31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 20 (WNUF Halloween Special)

Having just watched this, I'm really more in love with the gimmick behind it than I am the actual execution of what we get. On paper, what a goddamned concept. It's your typical found footage movie situation, exploring a condemned house where grisly murders took place 20 years prior and trying to contact the spirits within with terrifying results. The artifice of it, though, is that it's a 1987 live news broadcast on Halloween night. More specifically, a shitty VHS recording of it complete with fake 80's commercials and some unseen watcher of the tape fast-forwarding through whatever bullshit they deem uninteresting. Paranormal Activity by way of the fucking Star Wars Holiday Special. That's an absolutely gonzo idea in the same vein of The House Of The Devil (and WNUF, too, deals with the Satanic Panic of the time a bit) but going about it in a different direction. It's just crazy enough to work, and it... kind of does? I won't lie. I had a fun time with it and got spooked, but there are some issues. It ain't perfect, and allow me to nitpick.

In the end, I think the commercials kind of overstay their welcome. I definitely get the shifting intention of them, mind. They start as cute nostalgic snapshots of the time, and they're varied. They're also all original in-universe things, which is amazing dedication to the craft. This thing took a lot of work to make, without a doubt. Only a few of the ads repeat, as well. This, along with a snapshot of the Evening News at the beginning of the tape helps to set the ambiance and mood. 1987! Halloween! There's some spooky shit and tragic stuff but we mostly fast-forward past the tragic stuff, and hype up our spooky Halloween special in a real haunted house! There's also some Christians who think Halloween is the devil's night and will pray for it to be stopped, so keep that in mind. Once we get past the halfway point, though, and shit starts going bad in the haunted house and we keep cutting to commercial... that's when it gets a little grating. On the one hand, I get the vibe. It's trying to do the same thing The House Of The Devil did, building tension by making you wade through nothing spooky happening. It also adds some dissonance to the affair, with spooky shit happening and then cutting to the happy 80's commercials. In the end, the different format hurts WNUF. When nothing happened in The House Of The Devil, I was still scared shitless. When I had to sit through two more minutes of fake ads for heavy metal tapes and fake horror movies, I was very much in "GET ON WITH IT" mode and hoping the unseen tape watcher would fucking fast-forward.

Which brings us to another nitpick, the camera. I got completely taken right out of this movie because of the way the camera works. This is a live broadcast on location, and yet the camera keeps cutting and doing its own stuff like shot/reverse shot. Just like a normal movie would. Except this is a live broadcast/found footage movie. You never see these other cameramen, even though you very well should when it's cutting back and forth between the host and the person he's interviewing. I'm full aware this is a nitpick, but it really did lessen the experience for me. It would have felt way more real if we saw these other cameramen, or if they did it in one big take like a real news broadcast. Hell, you've got a producer in the van to cut back to if you need to split the take. Hell, you split the take every three minutes for more of those fake commericals! Despite these annoyances, atmosphere is definitely built up. Are there spooky scary ghosts in this house? Are they fucking with us and will we see a ghost live on camera?

Nah, not really. We eventually get the found footage staple of OH NO SOMETHING'S COME FOR ME and then the cameraman drops the camera and we see a body. In this case it's fuckers with axes. Not ghosts. Everything in the movie is easily explained as "fuckers with axes fucked around while the crew wasn't looking". Even the poor paranormal cat which gets offed. Poor kitty. The station goes off due to technical difficulties, but what we see after that is the tape cutting to the host having been kidnapped by those Christian fundamentalists from earlier, who killed everyone and proceed to cut out the host's tongue before the tape cuts to a news broadcast post-Halloween about how all those guys are missing. I peeked at Wikipedia, I'll admit, after watching. Not to like examine the plot, just for curiosity. Whatever Wiki person wrote this reads this scene as having been dubbed onto the tape by the killers themselves. It's a fucked up reading that totally recontextualizes the way we're watching someone else watch this recording, and opens the door to theories of how it all went down. They taped this. They set the VCR for the Halloween special, knowing full well they were going to kill these fuckers for sinning on the devil's night or whatever. They're watching it back, fast forwarding as they please... and with that knowledge I'd really like to go back and see exactly what ads and things they speed past. It's almost a recursive bit of found footage; footage of a killer watching the VHS recording of the live special in which they lurked in the background and committed their murders. Absolutely wild. WNUF is not perfect by any means. It's got some definite nitpicks for me. Nevertheless, the unique nature of it means it's at least worth your watch.