Haddonfield, 1963. Halloween is the loudest night of the year—bright masks, stitched costumes, candy lines at every porch. Inside the Myers house, it’s quiet. A father drinks. A mother hasn’t cooked in days. Michael asks for a costume. They laugh. Use what you’ve got.

In the shed he finds a broken mask, trims it to fit, wraps a torn sheet, and takes the only thing on the counter: a knife (object, not instruction). On the street, nobody cheers. A small boy in a crooked mask gets looked away from. Upstairs, his sister is dressing for a party, still mocking him. He stands in the doorway—mask on, hand tight. By morning, she is dead, and the boy who only wanted to belong is gone. What remains is the mask—and the story we tell about what’s inside it.

This Deep Dive reads Michael Myers as a folklore lens: not a supernatural force, but a child taught that a face gets you nothing and a mask gets you seen. We trace the images—porch lights, a shed mirror, a doorway laugh—and ask how neglect forges legends that pretend to be monsters.

2009. A mine collapses in Scandinavia. Seventeen days later, rescuers pull out a man who won’t speak. Nurses say he turns in perfect right angles and stacks anything he can reach—cups, gauze boxes, stones from a plant on the windowsill—into blocky patterns. His face bears severe trauma: features flattened into planes; a jaw set like a square. Non-graphic, but impossible to forget.

Then the rumor starts. “Some say” an indie developer saw the man and took photographs of that blocky profile, months before a voxel-style mining game launched—one with a silent builder who mines alone underground and stacks blocks into shelter. Is it connection or coincidence? The record gives us a rescue report and a patient who arranged the world into cubes. The legend gives us a protagonist the world now plays.

This episode is a Critique: we line up record vs. story, explain why block graphics were a technical choice, and ask why our brains fit trauma into playable myths. No blame, no claims—just images that won’t leave: a hospital tray tiled like a little fortress, a handheld torch in a dark tunnel, and a man who started building before there was a game.

Savannah, 1954. Perfume maker Clara Marrow sells scents locals call warm, heavy, almost alive. She marries seven times; each husband vanishes after the honeymoon. Her fortune grows. The town looks away.

On a stormy night, a delivery boy claims he saw Clara in the back room, holding a pale arm and draining something red into a crystal vial. Hours later, police raid the boutique: shelves of bottles labeled with men’s names and dates. At arrest, Clara whispers, “You can’t preserve love unless it’s fresh.” She’s sentenced to life. Then, in 1974, a prison fire—no body recovered.

Years later a young couple reopens the shop and breaks through an old wall. Dozens of sealed vials wait in the dark. One label: “For my next groom.”

This Deep Dive separates legend from record: which parts are documented (marriages, raid, fire), which are town tales (the arm, the never-fading scent), and why certain images—names on glass, scent as possession—stick. No gore, no “how-to.” Just the objects that won’t stop breathing: a handwritten label, a stoppered vial, and a line about love that smells like control.