The context of the scene is important. It is one of the many scenes in the 1977 (or 1979, or 2007, depending on your sources and criteria) Charles Burnett film, Killer of Sheep, that sees the protagonist, Stan, repairing his sink. His seemingly fruitless attempts at fixing a vital appliance in his home is very likely symbolic of his misguided effort to raise his children to be like him, which does not solve any of the family's core problems. The scene also follows one wherein Stan watched two people steal a television. Though he didn't let them go without a warning of being caught, he himself did nothing to try and stop them. This is because he always focuses more on his own family as the most important thing to worry about, even though it's allowing others to fall victim to the very circumstances he is trying to shield his family from.
After his friends asks if he's going to kill himself, Stan says he won't. His unwillingness to accept his poor financial standing and general downtrodden lifestyle is one of his admirable traits, though his stubbornness is also a curse, as it keeps him from being sympathetic towards others, even his children. When his kid arrives wearing a spooktacular dog mask, he jokes that he might kill him. He symbolically herds his children to their doom like the sheep in a slaughterhouse anyways, so his figurative consideration of killing them seems eerily in character.
While joking about murdering your children is a bit of a red flag in most cases to begin with, it is worse in this context because the child can see and hear him. Stan doesn't care whether his children understand why he says things or how they feel. The only reason he jokingly threatened to murder the kid is because she startled him, and he didn't even flinched, unlike I still do every time I watch that scene.
If anyone thinks they know why it was a dog mask specifically or why it was frightening, please let me know in a comment.
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