Halloween... The Happy Haunting of America! (1997) User Reviews

Are you a Halloween freak?

[lastliberal · 8/10 · 16 June 2008]

I know that I am. I love dressing up and passing out candy to the kiddies. Yes, I'm too old to go trick or treating, but I sure wish that I could.

Daniel Roebuck and Chuck Williams give us a tour of some of the best haunts in America, and talk about the holiday with some of the best stars of horror. Why isn't Halloween a national holiday? Anyway, you get the history of Halloween and see a lot of people enjoying themselves.

This is a two-disc DVD, so there are lots of extras. The best extra was, of course, a pilot for a TV show called "Raw Talk." Roebuck and Williams get to talk with Tony Todd, Christa Campbell, John Gulager and Don Coscarelli about Halloween customs and horror movies. It was extremely interesting. Yes, of course, I watched it because of Christa Campbell.

If you like Halloween, then you need to check this out.

Great for what it is

[cenobitehellraiser · 10/10 · 9 July 2004]

I picked this up on e-bay an a whim. It was listed as a video about Halloween with Alice Cooper, who my wife is totally obsessed with. After watching it, I found that I had not learned much, but I did thoroughly enjoy the video, especially the parts with bob burns. This video is strewn with famous horror movie actors, almost to the point that it's a who's who of horror. I'm hoping they make a second, third and fourth in the series to be honest. The history of the Don Post Studios was a nice view in to a company that i spend $500 on every year. If you got $10 to spare, head on over to e-bay and pick this up, you'll thoroughly enjoy yourself. If you don't enjoy it, well I guess I'm just crazy then

You can't always get what you haunt

[galensaysyes · 2/10 · 19 December 2010]

A travelogue of spook houses was a foolish project to undertake. A spook house is a simulation of a movie, and who wants to see a movie simulate the simulation? In any case, it can't be done, there's no there there. A spook house is a fake: it uses darkness, suggestion, and sudden jumps to make you think you're getting what it lacks the resources to provide. Trying to photograph it is like trying to photograph your uncle pretending to be the boogey man.

The cameraman for this film must have recognized the impossibility of his task, or fallen before it, because he doesn't try to give even a hint of what the experience is like: the camera is constantly bobbing and weaving, zooming in on costume and make-up that wasn't meant to be seen up close. And as if that weren't enough, the spook house scenes aren't enough to fill the running time, so they're interlarded with little lectures on Halloween, horror movies, etc., telling things that anyone who would have an interest in this movie would already know. Most tedious of all is the fans' celebration of themselves, as in an impersonation of a 50s TV horror host, which is much less enjoyable than the worst of the originals.

To my mind the spook house is a great unrecognized and untapped art form. And it will probably remain forever untapped because its audience doesn't want it to be more than it is. However, as it happens, a European artist did once create a high-culture version, sans zombies and chainsaws: an installation simulating an abandoned, partly ruined house where some rooms contained vaguely disturbing evidences of the former occupants, if one looked. Had actual ghosts been added--after the Japanese fashion, say--this would have been the first flowering of the spook house form. But that will have to wait for another day.