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.