10 Best "What's Around The Corner" Horror Movie Moments

4. The Shape Emerges From Darkness - Halloween (1978)

Halloween 1978
Compass International Pictures

Although he earned that title after creating several seminal genre classics, it wouldn't have been unfair at all if John Carpenter had been called "The Master of Horror" after just Halloween. Co-written with Debra Hill, Halloween reiterated the fierce nature of Carpenter's talent following the riotous Assault on Precinct 13, with the director this time confronting the idea of ultimate evil: a masked killer with the blackest eyes - the devil's eyes.

With Halloween, Carpenter and Hill created the definitive horror movie villain - a character grounded in real-world terror but with enough supernatural connotations that they would embody the very idea of evil itself. There was no explaining Michael Myers; evil exists in the world and therefore The Shape does too. He moves in and out of shadows like a ghost, but like evil itself, he is fundamentally human - and so too is the terror he exacts.

No scene better exemplifies this than when Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) investigates the Wallaces' house and discovers Annie, Lynda and Bob's corpses. With Laurie backed into a corner, the ghostly face of death emerges slowly from inky nothingness, embodying all the earthly and spiritual terror of The Shape in one lingering moment.

It's one of many masterstroke moments for Carpenter, shot beautifully by Dean Cundey.

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Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.