Reader, picture this high-ceilinged chapel, circa 1962, lit by beast light, and also, softly, by the red glow of exit signs at aisle’s end, a few dim lamps beneath the metal armrests of the chairs on either side of the aisle, the whole space filled with the repetitive and thrumming music of fear. This box of a theater might itself be a foggy time machine, or Samuel Von Hoogstraten’s perspective box, a distortion of light, and surely it must be a distortion, this nearly empty space with its echo of old grandeur, the strange film which makes little sense, and the boy who is too young to be here alone with his box of candy, his jacket on the seat beside him.

In this perspective box, two lenses are provided for us, two ways to view this chamber of instruction.

The first is in the back of the room, looking out over the boy’s head to the screen itself, and it allows us to see the film with a new clarity, not for its surface, which is schlock, something turned out for boys to watch on Saturday or Sunday afternoons, for lonely drive-ins in the country, places to offer little attention to the unfolding mysteries on the screen, the decade’s funny nightmares playing themselves out up there in monochrome or heated Technicolor.

But say this lens allows us to see beneath the surface, to what compels the child’s attention, and how shall I tell you that? There is the matter of archaeology, something pulled up from the past. There is the matter of the box’s generative quality, how it produces from fog both evidence of the lost world and a sleek, unreadable thing from the future: images of art’s power, how something never before seen appears, in the heightened realm of the box. The oldest thing in the world, the newest thing.

But of course there’s more than that: the hooded woman, who walks sideways through the world, who glistens darkly, who is—evil? Charged, certainly, with some negative prospect, a terrifying force. When she touches people they die, and I the boy viewer am disappointed by that. Not much of a monster, if all she does is touch. But through the lens we see that makes her more of a monster, and tragic—that what she touches is poisoned, tarnished somehow, compromised. Of course she’s the boy’s mother, or a painted rice-cake version of her, and of course he finds her both fascinating (those chill sequins, the glamour of her hood) and scary; why must she walk like that in the world, what is that edgy music which accompanies her?