For 11 months out of the year, a barn sits empty. The first day of October then rolls around and with the tearing of the calendar comes the change of the leaves, the wing-beat of owls lighting from bare trees and the whistling wind bearing the tinge of winter from an infinite dark. Pick-up trucks arrive with barrels of hardware, crates full of tools, cans sloshing with paint. Men climb out and get to work. By the 31st, everything is in place: skeletons hang from ceilings, racks buckle under the weight of false limbs and severed papier-mâché heads. And then, ready to endure its frights, to suspend disbelief and store up memories to recall on dark nights until next year, the people arrive and stand in line.
Daniel Erickson's Scary Movie (1991) is mostly set here, in a never-ending queue, where we find our protagonist, the gangly, buttoned-up Warren (no last name given, simply "Warren" and played by John Hawkes) waiting with ever-growing terror to enter the house of horrors. The townspeople wear fake masks, outrageous costumes and garish makeup. Warren trembles in khaki pants and a collared shirt buttoned to the neck. As people laugh and joke, he sweats and shakes. This is his personal hell.
Erickson was 22 when he directed his feature film about an anxious young man who believes an escaped mental patient is loose in a fake haunted house. It was a project into which he poured blood, sweat and tears, and one which perfectly captures the feel and atmosphere of Halloween. There's true love on display here.
An Austin-based production, Scary Movie (1991) emerged just as the Texas-based independent scene was in full swing (Richard Linklater's Slacker had come out the year before). The city was a trove for creatives, and Erickson pulled performers and specialists from his community to round out the cast and crew. One was the aspiring actor-carpenter-musician John Hawkes, a sharp-jawed and thin young man with eyes on Hollywood and a fantastic career in his cards.
In a Blu-Ray commentary provided by AGFA (the American Genre Film Archive, an Austin-based distribution company which led the charge on getting the film remastered), Erickson explains that Hawkes channeled the gangly nervousness of Ichabod Crane and pulled from John Lithgow's nerve-melted performance in John Landis's Twilight Zone: The Movie (1983) movie. Buster Keaton also gets tossed into the reference pool, and the similarities in physicality are easy to see, with Hawkes pouring every particle of his being into taking up as little space as possible. As the film moves, his performance becomes more physical, and Hawkes fully embraces the freak-out.
The production has a young filmmaker feel to it, yet feels as local and homegrown as a pumpkin patch. The filmmakers' passion comes through in every frame. This is an ode to Halloween in a small country town, a Ray Bradbury-esque setting of wind blowing through the leaves and the moon shining on pitch-black nights. Anyone who remembers the horror of the annual haunted house will recall the anticipation of waiting in line, the anxiety of wondering what lies inside. The cinematography lends a helping hand, too, painting blacks in a frightening opaqueness of onyx and indigo and bringing out the bright orange of pumpkins off the vine.
The production design deserves a nod as well. The haunted house in Scary Movie is an architectural anomaly, its unassuming exterior unfolding the slow reveal of its various rooms, hallways and dungeons like the centerpiece of Mark Z. Danielewski's novel House of Leaves. The film's house (can you guess which Hitchcock film it references?) was a façade: each room was built and then deconstructed on a sound stage, thereby allowing the camera crew to move with ease inside the space while conveying the claustrophobia and horror which Erickson sought to impend on his protagonist.
Scary Movie has been unjustly forgotten, a case that wasn't helped by the release of the 2000 comedy-horror send up with the same title. Erickson reveals that Wes Craven's Scream (1996) was initially set to be released with the title, but the young director and his team wrote a plea which the legendary horror director indulged.
Thankfully, the film is finding an audience and gathering clout as a must-see cult Halloween movie in some circles. Now viewers have a chance to see a vibrant, passionate talent on display and to witness a crazed performance by an actor who has gone on to have career-making performances in Deadwood (2004-2006) and Winter's Bone (2010) with still more to come. And if for nothing else, it's a ticket--no matter the month--to step back into the late evenings of October and to feel that brush of wind carrying something ominous and unknown on its breath.
By Thomas Davant
