>>212842441
I first saw it in the video store when I was a kid. You know, when you're walking through the aisles and conjure up phantasms of films you're not even allowed to rent, spin an entire movie in your imagination based on potentially misleading cover art? This creeped me out from the first time I saw it. I don't actually know if I even noticed the frightening face in the sky, but that's not what scared me.
Objectively, the foreground shouldn't technically be scary, in theory. It's just three trick or treaters walking along, right? Yet it was no uncanny to me, so unsettling. The gaunt, black silhouettes against the preternaturally orange dusk. It was a haunted landscape, haunted by something primeval and atmospheric. A presence without a face, pervading the landscape. You can feel how cold it is.
Those three figures. There's something odd about them. They are children, and yet, something else. They looked distorted to me. STRETCHED out to an unnatural degree. Like a walking projection from carnival mirrors. You could imagine limps and necks and faces that look ostensibly human, but distorted to a demented degree, a cruel mockery.
And where are they going? It's so ominous. This isn't fun trick or treating, because they are monsters as much as children, though the image of the latter distorted into the former is incredibly disturbing. Look at where they're walking. If it weren't for that street light in the background, maybe I could pretend it's some fantasy apocalyptic landscape, safely removed from all of us in fiction. No danger to us who still did go out trick-or-treating. But no. That light. This image is from modern America. How close are you to where they walk? When you go out on your innocent Halloween fun, might you run into this terrible trio? What then?
