In 1978, Halloween opened on one long walk seen through someone's eyes: up to a house on Halloween night, 1963, round the back, in and up the stairs, the view through the eye holes of a mask. Dean Cundey shot it on a Panaglide, Panavision's answer to the Steadicam, worn on a vest. He said the whole idea of that opening was predicated on it. Then the camera steps out of him: a six-year-old boy in a clown suit.

Is a moving camera scarier? In 2023, at Tallinn University, 44 people watched a camera move toward a closed door, with blood on the floor, or hold still. Moving it didn't stir them more. The scene did. What the move changed was how much the camera felt like their own eyes.

The house, the boy, the mask, the operator and the test room are our own models, built and lit in code.

So the move makes them your eyes, and what waits at the end of the walk does the scaring. Did you guess whose they were?

Sources: Dean Cundey in Taking Shape (McNeill and Mullins, 2019), quoted by /Film; Yilmaz, Lotman, Karjus and Tikka, "An embodiment of the cinematographer", Frontiers in Neuroscience 17:1160843 (2023).
Music: our own, played on GarageBand instruments. Sounds: made by us.