The Crate, Unmasked

In the commentary track for Halloween, John Carpenter talks about people coming up to him and telling him how traumatized they were by the scene when Michael Myers is unmasked at the end of the movie. The irony, of course, being that under the mask is no monstrous makeup job, a la Jason, but simply actor Tony Moran. (Poor guy, traumatizing all those people with his relatively average-looking mug.)

Back in the days before we all had Halloween on Blu-ray, though, and could watch and re-watch it in high definition to our hearts’ content, that scene stuck with us, and in our memories we conjured an image of it that was true to our experience, while straying from the actual facts. This was a phenomenon with which, as a young horror fan, I was very familiar.

Most recently, I watched Creepshow again for the first time in quite a few years, and was reminded of my inaccurate recollections re: the monster from the segment “The Crate.” In my memories, we never see the monster clearly until his final kill, when he drags Adrienne Barbeau’s Billy into the crate.

Of course, that isn’t accurate at all. We get several really clear shots of the monster throughout the segment, including during those sequences. But in my imagination, the monster is mostly suggestion, just claws and fur and teeth and menace, only shown in clarity in those final comic book panel moments. And no matter how many times I learn otherwise, that’s how I’ll always remember it, just like those people who were traumatized by Michael’s unmasking will never be un-traumatized, no matter how many times they see that he’s just Tony Moran underneath.

(On a tangent: The monster from “The Crate” is actually a good representation of something that I harp on a lot when it comes to creating supernatural horror stories. The monster is scary because it eats people, absolutely. But what’s much scarier than that is the fact that it has survived in that crate under those stairs for more than a hundred years without eating anything.)

[This post originally appeared on my Patreon.]