Tracing The Shape 9: My Favorite Shot in Horror

Our babysitters are in place. The children are in for the night. The TV is on, the phone is ringing, there is candy and popcorn and pumpkins.

Outside, a Shape waits.

There are many details worth unpacking in the sequence marrying Laurie's babysitting gig in one house with Annie's right across the street, and we'll get to them all soon. For now, though, we're going to linger here, because these few minutes before things really get violent contain not just my favorite shot in Halloween, but my favorite shot in any horror film. Maybe my favorite shot in any movie.

It's the shot you see above, a simple composition whose shadows and bright spots are so laced with potential that entirely new films could be woven out of what's left unsaid. It is a glimpse, a brief flash of something scary in the life of a small child who does not yet know his life is about to change, but for me, it's everything.

And it begins with Tommy Doyle.

Tommy's a sweet kid, a kid who loves fantasy and superheroes and tales from beyond his comfortable life. You get the sense that he's bullied at school because he's small and sensitive, attuned to ideas and leaps of faith that his classmates perhaps aren't. He's a boy with empathy and a powerful imagination, things that can be a rough combination when thinking about the scary stuff.

Which is, of course, where the Boogeyman comes in. I don't think that Tommy Doyle believes in a literal monster given physical form, out there stalking the night and waiting to eat children. At least not at first. But I do think that Tommy's interest in speculative fiction and superheroes makes him believe, in some corner of his active mind, that such a thing is possible. If you grew up with older siblings, or cousins, or the older siblings of your friends, you know that there's a temptation with those older kids to see what they can get away with telling the younger kids. For those younger kids, this is a test, not just for the bullshit detectors but for those imaginations that still drive so much of their lives. Can you push away your mind's automatic efforts to give form to these scary stories, and if you can't, can you deal with what that mind builds?

From the moment his bullies cornered him at school to the moment he's on the couch with Laurie, Tommy's been building a Boogeyman in his head. He might not have a complete picture yet, or a complete sense of belief, but it's up there, and we know because he's distracted from all the Halloween fun. He needs to understand this thing slowly sprouting between his ears before it gets too big, grows vines that choke out his brain.

So he asks Laurie what The Boogeyman is, but she's too busy to answer him. So the universe answers instead, and when Tommy looks out the window, there – silhouetted against the white siding of the Wallace house, stock-still in the dark – is his Boogeyman.

I've talked before about the odd unreality of Halloween, the feeling that no matter how realistic and grounded much of the film is, we're still watching it through some bizarre filter where it's spring and fall at the same time and a man in a mask can basically teleport all over town. That continues here, in this shot. Why is he backlit? Who put lights on that side of the Wallace house for this express purpose? Why is that where he chooses to stand? None of this matters, because for my money, there are few things more terrifying in a horror film than the sudden appearance of a silhouette in a place where no one should be standing.

This is the ultimate form of that, not just because the craft is on point, but because of what this moment represents. Michael's encounter with the children earlier in the film unlocked something in him, a sense that he could believe his own hype not just as a killer, but as some kind of local legend. We've seen the effects of that in the minutes since that scene, and now it's blooming in ways it couldn't before, because he's actually using this newfound magic to frighten a child. Does he know this? Maybe not. Maybe he's just making sure he understands the situation, with one girl he's been tailing on one side of the street and another on the opposite side. He might just be casting the Doyle house, trying to figure out who to pursue first. But whether he knows it or not, the spell is working.

And kids have a closeness to this of which, as adults, we are lucky to retain even a small piece. They give power to these flights of imagination, inflate them, grow them. Horror stories give us that power too, the sense that we can choose to believe in something like this, or at least choose to wrestle with it, and in some way give it greater form, like a mind virus. The Boogeyman is stronger when people believe in him, and this moment, so potent and simple and evocative of a night that's going to get very dark very quickly, makes not just Tommy, but us believe. No other image in film has lived behind my eyes more often than this one, and for the purposes of this film, it is the precipice upon which the rest of the story perches. Once we go over this cliff, there's no turning back.

Next Time: Adventures in Babysitting!