Picture a house. It’s an old house. Stately, with two quarter-moon windows perched above a balcony, or a rundown farmhouse far out in the countryside, overlooking a bent, ancient tree. It’s something with history to it, history that’s not your own, but that doesn’t matter: the keys are in your hand. You own it. You are going to build a life there. You bring your family inside, and fill it with what is yours, and claim every room, every hallway. Except the attic

Growing up, I was a shy, tenderhearted kid. School was not a good place for me, and I remember being astonished by my classmates’ naked viciousness. When a girl’s skirt rode up from the friction of her backpack, people pointed, nudged their friends, grinned at her without saying anything. Someone was sent home once for lice, and that would come to define her for years, a stain that she and every one of her sisters had to carry.

When John Carpenter and Debra Hill began to sketch out their ideas for Halloween, they dreamed up a list of scares. The creepiest images, the most unsettling scenes they could imagine. A clown with a knife. A gravestone in a bedroom. A pale face emerging slowly from the shadows. A person pinned to a wall by a blade. Or—how about this one?—a woman gets into a car and finds the windshield fogged up. The wipers kick on with no effect.

Summertown, Tennessee, seems like a nice place to live. Located about an hour southwest of Nashville, it’s a town of less than 1,000 people. Rural two-lane blacktops wind past corn fields and wooded glens. New houses—each on its own acre of green land—can be had for under $250,000. The town has a Buddhist commune (Turtle Hill Sangha), and Wheelin in the Country, an off-road park. Summertown is, in other words, the kind of place that horror writers love to use in their works.