One of the original actors who played the infamous Michael Myers in the first Halloween movie has revealed a hidden detail on the movie’s classic poster that fans of the horror genre are finding hard to “unsee.”
Released in 1978, just days before Halloween, the film introduced audiences to the chilling tale of Michael Myers. Myers is a mental hospital patient who, after fifteen years locked away, escapes on Halloween to return to the town where he murdered his teenage sister years before.
Sporting a horrifying mask, he sets his sights on teenage babysitter Laurie Strode, played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her first-ever film role. Curtis’s portrayal of Laurie would soon define her career, as she reprised the role in numerous sequels to the iconic slasher film.
Widely hailed as one of the best horror movies ever made, Halloween helped bring the slasher genre into the mainstream and introduced audiences to the iconic “final girl” trope. This key character is the last person standing, surviving the villain’s deadly spree and leaving the door open for sequels.
Michael Myers was portrayed by three actors in the original film: Nick Castle, Tony Moran, and Will Sandin. Castle mainly played the masked character, while Moran and Sandin portrayed unmasked and child versions, respectively.
It’s Moran, however, who recently highlighted the hidden imagery on the movie’s famous poster.
“Do you see this hand? It’s something other than a hand,” Moran told fans who were gathered at a recent convention for memorabilia signing.
“Well, I’m not going to tell you, you’re going to have a look at it yourself, bro.”
As the crowd looked on curiously, Moran added, “If you see it, don’t say a word. Do not say a word.”
“It’s something other than a hand, I promise you. When I show you you’re going to go ‘whaaaaat?’.”
Still puzzled, the crowd watched as Moran revealed the hidden detail.
“It’s the profile of a face,” he explained.
“There’s the eye, there’s the nose and there’s the mouth.”
After the reveal, fans had a collective moment of realization, each reacting with a surprised “ahhhh…” as they finally spotted it.
“You’ll never not see that now, you’ll never see a hand ever again,” Moran said, summing up the eerie new perspective.
The moment was captured on video by TikTok user Julian Mongeon, who captioned it: “I can’t unsee it now.”
Fans on TikTok were quick to react. One person commented: “I don’t see it not going to lie.”
Another chimed in, saying: “It’s a face, I don’t know how people never knew.”
And a third user added: “I see it now. It looks like a face screaming that is covered in a plastic bag; like something out of A Nightmare on Elm Street.”
Some viewers speculated that this might be a case of pareidolia—a phenomenon where our brains try to find familiar shapes, like faces, in random patterns. This theory is even more intriguing when considering that Robert Gleason, the artist behind the poster, later admitted he hadn’t intentionally included a face. In fact, he only noticed it himself long after he created the piece, adding an unexpected layer of creepiness to the lore surrounding the classic film.
