Horror posters are explicitly designed to make the viewer stand up and take notice, and so it was with the classic design for the original version of “Halloween.” The image, drawn by commercial artist Bob Gleason, shows Michael Myers’ hand holding a large butcher knife that’s positioned perfectly alongside a menacing-looking jack-o’-lantern. But have you ever noticed a small, creepy detail within the art that a few “Halloween” devotees have picked up on over the years? Take a gander at the hand holding the butcher’s knife. If you tilt your head a certain way, the knuckles and fist of the hand resemble a face, specifically a screaming face being compressed by a mask. It almost looks like the eternally immortal Michael Myers himself. Even creepier, the veins on the knuckle look an awful lot like worms crawling out of its eyeball.

Gleason — who was working with graphic design firm B.D. Fox and Friends when he was assigned the “Halloween” job — told Fangoria Magazine that his original pitch was actually rejected. “I want to have the knife, and I want to show the echoing pattern and have it be a jack-o’-lantern at the same time […] And they said, ‘No, get that outta here. It’s gotta be the mask’ and basically dismissed it.” Three days later, the rejection was retracted, and Gleason was able to see his vision through. But as for the face in the fist, as perfect as it is, he denies intentionally including that detail.

Bob Gleason later explained in a letter he attached to the original artwork when it went up for auction that he didn’t intentionally draw a screaming face into the poster art; he’d simply been trying to nail the correct shapes to properly reflect the stabbing gesture being made by the butcher knife. “I did not consciously know I was infusing in the back of the hand a screaming monster with worms coming out of his mouth, eye and nose,” the letter reads in part. Once he was aware of the coincidence, Gleason further admitted that it caused him to consider what he was thinking of when he painted the piece of work. “This kind of freaks me out. I couldn’t have done it better if I had tried to do that. What dark nightmares lurk in my psyche?”

On top of that, if you look closely at the poster, you might take note of the jagged way that the jack-o’-lantern is cut open, which, when combined with the point of the knife’s arc, makes a jagged ‘M’ shape — two Ms for Michael Myers? This, too, appears to be an unintended nod to the franchise’s iconic slasher.

But while Gleason might be freaked out by his own subconscious, it’s worked for him, as he’s created many pieces of work in the genre. Horror fans deeply dig his work, too; the original art for “Halloween” sold for $84,000 in 2016, with at least one person making an offer to buy it from the winner for nearly double that price since then. But of all of Gleason’s illustrations, none have made quite the cultural impact that his “Halloween” did, cementing him as a legend in the genre, intentional hidden face or not.