effects, hampered by the early millennium’s digital capabilities. That’s not exclusive to awful ghost illustrations that look like someone just decreased the “Transparency” slider in Photoshop. The fog, the TITULAR FOG, doesn’t even hold up to Demon Wind standards (in which the wind is essentially fog, roll with it). Wainwright and his team brainstorm ideas that sound rad on paper — an older woman gets barbecued, a ghost outline appears in fog like Imhotep’s sandstorm face, a younger woman is attacked by seaweed — but execution almost exclusively whiffs. The remake’s drunkard generalization of Father Malone (which is such a slap in the face to Hal Holbrook’s fantastic original performance) should meet an epic death when Captain Blake levitates glass shards as a containment circle, but three pieces fly through Malone’s body, and it’s over. That’s the level of SFX disappointment that festers throughout 2005’s The Fog, all buildup with no reward.

The film’s finale feels like a prank; the rest of the conflict’s resolution is lost at sea. Carpenter’s much heavier scolds against organized religion’s dirty dealings help give his film an identity down to the glimmering golden cross, while Wainwright goes as generic as they come and abandons ship when the well runs dry. Nothing justifies the kind of conceptual excitement that comes along with worthwhile remakes, whether that’s copycat role replications (I love Selma Blair, but her Stevie doesn’t match Adrienne Barbeau’s presence) or storytelling reductions that choose numbing violence over folkloric sensations of dread. We love a horror movie that’s critical of early America’s disgusting colonization tactics, but The Fog doesn’t know how to turn those frustrations into a compelling genre production. Whatever’s kept from the original holds no candle to Carpenter’s version, and whatever’s added — like Nick and Elizabeth’s awkward shower sex scene set to softcore porno music — brings nothing of value.


The Lesson

‘The Fog’ (2005)

Just because your remake starts with a banger like Fall Out Boy’s “Sugar, We’re Going Down Swinging” doesn’t mean the film itself is a banger. There’s no world where I’d recommend Wainwright’s The Fog over Carpenter’s titanically superior original, and I say that as a leading Aughts horror remake champion. It’s another Nu-Horror approach that strips away commentary crucial to the plot’s intrigue since all Layne musters is a non-creepy and waterlogged story that feels like an unwieldy CW episode — not meant as a compliment. Not even the chiseled beauty of an early 2000s Tom Welling in a wool turtleneck can save this travesty from becoming another forgotten wreck.

So what did we learn?

● Not all CW figureheads have a hit horror remake in their blood.

● Less is so often more when it comes to horror movies, as long as you’re selling scares and confidently telling a story within your means.

● Some movies from the 2000s horror era will always suffer thanks to dodgy digital effects because while it was the shiny new toy everyone wanted to play with, golly, the technology was rough to start.

● Horror fans can be easy to please, but they’re also first to call out your bullshit — get out of here with these ghosts and their inability to pick a lane.

Wainwright’s film never knows what kind of horror movie it wants to be, and that’s the kill shot. Is it a slasher flick? Zombie movie? A large-scale haunted house blueprint? There’s never any indication that Wainwright or his screenwriter conceptualize a path forward, so they barrel on, praying there’s enough horror familiarity to appease the masses. There isn’t, it’s a boneheaded slog, and that’s that. Horror fans deserve better than to be fed the equivalent of table scraps for 100 minutes. To each their own and all, but now that I’ve finally seen 2005’s The Fog, the only times I’ll think about this movie again will be if someone interacts with my Letterboxd post.

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