For the fourth year in a row, the horrifying gaze of the Eye of Sauron blazed in LED atop San Francisco’s tallest, and for one night, spookiest building.

We apparently no longer need Change.org petitions and social media campaigns to convince Mark Benioff and the gang at Salesforce to turn the illuminated LED tip of the Salesforce Tower into the Eye of Sauron for Halloween night again. It’s now apparently an official annual thing at the top of the tower, as anyone who gazed at the ubiquitously visible 1,000-foot skyscraper saw that once again Sunday night, the Salesforce Tower went as the Eye of Sauron for Halloween.

This year’s iteration was a blazy, fire concept, likely the one which was scrapped in 2019 in the wake of the Kincade Fire. Artists Jim Campbell wisely assessed that might seem insensitive to those fire victims, but this year’s Halloween eyeball did feature blaze and flame imagery, more in line with the original 2018 version.

You’ll perhaps recall that the original 2018 version was prompted by an online petition, and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff publicly shot down the idea. But then it happened anyway, perhaps because Benioff was being a coy prankster, or perhaps the decision came from the building’s actual owner Boston Properties. It returned in 2019 a just a big eyeball, and then in 2020 was a “blood red river” concept.

The Eye of Sauron is a “character” in the Lord of the Rings books, movies, franchise, etc., a sort of omnipotent all-seeing evil spirit thingy. It was represented as a flaming eyeball in the recent blockbuster Peter Jackson movies, though comic book guys argue it should be considered a far more complicated metaphor than just the blazing eyeball.  

And because of those blazes, the reviews were not universally positive.

Related: Salesforce Tower to Light Up With Halloween Surprise [SFist]

Image: @LitzenUp via Twitter