An early piece of Larraz’s, Halloween is a rural scene depicting the October celebration. Little children  dressed up for Halloween are trick-or-treating—they are the artist’s son and his friends. Their costumes’ features are not accurately defined, but rather sketched with dynamic brushstrokes. Light is scarce in the surroundings, but intensely concentrated in the area of the masks and clothes, as if glowing from inside of the bodies of real monsters in a blurry nightmare. The silvery whites, the pastel blues and the bright blood-red contrast with the darkness of the background, adding harshness to the image. Behind them, the landscape is simplified to blacks and blues—there is also a tree without leaves and symmetric openings in the sky resembling a ghost embracing the painting from the back. At the center of the composition among the children, a woman in a jacket—the chaperone—faces the viewer. “It is Mrs. Van Fleet, a family friend who I asked to model for this painting,” the artist explains. For this work, he would ask each person to pose separately to later create the composition. The woman’s gaze is fixed on a child who, also without costume, looks at the scene from the extreme foreground of the painting. These two figures are much more detailed and their mysterious exchange of gaze produces a great deal of tension. They are not participating in the game of pretend; yet still create a puzzling, daunting atmosphere.