If you can’t count on your best friend to check your teeth and hands and stand vigil with you all night to make sure you don’t wolf out, who can you count on? And so begins our story on anything but an ordinary night in 1993…

The best thing about urban legends is the delicious thrill of the forbidden. Don’t say “Bloody Mary” in the mirror three times in a dark room unless you’re brave enough to summon her. Don’t flash your headlights at a car unless you want to have them drive you to your death.

Perpetrator opens with a girl walking alone in the dark. Her hair is long and loose just begging to be yanked back and her bright clothes—a blood red coat, in fact—is a literal matador’s cape for anything that lies beyond the beam of her phone screen.