What a strange time we live in, where it seems a great many otherwise sane people are so easily swayed into believing the craziest shit, usually from information posted on social media by somebody they don’t even know. I write this as we approach a presidential election which has me filled with outright fear, as it seems roughly half of the US population whose likelihood to believe something is in direct proportion to how disconnected it is from reality. Right now, many people believe Haitians are eating the pets of the residents of Springfield, Ohio, and I keep waiting for a novelty publication pretending to be a Haitian cookbook but filled with recipes for how prepare cats and dogs for an elegant multi-course dinner.
And yet, you wouldn’t be able to successfully pull a stunt today like The Blair Witch Project did in 1999, where the filmmakers made it difficult for viewers to shake a nagging suspicion what they were seeing is real. And that’s why I suspect 2013’s WNUF Halloween Special chooses to walk an unusual tightrope of doing a great deal to present itself as a VHS recording of that channel’s doomed 1987 special while also sending many signals this never happened. The latter is made apparent by multiple touches of humor throughout, and I’m still on the fence as to how I feel about those.
Even the structure of the work sets up an uncomfortable balance, with the first and last things we hear being a tape being put into, and then taken out of, a VCR. Because of that, we are already one step removed from this being a pure presentation of the material. Compounding this sensation are the occasional fast-forwards through some segments of the program.
The movie has an interesting manner of providing the exposition for the bulk of the program, opening with the news, where anchors Richard Cutting and Leanna Chamish plug the live broadcast to immediately follow. Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf) will be reporting from the Weber House, where the “Spirit Board Murders” had occurred twenty years earlier.
I thought it was interesting this movie channels some of the “Satanic Panic” vibe of the 80’s, with a guy decapitating his parents with an axe because a demon supposedly told him to through a Ouija board. Another callback to the era are elements similar to those godawful Geraldo Rivera specials of the period, as Stewart is accompanied by his walk through the murder house by a psychic couple (Brian St. August and Helenmary Ball) and their cat. They will also be joined by a priest (Robert Long II), who is there in case they need to the give the house an exorcism.
Unlike Rivera’s notorious broadcast when he opened Al Capone’s vault (and I will confess I was one of the dupes who watched that), things will go very badly for the presenter. I’m not sure I was completely sold on how we cold possibly be seeing everything that is captured, but there are some genuine, albeit minor, scares.
It is obvious the filmmakers realized audiences are too hardened nowadays to try to pass something like this off as real, and so they take the opportunity to add some humor to the proceedings. Some of these moments are clearly meant to be funny and they often succeed, such as the guy Stewart picks to interview from the crowd outside the house, who is clearly terrified when he discovers a murder happened there. But then there are other times the humor is more subtle, such as an ad for the local arcade claiming the latest hits they have include Space Paranoids, which is the fictitious game Jeff Bridges is playing in an early scene in Tron. But then another game listed is George Plimton’s Video Falconry, which nobody would mistake for a real title, and which takes one out of the experience a bit.
An interesting decision was to play it straight with most of the ads. On a second viewing, I was surprised to find I wish they had taken that approach with more of the material. One ad was for a carpet store, and I could not discern anything of humorous intent in it, and we will even be subjected to it multiple times. More elements such as this would have made the viewing experience more uncanny, even if it would have made it superficially more boring.
I liked WNUF Halloween Special, though I appreciated it more for what it tries to do than the degree to which it actually succeeds. Word of warning to those such as myself who don’t care to have animal deaths happen in a film, even if it is offscreen. Also, I’m sure no harm actually came to the real-life cat which supposedly belongs to the psychics. Spoiler alert: even the cat within the film is not eaten by immigrants.
Dir: Chris LaMartina, James Branscome, Shawn Jones
Starring Paul Fahrenkopf, Aaron Henkin, Nicolette le Faye
Watched on Terror Vision blu-ray