According to the movie, it’s also why the town of Haddonfield refused to accept that this tragic incident was an accident (although the movie glosses over that it was still manslaughter as well). Corey is ostracized from the community and belittled to the point where his life consists of working in a dead-end job at the dump with his uncle and dealing with some woefully underwritten Norma Bates energy from his mother at home.

At first, Laurie pities Corey when she sees high schoolers beating him up, but she comes to fear him after he starts romancing her granddaughter—and after Corey has come face-to-face with Michael Myers. The fabled Boogeyman finds Corey at a low point and instead of killing him, he lets Corey go. He sees the devil in this boy, and as the movie progresses, the kid with the same last name as the hero in Happy Days starts taking on Michael’s mannerisms until, by the end of the movie, he’s slaughtering his own mother while wearing Michael Myers’ mask.

The movie wants to leave it ambiguous as to whether Corey slowly became evil or was always evil, with one character even saying he isn’t sure if the darkness that was growing in the lad’s eyes was always there or something new. However, by proxy to Laurie’s own narration about “letting the evil in,” and the fact that the opening sequence clearly shows us Corey accidentally killed the kid, we know the answer. Hell, Laurie Strode has a sixth sense about evil in these more recent movies, and even she liked Corey when she first chatted with him pre-Michael Myers rendezvouses.

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Corey wasn’t born evil like Michael Myers is implied to be in the original Halloween. He was a decent kid who grew up in a community that became a little meaner, a little more cynical—a little more EVIL!—after the night Michael Myers came back to town (and perhaps after the invention of Twitter). So following a cruel tragedy that was, in part, inspired by Myers’ night of horrors, that town turned on Corey. Evil begets evil, and hate begets hate. Corey even acknowledges this to one of his teenage tormentors, telling him that his dad picks him, so now he picks on the town’s pariah.

Trauma is contagious (a fact that this month’s Smile fictionalizes to far better effect), and the trauma of Michael Myers’ many killing sprees has led to the continued traumas of Corey. Still, this is a Halloween movie, and there is something vaguely supernatural afoot about Michael Myers, and how the evil of “the Shape” passes from Old Man Mike to Young Corey.

Evil never dies, it just takes new shape. If Michael was the personification of evil for one era, Corey becomes the Shape of it for the next, with the reasons for his change—the nature versus nurture argument—remaining ambiguous. The complexities of human nature often are.