Greetings, hello, hi!
Out of pure curiosity, is there a potential site or thread here which has history of the indie masks for the Michael Myers? Scrolling through the gallery, I came across the SSN Small 75, and the 1981 McCain Myers. The more I read up on them, the more curious I became. How exactly did a mask that was basically $2 start a business where the top range masks could be into the thousands of dollars, along with the countless rehaul services to make said masks even more accurate?
the Mccain mask really started the indie masks cause it came out in 81, then there is the Kirkus kirk which had ultimately jump started the masks with such masks as the Nightmare by Night Owl which had multiple molds made then it all went from there
After the success of Halloween the only version of the mask available to the fans was Don Post Studios’ “The Mask”, an inaccurate depiction of what we saw on screen. Fans finally started to make their own versions based on a recast of the original Kirk in the late 90s, right around the time of the internet. Before long there were internet communities of fans which led to where we are today.
I’m still not sure about the specifics regarding the legalities of DPS and the Kirk mask (I’m not sure anyone really does) but I assume that had they of continued to produce them (the 75 Kirks) throughout the 80s and 90s there would never have been such a robust indie community. At this point the look of the mask has been achieved (NAG, The Creep, DIY, ID, etc.) and I don’t think it can ever be anymore improved upon.
There is no definitive timeline or anything, but I don’t think anyone can dispute that the indie Myers masks started with Sam’s 81 Myers. The next indie mask sculpts being produced that I am aware of would be Sean’s masks as you mentioned, MMP, Justin/Nightowl, etc. That being said I am sure that there may have been others being made by others that we aren’t aware of and not shared. I would argue that what jumpstarted the hobby as we know it today would be in the 90s during the transition of web 1.0 to 2.0 when it started to become easier to find “our people”, so to speak, and then the hobby grew over time. Easier to connect with each other, a deepening obsession with accuracy, and trying to achieve something as close as we could to the '78 mask. At the root of it, that is what drove the hobby IMO.
Horror Sanctum Studios was given the license to produce a Michael Myers mask from THS Industries. THS got the license from Joe Wolf’s brother who was in charge of licensing for Compass. (He was specifically the one who didn’t let DPS get the license of Michael Myers.) Sorry…you can’t say Sam was an independent, at that time, if he had the license and was producing a mask for a company with the intention of mass-production.
To my knowledge this has never been posted, so I had no clue. Thanks for the correction. Do you have a better idea as to what the first true Independent Myers mask was?
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I think it would have been the Sean Clark small right? Sold out of ads in Fangoria (or so I’ve heard.)
Great info. I’ve always wondered how this stuff got started. It is crazy how far these masks have come over the years. I remember trying to find some kind of a decent Myers mask back in the early 2000s, and ended up buying a cheap Cinema Secrets Resurrection mask and being so happy just to find one. It wasn’t much but was pretty much all I could find back then as a kid. Very cool that all these years later there’s a bunch of great indie masks that look screen accurate and are much easier for the average collector to find now. Glad the business has evolved and hope it continues to do so.