WNUF Halloween Special (2013)

Movie: WNUF Halloween Special (2013), directed by Chris LaMartina et al.

Watched on: Shudder

Ran: 8.04 miles, 9’12”/mile, 01:13:58 (recovery run)

 

Gather ’round, kiddies, and let me tell you about a bygone era called… THE LATE ’80S! It was a time when you had to call local businesses on the phone instead of tweeting @ them and you didn’t even have to dial an area code, a time when the most heated religious debate was VHS vs. Betamax, a time when… Actually, no, you know what? Why should I go to the effort to be a first-person historical source (yes, I’m that old) when I can just point you toward tonight’s totally tubular recovery run selection, WNUF Halloween Special? I chose it as a spooky window into antiquity, because as everyone knows all too well, next to the present and the future, the past is the third-scariest thing out there!

 

WNUF’s found-footage conceit is about as straightforward as it gets: you’re watching a videocassette recording of an investigative Halloween special that broadcast live from the local murder house, which has stood empty since its last resident got obsessed with an old Ouija board he found in his attic and then, y’know, sorta decapitated his parents and stuff. The tape kicks off a little early during the WNUF Evening News, complete with local anchors in crappy witch and vampire costumes, and immediately sets the tone for the night by making two things very clear: 1) you’re going to be watching a LOT of fake ’80s commercials; and 2) everything about the ’80s aesthetic is cursed.

 

After some typical local news fare about dentist Halloween candy buy-backs and crackpot religious opposition to trick-or-treating, we finally begin Frank Stewart’s Halloween special, live and on-location at the Weber Murder House. Frank is a typical smarmyish news reporter and he works the crowd, asking a bunch of costumed knuckleheads if they believe in ghosts, which leads to a few good chuckles. Frank also gives the background on the murder, and introduces us to a husband-and-wife(-and-cat) team of paranormal investigators, as well as a priest he’s brought in just in case they need to do an exorcism. Things eventually start getting weird, but it takes a while: glimpses of motion when the house is supposed to be empty, creepy voices appearing on recordings, equipment smashed by invisible entities, etc. Once the violence escalates, will even an exorcism save them?

 

Story-wise, that’s about all there is to it, and it’s not a lot, but story is clearly not what WNUF was supposed to be about. The look and feel of the recording is darn close to perfect: the low definition, the terrible color bleeding, the scan lines and tracking artifacts during the fast-forwarding scenes. The art direction for what appears IN the recordings is spot-on as well—possibly the scariest thing about WNUF is that these fonts, fashions, and colors really did once roam free and plentiful. 

 

The thing is, unless you’re a pretty specific age, you probably won’t appreciate just how spot-on a lot of this is. I watched Geraldo Rivera open Al Capone’s vault live on Chicago television, so believe me when I say that the notion of a local channel doing a live call-in seance in a murder house on Halloween as a ratings grab is VERY realistic. (In fact, I strongly suspect that Frank Stewart and his moustache are directly inspired by late-’80s Geraldo.) Likewise, cheesy “Just Say No” anti-drug commercials, local political attack ads, pay-by-the-minute 900 numbers, pizza-parlor video arcades, “computer learning centers,” the pervasive hysteric hand-wringing over the alleged increase in Satanic worship and animal sacrifice due to heavy metal and Dungeons and Dragons, and SO, SO MANY carpet commercials—all of that is dead-on accurate, yo.

 

That said, I should point out that while WNUF is one heck of a nostalgia trip, it’s not especially effective as a scary movie. There’s nothing in this found-footage entry that comes close to cultivating the sort of dread and fear that, say, The Blair Witch Project can brew up, so if you’re looking for real scares instead of some lighter scare-adjacent Halloween entertainment, you should probably look elsewhere. (On the other hand, Blair Witch doesn’t have a shot of a psychic cat wearing headphones, so hey.) Even if the acting were top-notch (spoiler: it isn’t), it’s pretty tough to build up the sort of tension required for real creepiness when the narrative is being interrupted by commercials every four minutes, which is precisely why you should never watch a horror movie for the first time on basic cable, Tubi, or Pluto TV—but I digress.

 

What WNUF does offer is a little heart, a few decent laughs, and a truckload of authentic 1987-style video. If you’re old enough to remember what UHF programming was like in 1987—and aren’t so traumatized by it that you’d rather forget it ever existed—this movie might be for you. If not, I would guess that you’re probably going to hate it. But as a movie you can throw on in the background on Halloween night, there are worse choices you could make.