What a silent man in a mask taught me about feeling safe.
I'm going to say this out loud and let it sit there, since apparently that's what I do now.
My first love was Michael Myers.
Not a boy from school. Not a poster on my wall. A six-foot silent man in a bleached-white mask who walks, never runs, and who has been methodically ruining Halloween in Haddonfield, Illinois, since 1978. That one. That's my guy.
I'd apologize, but I've retired from apologizing, so instead, let me explain why. Because there's an actual reason, and it isn't really about him.
First, the film-nerd part, because I do have opinions. Michael works where a lot of horror villains don't, and the reason is that he refuses to explain himself. He doesn't crack jokes. He doesn't have a tragic backstory designed to make you sympathize. In the original credits, he isn't even called Michael. He's called The Shape, which is the most unsettling piece of writing in the whole thing. He isn't a person with a motive. He's a shape in your peripheral vision that's a little closer every time you look. He stands at the end of the street. He tilts his head. He waits.
And that mask, which is possibly my favorite piece of movie trivia ever, was a William Shatner Captain Kirk mask from a costume shop, spray-painted white with the eyeholes cut wider. That's it. A low-budget production grabbed a novelty mask, drained the color out of it, and accidentally created the most recognizable face in horror. There's something so charming to me about the fact that the scariest thing I've ever seen started as Star Trek merchandise.
But that's the fun answer. Here's the true one.
I fell for Michael Myers on my grandmother's couch.
If you've read anything else here, you know this story is the whole foundation. Friday nights, her living room, the lights off, that blue TV glow, and a little girl who was allowed to stay up well past the part where a sensible adult would have said absolutely not. And here's the thing I've never been able to explain to people who don't get it: I was never once afraid. Not for a second. There was a man on the screen doing genuinely terrible things, and I was the safest I have ever been in my life, because her hand was right there.
That's the trick that built me. The monster stayed a monster. Nothing on the screen got kinder or smaller. What changed everything was the person sitting next to me. I learned, at an age when most kids learn the alphabet, that the scariest thing in the room loses all of its power when you're not facing it alone.
So Michael was never a nightmare to me. He was a Friday. He was popcorn and a blanket and my grandmother laughing at me for leaning forward at the same part every single time.
And then there's the loyalty, which I'll defend to anyone. That man does not quit. Sequels, reboots, retcons, timelines that contradict each other, decades of people insisting he's finished. He always comes back. Every October, without fail, he's out there walking slowly toward someone. In a life where a lot of things did not stay, there is something almost funny and almost tender about the one guy who absolutely refuses to leave.
My family thinks it's strange. My kids have opinions. I have made peace with all of it, because here's what I actually know now, from the far side of a lot of years.
I'm not loyal to Michael Myers. I'm loyal to that couch. He's just the bookmark I keep in the best memory I have. Every time that theme starts, five notes and a piano, I am seven years old in a dark room with the person who made me feel safest in the world, and I get to sit there with her for another ninety minutes.
She's the reason this whole site exists. He's just the reason I know how to find her.
So yes. Every October, lights off, blanket up. My kids groan and then they sit down anyway, which is how these things get handed down.
The Shape walks. The house stays warm. Some loves really do last.
