Michael Myers is the masked killer of the Halloween films. In the original 1978 film he is a boy from Haddonfield, Illinois, who killed his older sister on Halloween night 1963, spent fifteen years locked away and came home. Its credits list the masked figure as The Shape. Jason Voorhees is the killer of the Friday the 13th films: in the original series, a boy who drowned at Camp Crystal Lake in 1957, whose mother took revenge for him, and who comes back as the silent figure in the hockey mask.
Both series have been rebooted more than once, so each claim below names its film. The Shape is on the Halloween shelf and Jason is on the Friday the 13th shelf. Spoilers for both series below.
The Shape: who Michael Myers is
In Halloween (1978), Michael Myers is six years old when he kills his sister Judith in the family home on Halloween night 1963. He is committed to Smith's Grove Sanitarium, where his psychiatrist, Dr Sam Loomis, spends fifteen years watching him and comes to believe there is nothing left inside him to treat. On 30 October 1978, Michael escapes and heads back to Haddonfield.
The film gives him no motive and no voice. He never speaks, walks rather than runs, and is mostly a pale face in a doorway or at the edge of the frame, which is why the credits list the masked figure as The Shape. The mask is a blank white face under dark hair, linked in the film to a hardware-store break-in where Halloween masks and knives go missing.
His one gesture became his signature: after a killing in the 1978 film he stands still and tilts his head, studying what he has done. Head Tilt is that moment, and The Shape is the mask on its own.
Haddonfield and the Halloween timelines
Haddonfield is a fictional small town in Illinois: leafy streets, the empty old Myers house, and a teenage babysitter, Laurie Strode, who walks past it to school. In the 1978 film, Michael fixes on Laurie, kills her friends that night, and is shot six times by Loomis. He falls from a balcony, and when Loomis looks down, the body is gone. Haddonfield and He Came Home both belong to that night.
After that, the series splits. Halloween II (1981) picks up the same night at the town hospital and reveals that Laurie is Michael's younger sister, adopted by the Strode family after their parents died. In Halloween 4 (1988), 5 (1989) and The Curse of Michael Myers (1995), Laurie has died off screen, Michael hunts her daughter, Jamie Lloyd, and the sixth film blames a cult's ancient curse, the Curse of Thorn.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) has no Michael at all. Halloween H20 (1998) and Resurrection (2002) follow on from Halloween II and ignore 4 to 6: Laurie is alive, hiding under a new name. The 2007 remake and its 2009 sequel start again, with far more of Michael's childhood.
The newest line, Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022), follows on from the 1978 film alone. Michael has been locked up for forty years, Laurie has spent them preparing, and the brother-and-sister link is waved away as a story people made up. In Halloween Ends, Laurie kills him and has his body destroyed so he cannot return.
Pamela Voorhees and Camp Crystal Lake
The first Friday the 13th (1980) does not have Jason as its killer. Camp Crystal Lake is a summer camp in New Jersey with a bad history: a young boy drowned in the lake in 1957, two counsellors were killed there in 1958, and every attempt to reopen it since has gone wrong. The locals call it Camp Blood. When it reopens, someone starts killing the new counsellors.
The killer is Pamela Voorhees, a friendly-seeming woman who turns up near the end. She was the camp cook the summer her son Jason drowned, in 1957, while the counsellors who should have been watching him were busy with each other. She blames every counsellor since. Alice, the last one alive, kills her on the shore with a machete.
In the final scare, a young Jason lunges out of the lake at Alice's canoe; she wakes in hospital, unsure it was real. Camp Blood and Crystal Lake are named for the place where all of it starts.
Why Jason wears a hockey mask
Friday the 13th Part 2 (1981) makes Jason the killer. He is grown, living wild in the woods by the lake and out to avenge his mother; the films never settle how a drowned boy grew up. Here he hides his deformed face under a burlap sack, and keeps a shrine to his mother in his shack.
The hockey mask arrives in Friday the 13th Part III (1982). Shelly, a young man staying by the lake, likes to scare his friends with a white ice hockey goalie mask. Jason kills him and keeps it. That is the whole in-story answer: the mask hides his face, he took it from a victim, and from that film on it is his face to the world.
Jason after death: the lake and the lightning
The Final Chapter (1984) ends with a boy, Tommy Jarvis, killing Jason. A New Beginning (1985) has a copycat in the mask, not Jason. Then, in Jason Lives (1986), an older Tommy digs up the grave meaning to burn the body, stabs it with a metal fence post, and a lightning strike brings it back to life. From here on Jason is undead, and nothing keeps him down for long. Tommy ends the film by chaining him to a rock at the bottom of Crystal Lake, in an area that has renamed itself Forest Green to bury its past.
The lake is where he keeps coming back from, which is the idea behind The Lake Keeps Its Own and Red Water. In The New Blood (1988) a girl with telekinetic powers frees him by accident; later films send him to New York, into other bodies and, in Jason X (2001), to a spaceship in 2455. Freddy vs. Jason (2003) has Freddy Krueger appear in his dreams disguised as Pamela and send him to Springwood, so that the killings will make the town afraid of Freddy again. A 2009 remake retells the start.
Michael and Jason compared
From a distance they are the same idea: a silent, masked man who walks rather than runs and keeps getting up. Up close they run on different rules.
Michael's horror is tied to a date. He comes home to one town on one night, in most timelines after his own family, and his weapon is a kitchen knife. The films that try to explain him (the curse, the remakes' childhood) are the ones fans argue about most.
Jason's horror is tied to a place. Anyone who comes to Crystal Lake is trespassing on his mother's grief, and his weapon is the machete. From Jason Lives on, he is closer to a force of nature than a man. The two never share a film, but they share a tee: Slasher Squad lines them up with the rest of the class.
On the back of a tee
Michael has his own rack on the Halloween shelf and Jason has his on the Friday the 13th shelf, both drawn from canon reference art. Check the size guide before you pick a size.
Why they work on the back: a white mask against a dark ground is the simplest silhouette in horror. It reads from across a room, and needs no explanation.
Read next: Freddy Krueger and the rules of the dream world explained (the other half of Freddy vs. Jason) and Ghostface and the rules of Scream explained.
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