So yeah, someone took a picture of a mountain range and it definitely looks like an iconic murderer

Fixation on the macabre side of life is a fact of media culture that we all must deal with. The gargantuan genre of true crime continues to rise, as there appears to already be a show about the Murdaugh murders in the works.

Even so, you can’t really blame us. Obsession with darkness stems from long back in American history, from the Salem Witch Trials to the infamous Lizzie Borden case. So it should come as no surprise when bystanders start to see familiar-looking faces in the most innocuous of places.

Does this mountain look like Michael Myers?

It all started innocently enough — as most things do — on the internet. Rob L. White posed a typical brain exercise, marking the difference between right-brained and left-brained people. But he did not account for the brains of our more spooky-leaning friends.

Upon inspection, it is hard to see anything else. Michael Myers’ face from the Halloween franchise pops out immediately, with no sign of an eagle or goat in sight. Those haunting eyes, accompanied by the downward slope of the nose, are hard to miss. It even bears the uncomfortable representation of Michael’s lips, which is something no one really wants to meditate on. It didn’t take the comments section long to come to a complete agreement that there was no other visual than Jamie Lee Curtis’ long-time tormentor in the slasher franchise.

One look at the poster’s bio and it’s clear Michael Myers is the only option. White writes horror comics, which he proudly professes on the social media platform. His short-form horror stories can be found at https://therlwrites.gumroad.com/ where fans can purchase them. The Michael Myers image itself was powered by PromoteHorror, ultimately proving the author’s intent. For any artist, especially in these times, social media is just as important as the art itself. Exposure means everything to an artist making a living — and Michael Myers is a hot-ticket horror topic.

The character was the beginning of a long tradition that still remains to this day. The first Halloween film was directed by John Carpenter in 1978, and at the time, Michael Myers was simply credited as “The Shape.” The film follows Laurie Strode (Curtis) who finds herself in the grips of horror when Michael terrorizes the town of Haddonfield, Illinois, on one landmark night. The character of Michael is what separates him from others of his ilk, and what has made him such a long-standing, fan-favorite antihero.

Carpenter had always been interested in a force that was pure evil. Unlike Jason Voorhees or his mother in Friday the 13th, Michael has no motive. He has no tragic backstory or plots of revenge, like Billy Loomis in Scream. Michael is purely evil, with no rhyme or reason. Later films attempted to retcon this by making him Laurie’s brother, but the horror culture at large did not approve of this, and it was done away with in the current canon of Halloween films. Though David Gordon Green’s recent Halloween trilogy was divisive at best, Michael continues to resonate with horror fans on every level, and on every mountain range.