#wnuf halloween special | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

slashertalks · 10 months

Text

You’re in a Blockbuster. It’s summer, you’ve got no responsibilities and your parents threw you some extra cash so you could rent a movie and buy some popcorn. You’re gonna go home, open that plastic shell case (remember the way the cheap ones would crinkle?) and plug the tape into your VCR for 120 minutes of fun. Or, better yet— you’re not in a Blockbuster. You’re at home, digging through your movie shelf for the one tape you want to watch. Your mom recorded it off the TV, so you’ll have to fast-forward through commercial breaks (and little do you know, it’s probably edited) but you love it all the same. It’s not as high a quality as what you could get from the local rental shop, but there’s something magical about it. The four and a half minutes of the end of whatever TV show was on before your movie started. Ads, captured from a specific time period in a specific region— ads you probably won’t ever see again. VHS artifacts— fuzz, lines. The colors are a little off, the images a little hazy. You’ve got popcorn in your lap and a remote in hand so you can always get to the good stuff fast when the commercials do start. You don’t realize it, but that tape, with the hand-written label already starting to wear away, is a time capsule of your youth.

Youth you’ll never get back. Youth you may not even miss, but which so many people will play up as the best time of our lives. Was it really, though? Teenagers are assholes. Times were different. People are hateful now, yeah, but people were hateful back then too. I miss grunge and Y2K fashion and idogs and inflatable furniture and the freedom of being able to go outside as a kid but I wouldn’t exactly want to live in the fucking 90s or early 2000s. I wouldn’t go back, even if I am nostalgic. And I think there’s some very potent horror in that nostalgia.

I’ve been hyping this up for a while and it’s finally time I tackle WNUF Halloween Special, V/H/S 94, and V/H/S 99 all together— splatterfests, sure, but all poignant time capsules of a specific genre of media: the home recording. Not family movies, though a variety of those certainly plays a major role in both of the V/H/S titles I’ve selected. No, instead I mean tapes copied from local TV channels, ads and all. There’s something very unique about the experience of watching a film on TV. I think few of us would actively choose that route these days, when films are available seamlessly at our fingertips (unedited and uninterrupted). Yet, there is something so universally nostalgic about both local TV channels and VHS tapes for a certain generation of us that all three of these movies capture perfectly (albeit some aspects are captured better than others in each of the films).

The first film chronologically for both release and setting is WNUF Halloween Special. A gem of a film set in 1987, it pretends to be a home recording of a local news channel’s Halloween broadcast. Segments about dentists buying back candy, about Christians protesting the holiday, and the grand finale: a longer special about a news reporter and a team of paranormal investigators exploring a supposedly-haunted house. Things go, unsurprisingly, haywire. The plot of the film is paper-thin and predictable, the acting is sublimely cheesy (exactly what you want and expect from smalltown news personalities), and the effects are alright. A little blood here and there, a dead cat— nothing beyond that.

Where the film shines is its dedication to capturing the experience. The sound of the tape being pushed into the VCR, the blue screen— local commercials, and fast-forwarding through ones you’ve already seen or segments you find boring. “Kids, ask your parents permission before calling!” “Playing with drugs... is playing with DEATH.” “All the rock you could want, on the QUARRY!” — It’s truly a masterpiece. I feel like a little kid sitting too close to the TV screen with my bucket of Halloween candy next to me every time I watch this movie. It has its flaws, sure, but there is something so tangibly charming about a window into my childhood now preserved only on old Between The Lions tapes, captured here in a film released in 2013. I remember that broadcast on my TV. I remember my old Halloween costume, and my orange plastic pumpkin. I was that kid, watching in awe and horror was my local TV anchor hosts a call-in seance live. We all have, I think, if you grew up in that wonderful window from the late 80s to the early 2000s. It’s delightful, and WNUF Halloween Special has cemented itself as one of my favorite holiday films of all time.

V/H/S 94 is second, again for both release and setting (and isn’t that perfect?). Overall, this film takes itself the most seriously. While WNUF is not an anthology film, both of the V/H/S entries are. Our frame story here, Holy Hell, follows a SWAT unit on a drug bust that turns into a snuff film ring bust that quickly goes sour. As the film progresses, so to does our little unit— deeper and deeper into the facility, uncovering more and more eyeless bodies and strange TVs, until it’s finally revealed that the two female officers were the leads of the snuff film cult all along. The take a camera to the head of the final SWAT officer; lenses shatter and brain chunks splatter.

Overall, the shorts in this film are delightful, and all in various ways. Storm Drain is most similar to WNUF, as it also parodies a news broadcast. Being a direct broadcast from the mid-90s, the camera quality has improved distinctly— only to drop again for the next short, The Empty Wake. After all, a funeral home certainly wouldn’t have the same quality cameras as a news station. You could (and people certainly have) argued that The Empty Wake is middling at best; a simple and obvious story that excels mostly with its use of effects and occasionally with its building of tension. Yet the use of three fixed cameras calls back to early survival horror in a delightful way. It feels almost Poe-esque, a sort of 90s Gothic I’ve never really seen before. Overly-haunting funeral music, a raging storm and a sea of brown. Brown chairs, brown carpet, ugly light fixtures that constantly threaten to go out. Its delightfully evocative of the sort of empty beige wasteland of many Midwest baptist churches. The only things unique here are the girl and the casket— and whatever monster lurks inside.

The third short, The Subject, is my second favorite. The effects are stunning and CGI is used sparingly, and I’m a sucker for mad scientist/Frankenstein’s Monster stories. Though it makes the least effort to maintain an “authentic” appearance, the creature and set design elevate it. There’s also a delightful emotional core; the girl becomes a monster of the soldiers’ own creation, and it is Jono’s kindness that helps re-ground her. I can only say it’s unfortunate Jono died, considering they each save the other (and he’d only ever been kind to her, trying to protect her from the start and even lying to his commander about seeing her crawling away before they run into each other again in the midst of her killing spree). I’m not sure whether I would’ve preferred that they both died together, or both escaped together, but having only the girl survived feels... odd. Especially considering the world she is escaping into is likely to hold little kindness for her.

Interestingly, the fourth short (and by far my favorite) has a similar sort of “monster of your own creation” through-line, though with a distinctly more serious twist. A white supremacist extremist group is preparing for a domestic terrorist attack, using vampire blood as a bomb. It’s got the grittiest, most low-quality footage of any of the shorts (which, again, makes sense — they’re using cheap, handheld cameras) and feels the most real to me. It’s set near Detroit, but the snowy wilderness is familiar as someone who grew up in the northern midwest. Each day, at a certain time, the militia members shoot the vampire in the head. One such scene opens the film— the vampire pleads for his life. Each subsequent time, the vampire pleads less and less, until he simply kneels in silence and accepts a bullet through the skull. At the end of the film, through a series of drunken mishaps, the vampire is released and all of the militia members are killed. The vampire uses the militia’s fail-safe to open a large window and expose himself to sunlight, killing himself and destroying the compound. It feels less tragic than The Subject, but remains very understandable. When you’ve spent most of your life being demonized, sometimes you do just want to let yourself become the demon.

The third and final film, V/H/S 99, is more consistent aesthetically than V/H/S 94, as it leans almost entirely into handheld, home movie style film-making. It is also mostly focused on teens suffering the consequences of their actions. There was certainly a specific brand of mean-spirited, Jackass-style “prank” content prevalent in this era alongside the blossoming newgrounds community of shock animations and flash games. All that to say, teenagers of this era fucking sucked.

Shredding, the first short, features a group of irreverent douchebag punks who break into an abandoned music club only to mock the deaths of Bitch Cat, the last band who played there before a fire broke out inside the building. Only one of them shows any concern for their actions, but all of them die gruesomely— and in a delightfully gory bit of effects work, their dismembered corpses are reassembled and puppeteered by the zombified ghosts of Bitch Cat to perform one last song.

This is followed by Suicide Bid, pivoting from punks to bitchy sorority girls who decide a great hazing prank would be burying a desperate girl alive for a night. Of course, as shitty as that would be on its own, there also has to be a ghost involved. The ghost of Giltine attacks Lily as the coffin slowly fills with rainwater after a storm starts, and the sorority sisters come back to a mysteriously empty coffin the next day. Lily gets the last laugh by trapping all the other girls in their own coffins, having made a deal with Giltine to offer the sorority girls in exchange for her own soul.

Ozzy’s Dungeon pivots from revenge against shitty teens to revenge against shitty adults— all while parodying Nickelodeon game shows. It’s gross, it’s sleazy, and it’s wonderfully demented in a SAW-esque way. It’s also an interesting look at failed child stardom. Donna was supposed to be the one who got out, the one who made it big, but now her leg is mangled. Her own mother says it looks like dog meat, goes on this revenge crusade that Donna barely takes part in. When she does, her mother takes over for her. Her father makes token protests but ultimately lets the mother take the lead— and the game show host was always more worried about appearances than anything else. At the end of their little vengeance plot, the host helps Donna and her family sneak back onto the set of the show to meet the titular Ozzy and get a wish granted (the promised prize of the show which no one ever won). Donna’s mother prompts her to wish for for a new car, for 15 million dollars— Donna wishes for everyone who used her to die.

The frame story of this film, stop-motion animated segments of a teen’s home movie made with toy soldiers, feeds directly into the fourth short, The Gawkers. We’ve returned again to the world of shitty teens— this time, to popular teen boys. They think they’re hot shit and treat women as objects, trying to sneak panty shots of girls in a park before being chased off, and later spying on Brady and Dylan’s neighbor. It’s hardly the most enjoyable watch, but it is quite gratifying. The teens who treated women as nothing more than sexual objects are themselves turned into literal objects. It turns out the neighbor is a gorgon, and she caught the boys spying on her through her webcam thanks to Brady’s programming skills. She attacks them all and turns them to stone for invading her privacy, betraying her trust and sexualizing her without her consent. This is the short that relies most heavily on CGI (to create the Gorgon) and it does feel extremely weak. The gorgon doesn’t seem to have any weight to her and the snakes on her head do not move naturally in the slightest— budget constraints are understandable, but this is why I much prefer The Subject’s merging of practical and digital to elevate the practical and execute what couldn’t be physically built.

Last, but certainly not least, is To Hell and Back, a short following to videographers recording a Y2K party hosted by a coven of witches as they attempt to summon a demon into the body of a willing host. A lower demon crashes the party, and as the witches banish it back to hell it grabs onto the two cameramen and drags them to hell with it. The only short that has nothing to do with vengeance (or teens), the two men must instead venture through the pits of hell in an attempt to find the demon being summoned and catch a ride back to earth. They succeed, but ruin the coven’s summoning and are killed for it (one of them using his blood to write the name of another lower demon who had helped them escape in the witches’ book before dying). The film closes as the videographers’ camera runs out of battery.

Each of these films captures a very specific era in the lifetime of VHS as a medium, and captures it extremely well. From the image and color distortion of WNUF’s faux home recording to the differences in camera quality to match the shorts’ settings in V/H/S 94 as we transition from newscasts to funeral homes, to amateur documentaries. V/H/S 99 is more consistent than 94, as stated, but this is inherent to all of their shorts being filmed by amateurs— the most polished segment is the beginning of Ozzy’s Dungeon while the actual show is being filmed. It’s an excellent depiction of the astounding jump in technological quality in such a brief time. At least in what was available to professionals. Perhaps the most charming part of this era of VHS is that while technology got smaller and cheaper for consumers, it did not necessarily get better. A cheap, handheld video camera is still a cheap handheld video camera.

In their commitment to this horror time capsule project, WNUF Halloween Special and most of the shorts from the two V/H/S films rely heavily on practical effects. It is, at times, bad-looking. You know it’s a guy in a rubber suit. The leech-like vampire isn’t really chewing a guy’s face off. Giltine is... well, an unarticulated latex mask with equally unarticulated hands. These monsters are fake and you know it, and that is part of the charm. It is a low-budget 90s film you picked up from the bargain bin, a home-burned DVD your friend gifted you of their high-school slasher created during summer vacation. It’s a guy in a mask, and it might be a guy you know, but you’ve got to suspend your disbelief. You’ve come home from Blockbuster with every intention of seeing that guy in a mask and believing he is a monster out to torment assholes, and it’s golden.

I’ve said it before, seen it said by others, and will absolutely say it again: bad practical effects will always be better than bad CGI. I don’t care how cheap it looks— if there’s a real, tangible thing in front of the actors I’ll buy it so much more than PS1 graphics slapped against the background. Something with weight, something the actors can really react to. A good performance can make bad practical effects passable and passable effects amazing. You forget you can see the wire in certain shots until some dude on IMDb points it out in the trivia section. The actors sell it. The film scares you. You’re 14, 15, 16 and you snuck a horror movie out of the rental place your parents would never let you watch normally. You’re tuning into the late-night broadcast of Ghoulies or Reanimator or Killer Klowns from Outer Space. It scares you because it’s not something you’re supposed to see. None of these tapes were something we were ever supposed to see, but here they are.

Here’s death, here’s gore, here’s horror. Here’s a man in a mask. Here’s a cheap video camera and here’s the nostalgic sound of your tape thunking into place in your VCR, whirring to life as a commercial flickers across the screen as that home recording of your favorite movie comes on. The one you were only supposed to see once, that Halloween night, preserved carefully now on your shelf lined with hand-labelled tapes. Maybe it’s not as scary as it used to be, but it’s joyful! It’s a trip down memory lane, an experience not many of us will get back (at least not the way we all individually remember it), but we can still plug in any of these masterfully crafted movies and get a dose of nostalgia whenever we want. They’ll always be there— and you can always be a friend.

Just remember to rewind when you reach the end.

#wnuf halloween special #v/h/s/94 #v/h/s/99 #vhs 94 #vhs 99

9 notes · View notes

maroonghoul · 1 year

Text

Terror Time 2022: Days 18 thru 21

Hi everyone! Yeah, it’s been a while and I actually got a lot to cover. Here we go:

WNUF Halloween Special: Another found footage movie! With an added boost of 80s! I was born after the 80s were over, but I was a child of the early 90s and had older siblings who were born in it. So this had a bit of nostalgia for the time I watching their vhs tapes, especially recordings of tv specials.

Plot-wise, there’s not much that happens, especially not in the first half. Thankfully, that wasn’t really the point. It was trying to capture the feel of TV around that era, both through the commercials and bits of satire. Heck, given how this starts and with the little bits of political satire, I half expected Robocop to actually show up...anybody else want a Robocop Halloween special now?

As for the haunted house at the center of it, I liked that the set up was evoking some D&D scaremongering, all too common for the time. And when things get serious, the house wastes no time. While the crazy amount of ad breaks in the second half could be annoying; given how much actually happens and how long they could draw it out, it served it’s purpose.

As for the ending, like I said, despite the trappings, this is a found footage film. So some common tropes are in play, so go in based on whether you’re cool with that. But I will say, the reveal of the horror, which I won’t reveal, cuts the BS on what the real monsters of that decade was.

Frankenstein (1931): The one that started it all! The most famous adaptation of the first true science fiction story. And one based on a story written by a woman and directed by an openly gay man. I shouldn’t have much to add, (the changes to the story, the logistic inconsistencies, anachronism, etc.) outside of that, so I’ll just gush/reflect on my personal feelings.

Yes, there's more that’s different then faithful. Was it possible to make a 70 minute more faithful version with the resources available at the time? Probably, but that wasn’t the mindset at the time. Not as many people read the book so they were able to take the film as it is.

Fritz is like the worst helper you can ask for when making a monster, and I’m NOT talking about his disability. 1. almost blows their cover at the funeral right at the beginning. 2. destroys the desired brain and switches it out without telling his scientist boss. 3. When the creature is brought to life, he delights in torturing it with whips and torches for some reason? What did you think you signed on for, dude? Even the scene whether the creature flails about and Dr. Waldman concludes that makes it a monster doesn’t make sense; It was reacting how anyone would when a scared, dumb maniac would keep waving a torch in their face! The death by hanging is a nice visual, but I’m still confused on to how the creature knew how to do that.

This is one of the few versions of the story where Frankenstein pretty much tells everyone what he’s done from the start, even if they had to force him to. You’d think that would make things even more different from the novel. But given how they and everyone else are still quick to turn against the creature, perhaps while the theme of who’s the real monster of the story (creator or creation), James Whale went for a way to not let supporting cast off the hook for ignorance. Plus, they’d reasonably be more mad at Henry, but he’s the son of the baron, soon to be married, so that’s their priority over having him face actual consequences for literal crimes against nature, right? Commentary on the upper class, anyone?

As for the creature itself; even now, based on Karloff’s body language, and the makeup on the face, I buy this as a lightly-decayed corpse roughly stitched back together and barely walking again after being reanimated. Yes, he’s not eloquent, but given how all this is set up, in addition to the shorter amount of time this takes place, this creature has way less downtime to think and even relearn to read. He’s chased a lot more in these films then he ever was in the book. No breaks until the blind man in the sequel. And that was only for a night. As for the “abnormal brain” business; on one hand, it was a change made I suppose to make us believe the creature is pure evil. but it backfires and imply that perhaps Frankenstein’s experiment would've worked if he was actually given competent assistance. But I’d argued that it still works in the long run, because it just accelerates his ostracization, given now even the supposed rational Dr. Waldman is quick to dismiss the creature.

Part of the power of the story of Frankenstein, like many horror stories that came after it, was the first time we watched it, our horror was at the monster. We didn’t want to see or encounter anyone like that in real life. But as time goes on, we learn more and develop empathy; we realize THE monster of the story is actually THE victim. This creature’s birth is horrifying, but it didn’t ask for it. It only murders due to self preservation or lack of understanding. All chances it had to be peaceful and nonviolent conveniently go out the window once it’s provoked. And then it is killed in the worst way it can imagined. All this can be a little too familiar, especially for anyone society considers an “outsider”.

Frankenstein and what created him remain the monsters of the story, just as in the book. But in neither case am I referring to the Creature.

Victor Crowley (2017): This is the last of the Hatchet movies I haven’t seen. And I think it’s with this, I realized what I was looking for in movies like “Gravy” and “The Ranger” and didn’t get but I was more successful here. This is me talking about what I prefer, not in which of these is the better movie. With the former, I felt it tried to make me like the villains, but I didn’t. The latter tried to add some psychological character study elements that I don’t think meshed well narratively to the otherwise over-the-top characters and kills. With the Hatchet movies, I was told “This is obnoxious a holes all getting brutally murdered by some monster man with one or two survivors”, and each time, that’s what I got. And this time, I didn’t want anything more. It’s sad that I didn’t reach this appreciation of the “less is more” approach here until now, when I’ve run out of new ones to watch. Oh well.

Superhost (2021): Misery with vloggers. You can certainly feel that this was filmed during the quarantine, but (not to beat a dead horse), they picked a premise that worked with these limitations. The skewering of this culture, for comedy and for drama, really hits. Even the bit at the very end, even if it doesn’t completely make sense, feels like the only way this movie could’ve ended. I’d like a sequel, even if I don’t know where you can go from here. Or maybe I just want to see this actress, Gracie Gillam, show up and go more nuts like this in more movies.

Lady in White (1988): Okay, I went in thinking this was a kids movie about a new kid seeing a ghost haunt his school. I did not expect a full blown CHILD SERIAL KILLER mystery to be the main focus! All of that is relatively serious and tragic, even if I didn’t like where the framed janitor subplot went. Maybe I would’ve if the grieving mother learned it really wasn’t him at the end. Melissa, her aunt, and her mother all deserved better too!

That being said, there’s always a charm about movies set at Halloween at a far earlier time. Nowhere near as bombastic as some places celebrate it now, with haunted houses and parties. But the kids still had fun with what they had, reminding us that most of the modern traditions of the holiday were meant for them. Also, I guess this doubles as a Christmas movie since that’s when they last half took place. But again, not a happy one.

X (2022): This was a surprise bonus; this was at a local screening I got into with my brother-in-law while visiting him and my sister.

This is one of the more unique slasher movies I’ve seen, at least structurally. I’m used to someone getting introduced then killed every five minutes. Here, it actually feels more realistic and tragic. we’re made to spend an hour actually seeing these characters as people, not just with vices but also their desires and limits. Not a single death happens until the third act, and then, they’re dropping like flies because everyone’s quick to realize something’s wrong. The only other movie I remember doing that was Event Horizon, though this was more effective.

I’m not sure I can buy a pair of 80somethings being this effective at killing people like a third of their age with ease, but maybe I need to think about it. Plus, it’s probably expanded on in Pearl, but I haven’t seen it yet. At least the kills were based more on traps, surprise, and a bit of shotgun, to sell it. I normally don’t care for slashers that use guns, but this is set in Texas, so it’d actually be weird otherwise.

The first half is all mood; wide shots and group dialogues, people wandering around and getting the geography and discovering new information. When done well like here, this is actually the most unsettling half of the movie, because you either don’t know what the threat is or what’s going to set it of.

As it is, it’s a effective Texas Chainsaw Massacre homage, though given what I heard about Pearl and can guess what’ll happen with Maxxxine, there’s definitely a more ambitious theme at work. One you’ve probably already worked out. I’ll talk more when I eventually get to Pearl.

This is all I can do for now. This isn’t fully caught up, but I need more time to get my thoughts together on those. Hopefully, I can get them in soon.

Catch y’all later!

#wnuf halloween special #Halloween #frankenstein 1931 #victor crowley #superhost #lady in white #x 2022 movie

0 notes