Every year, since my son was six months old, I’ve made a Halloween movie starring…him. And, inevitably, myself and my wife and several of our friends. These are screened at our big Halloween party we throw every year, and added to YouTube largely as an afterthought. Sometimes they’re a little more ambitious. One year we dressed him up as Godzilla and made a film about Godzilla (whose name we censored for most of the film) trashing toy cities inside our house, replete with a miniature army firing upon him and our friends dying in horrifying explosions. Another year he was the Frankenstein monster committing wanton murders, and another year a mummy being pursued by a mob.
Below are two of the better home movies from this series. “A Low-Key Halloween Gathering” was also used as part of the web series Dadurday Light, spearheaded by my friend Jimmy Hughes. Dadurday Light was two seasons’ worth of short films made for an improv group in Texas called My 4 Dads and their recurring live show Dadurday Night Live. I asked one of our ensemble, the musician Ian Rickert-Dellios, if he could write a short “Monster Mash” parody that only needed to be 30 seconds long or so. Instead, he was having so much fun that he composed an entire novelty song, so to accompany it I created an animated music video. This video is just that piece, although there’s a longer version of the short that features my son and I doing our best Abbott and Costello imitation to introduce it.
The other one is the most ambitious I did, an H.P. Lovecraft homage called “The Name of Cthulhu” that was filmed all around Wisconsin and incorporates elements and characters from Lovecraft’s stories. Jimmy Hughes made original music for the film, and my brother-in-law Kevin Luebke performed a cosmic horror violin solo during his key scene. I also built a Cthulhu model for this, and my son and I created some brief (and crude) stop-motion monsters. Incidentally, my son is playing “A. Derleth,” an homage to the weird fiction author August Derleth, founder of Arkham House Publishing, which was the first publisher to collect Lovecraft’s fiction. In one scene, we actually show Derleth’s real-life grave, which is not too far from where I live. Our newest film (which might be the stupidest we’ve ever done) comes out on 10/25!
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