Spirit Halloween: The Movie (2022)

The inspiration behind movies can come from many places. People say that you should write what you know. Many writers pull from earlier in their lives. It could be a childhood fear that inspires a horror movie, or a friendship that inspires a children’s adventure movie. Rule of threes says I should pull out one more. It could be the divorce of parents that inspires a family drama. Not every inspiration will be pulled from a writer’s life, though. They might find inspiration in other movies and stories. They could find inspiration in the news. Many times, inspiration could come from some much stranger places.

Consider the movie that inspired this post. Spirit Halloween: The Movie came out in 2022. Jake (Donovan Colan) was gearing up for another year of trick-or-treating with his friends, Bo (Jaiden J. Smith) and Carson (Dylan Frankel). Carson said they were too old for trick-or-treating because they would be in high school the next year. This led Jake to change his plans. The three of them would hide in the local Spirit Halloween at closing time and stay the night. It all seemed like simple fun and games until they discovered the spirit of Alex Windsor (Christopher Lloyd), an evil landowner from decades before, haunting the store. Would they make it out alive?

It's a spooky children’s flick. Of course they made it out alive.

The strange thing with Spirit Halloween: The Movie was that it was inspired by a store. I don’t mean that it was inspired by working in a store, the way that Clerks or Empire Records were. I mean that the entire reason the movie was made was to promote the store. Kind of like how Career Opportunities was a movie about being stuck in a Target overnight. Swap out the Target for a Spirit Halloween. De-age the characters a little bit. Swap out thieves for a ghost. He basic idea of being in a specific store overnight is still there.

The only reason for a movie to be inspired by a store in this way would be for the movie to serve as an advertisement. That’s essentially what Spirit Halloween: The Movie was. The montage of the children playing around in the store was an excuse to show off a bunch of the costume stuff they had, whether it was actual costumes or accessories. The ghost being around and possessing various items throughout the store was an excuse to show off all the decorations and animatronics that Spirit Halloween had. This movie was one massive promotion for people to visit Spirit Halloween and buy things. However, it still had an 80s kids’ horror adventure feel to what was going on in, and under, the store.

Spirit Halloween: The Movie might have been inspired from the seasonal store, but it still had to be more than montages and interactions with Spirit Halloween items. There was an underground cave system beneath the store that led to a small shack next to a pond. That added an adventure side of things. There was Kate (Marissa Reyes), Carson’s sister, who broke into the store to find her brother who said he was staying at Jake’s house, but clearly wasn’t. And there was Sue (Rachael Leigh Cook), Jake’s mom who was worried about what her son was up to and didn’t really do anything beyond banging on the doors of the store for a bit. I’m not sure why she was in the movie.

Nothing about Spirit Halloween: The Movie was groundbreaking or memorable. It was a movie that simply happened. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t bad. It just was. What it did do, however, was give me a jumping off point to find some movies that were inspired by things that wouldn’t normally inspire a story. Or television shows. Really, any sort of visual media that was inspired by something you wouldn’t typically get inspired by. I may have written about this before. I don’t remember. I’m writing about it now.

Perhaps the most notable example is Shit My Dad Says. This was a one season television show starring William Shatner that was based on a Twitter feed. I’ve never known about anything else that was based directly on someone’s social media account. Based on YouTube? Sure. But a television show based on someone’s, at the time, 140-character messages about things their dad said? That sounds like a crazy idea now. It was a crazy idea then, too. It didn’t work.

Next up is a movie that most people say shouldn’t have been made, but I found to be kind of decent. The Emoji Movie was a children’s animated flick about emojis living inside a kid’s phone. Specifically, it was about a meh emoji trying to prove that it was more than just one emotion. There was an adventure through different smartphone apps and a decent story about being more than what people label you as. It’s a shame that certain voice actors are in it, though. But a movie inspired by emojis? That’s a strange inspiration if I’ve ever heard one.

I guess you could lump in a bunch of Pixar movies for this one. The monster in the closet becoming Monster’s Inc. A person’s emotions becoming Inside Out. The four elements becoming Elemental. Pixar doesn’t always take random things and pull a, usually, good movie out of them. However, they can look at the idea of a person’s emotions and think “What if we personified the emotions and they had to work together to make the person whole?” The studio is good at doing that. They have done stuff like that multiple times.

It would only make sense to follow up Pixar with Disney. There have been a few times that the multimedia juggernaut based movies on the rides of their amusement parks. Pirates of the Caribbean was the most successful, spawning a five-movie franchise. It’s based on a dark ride where you sit in a boat and float past a bunch of pirates doing pirate things. Then there was The Haunted Mansion. Two movies have been made based on the spooky dark ride, plus a Muppets special. The Country Bears was another attraction that was made into a movie. Finally, there was Tomorrowland, which was named for the land within the Disney parks, and was based on Walt Disney’s vision for the future. The Disney company just keeps making movies based on their rides as a sort of synergy between film and park. It’s the opposite of how they make rides based on their movies.

I should also mention From Justin to Kelly which was inspired by the first season of American Idol. The winner and runner-up of that singing competition show, Kelly Clarkson and Justin Guarini, were contracted to make a movie after the season was complete. The entire idea behind the movie was to use the newfound success of the singers to produce new music in movie form. It was a spring break musical that had almost nothing in the way of story, outside of a romance between the two aspiring pop stars. Who were not actors. Not a great reason to make a movie.

The last inspiration I want to mention is one that inspires a lot of movies, which makes sense because so many people have worked there or visited there. It’s the way that it inspired these movies that makes it a weird inspiration. That is McDonalds.

I’ve covered two movies for Sunday “Bad” Movies that were inspired by one of the biggest companies in the world. The most obvious one, from a story standpoint, was Hamburger: The Motion Picture. It was a sex comedy, not too unlike Police Academy, where a guy enrolled in Hamburger University to one day run a franchise of a successful fast food chain. The idea of a Hamburger University was based on the McDonalds Hamburger University, where management and franchise owners are trained, or were trained at the time. So, maybe it is a little stranger that it’s not based on the restaurant and more based on the training facility of the restaurant.

The other movie inspired by McDonald’s might not seem so obvious upon first glance. Mac and Me might look like your average E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial knock-off, where an alien was lost on Earth and befriended a few children, while the government tried to find and capture it. But there’s the name. The alien was Mac. M. A. C. Like if you were to go to McDonalds and order a Big MAC. Okay? And then about halfway through the movie, Mac goes to a birthday party dressed as a bear. Where was the birthday party? McDonalds. Who was there? Ronald McDonald. There was a ten-minute dance sequence at the McDonalds. Mac and Me was a poorly done excuse for a McDonalds advertisement.

Sometimes, inspiration can come from the strangest places. There are the obvious ways to be inspired to write a story. Personal experience, something on the news, a certain notable person. Other times, though, it can come from somewhere you never expected. One very old picture, a meh emoji on your phone, a ride you went on once when you were a kid. The important part is that a writer gets inspired. That doesn’t always happen and it’s important to act on the inspiration when it does. However good or bad the end result is.

Let’s toss a few notes in here to close things out:

• Christopher Lloyd returned to Sunday “Bad” Movies in Spirit Halloween: The Movie. He was previously in The Oogieloves in the Big Balloon Adventure, Baby Geniuses, Foodfight!, Dead Before Dawn 3D, and Santa Buddies.
• I mentioned a few movies that I’ve covered for Sunday “Bad” Movies in the past. They were The Emoji Movie, Mac and Me, Hamburger: The Motion Picture, From Justin to Kelly, and Police Academy.
• Have you seen Spirit Halloween: The Movie? What did you think of it? Have you been to a Spirit Halloween? Have you ever wanted to stay the night there? Let me know in the comments or on Threads.
• If there’s something you think I should check out for a Sunday “Bad” Movies post, let me know. I’m always open to more movies to watch, even if it might take me some time to write the posts.
• I promise the next post will be for Ringmaster. I’ve been meaning to write about that one since… February? It’s been way too long and I want to get a post in before December. It seems like the right time for that Jerry Springer movie. I’ll see you when I get that one up.

Scream Returns (2018)

Let’s go back to the 1970s or 1980s. I’m going to be talking out of my ass for this little bit because it was a time before I was born. Personal video cameras became a more popular thing sometime during those two decades. The transition from film to video made it a whole lot easier for a regular consumer to get their hands on a camera they could use to film whatever they wanted. People became more familiar with these home movie makers. They made home videos. Families doing family things. Stuff like that. They also started making scripted movies.

That’s where no-budget cinema came from. People had access to cameras at a rate that hadn’t been seen before and were able to let their creativity out. People like Todd Sheets rose in prominence through the underground movie scene because they had access to equipment they hadn’t previously had access to. Then came the independent scene of the late 1980s and early 1990s where people like Kevin Smith, Richard Linklater, and Steven Soderberg found their footing in the industry. Having access to a device to capture video allowed more people to start their cinematic careers than ever before.

Everything took another step forward with phone technology. As phones got better, the cameras on phones got better. As the cameras on phones got better, more people were able to make creative video output. Places like Vine, TikTok, and YouTube helped creative minds reach wider audiences. Anyone was able to make movie. Or videos. Or content. Whatever they wanted to make, within legal parameters, they were able to make.

All this quick rambling was to set up for this point. Some people, namely the creative types I name-checked already, brought their own ideas to the forefront. They came up with stories. They, in many cases, had original characters they created, going through original stories they wrote. There were some cases where that wasn’t entirely true. Kevin Smith made Cop Out and Richard Linklater remade The Bad News Bears, which didn’t feature their own characters. For the most part, however, these people had their own ideas.

Another subset of creative mind came out of the rise of easily accessible cameras. These people were a little more fanboyish in their creativity. They didn’t simply reference other movies. They used those other movies as the basis of their own movies. They used their access to cameras and other such equipment to make fan films.

There are three main ways fan films could be made. The simplest is for someone to basically remake a movie they like. Off the top of my head, I think I’ve only seen one of these kinds of fan films. On YouTube, you can find something called Live Action Toy Story, where someone remade Toy Story with real toys instead of animation. I also know of a Raiders of the Lost Ark fan film from the 1980s, but I haven’t seen that one.

The second kind of fan film is to reboot the intellectual property in some way, without having the rights owner’s input. The most notable, at least from my knowledge, would be the works of Adi Shankar. He made Dirty Laundry, which brought Tom Jane back as The Punisher, and he made a dark reboot of Mighty Morphin Power Rangers called Power/Rangers. I’ve seen both and they’re each good quality short films. But they are just fan films of what people may have wanted at the time, even though big studios were doing other stuff with those properties.

Finally, there are the fan films that use an intellectual property as a jumping off point for doing their own thing while capitalizing on the other, more popular, property. My example, and the movie I started writing all this to discuss, is Scream Returns. This French film from 2018 followed a bunch of people who were stalked by Ghostface. And, as you may already know, Ghostface was never the same person in the Scream movies. None of the characters from the Scream franchise were in this film. Only the mask made an appearance and, for the most part, it wasn’t even the same mask.

Scream Returns began by basically recreating the opening of the first Scream movie. Instead of “What’s your favourite scary movie?” they went with “What’s your favourite scary video game?” You see, as much as this was a Scream fan film, it was also a video game fan film. One of the production logos that came up at the beginning of the movie featured a PlayStation controller. Someone called a woman who was home alone, quizzing her on horror movies, before chasing her around the house and killing her. That someone wore a Ghostface mask. Only, this Ghostface mask was silver instead of white.

Hard cut to the next scene where the movie went into a Grand Theft Auto V mod. That’s right. There was a whole ten-minute chunk of the movie rendered in Grand Theft Auto V where Trevor got into a fistfight with Ghostface. If you thought the opening scene was all about video games, you hadn’t seen anything yet. The fact that the scene was in the movie at all was crazy. The fact that the characters in that scene, and that scene only, spoke English with heavy French accents took everything another step over the top. This was going to be a bonkers fan film and it probably wouldn’t let up.

Only it did. In the third part of Scream Returns, the audience was taken back to the live action world. I’m not going to get too much into this or the final section because they were basically more of the same from the first segment. There were video games involved. A killer in a Ghostface mask harassed some people. There may have been some teleporting and time shifting and insanity involved in the fourth and final portion. But, all in all, it was just a bunch of French people using the Scream IP to make a movie.

Yet, the fan film suffered in a way that most fan films don’t. Usually, a fan film will ooze with someone’s love of a property. The way that some of them are shot-for-shot remakes done on shoestring budgets with kids (Raiders of the Lost Ark) or toys (Toy Story) shows the investment that people put into making these movies. The Adi Shankar fan films showed an appreciation for a property and an understanding of what the fans of those properties wanted to see. The problem with Scream Returns was that it had none of that love.

Scream Returns took some of the iconography of Scream and put it into this new movie. The Ghostface mask was there, though silver instead of white. The “What’s your favourite scary movie?” line was in there, with video game substituted in. The issue was that it took away one of the biggest strengths of the Scream movies. The meta humour was gone. The characters were no longer self-aware. They no longer followed the horror rules. There was no ability to understand what they were going through because they didn’t bring up any of the rules that built the genre over the century it has existed. This was the element that helped set the Scream franchise apart from the other horror of the mid-to-late 90s, and it was completely absent from the fan film. That felt like a major misstep.

As its own thing, Scream Returns was fine. Replace the Ghostface mask with any other non-IP slasher mask and it would surely not rub me quite as wrong as it did. There would still be the whole Grand Theft Auto V scene that came out of nowhere. And it wasn’t tense or frightening at all. But it was a serviceable little amateur slasher flick. I just wish that, for a movie that claimed to be a fan film, it had represented the franchise it was based on a little better.

A final note about Scream Returns… Even the poster was influenced by the Scream movies. Look at it. That poster wouldn’t be too out of place among at least the first four Scream movies. The fifth and sixth were made after Scream Returns, so the filmmakers didn’t have those for reference.

Fan films come in many shapes and sizes, though there are really two things that they have or should have in common. The first would be an appreciation for the property they are based on. The people making the movie wanted to share their love of what came before, and they presented their love on screen. The other would be an appreciation for the fans. The filmmakers might want to share something that all fans of that property would love. They should be about the love. By fans and for fans.

That all ties back into the introduction of home cameras. Once people were able to access affordable cameras, they were able to declare their love for specific movies and movies in general. Thanks to the internet a little while later, they were able to share their love of the movies by showing the world the movies they made with those cameras. Now that everyone has a camera on their phone or even better cameras outside their phones, and because streaming is so easily done, fan films are all over the place. And it’s very easy to watch them.

Now it’s time for a few notes:

• I’m pretty sure there are no actors from Scream Returns in any other Sunday “Bad” Movies. Let me double check. Yeah, there are none.
• I might as well list off a few slashers that I’ve checked out for Sunday “Bad” Movies. Here are links to Backwoods Bloodbath, Science Crazed, Sleepaway Camp, Slaughter High, New Year’s Evil, Taboo, Santa Claws, and Valentine.
• Have you seen Scream Returns? What did you think? What are your thoughts on fan films? Let me know in the comments, or find me on Threads because that’s where I am.
• If there’s a movie you want me to watch for Sunday “Bad” Movies, let me know in the comments. I’m open to suggestions and I will get to them.
• I know I was supposed to cover Ringmaster. Yeah yeah. I still need to rewatch it. I haven’t seen it since February. I got a little sidetracked by Spooky Season. It’ll be coming up at some point in the near-ish future. I do have another Spooky Season post to put up, though. One that I’ve been working on for a couple weeks because I couldn’t pass up the chance to watch the movie. It seemed like perfect Sunday “Bad” Movies material. I’ll have something up about Spirit Halloween: The Movie. I’ll see you again when that one goes up.