David Robert Mitchell has talked about Carpenter as the reference, and the film is built out of his grammar: a wide frame with too much empty space in it, so the audience searches the background before the characters do, and a walking figure that never runs. The suburbs are shot as the same unwatched autumn street, here in Michigan rather than in an Illinois built on a California backlot, and the synthesiser score does the same job of telling you the threat is present when nothing is visible. What is rewritten is the threat itself, from a man who will not stop to a thing that is passed from person to person.