As a child, Halloween always carried an unsettling undertone. The crisp October air was often filled with news reports of missing people, an eerie pattern that haunted our small town year after year. It was as if the thinning veil between our world and the next brought with it a real sense of macabre.

Amongst my friends, there was one house that epitomized this feeling: the old, creaky mansion on the hill. Each Halloween, the owner—a reclusive elderly man—would outdo himself with the most realistic decorations. His yard was filled with bloody skeletons and the undead, each figure staged in grotesquely lifelike...