Fest Track On Sirk TV Film Review: SPOOKTACULAR! [Fantastic Fest 2023 - Austin, Texas]

The essence of a great theme park is a context of love for what is being created but enough talent and capital to back it up. Halloween Horror Nights now rules the roost but because it has figured out how to use IP but balance the scares and have the money and space to make it happen. The reality is that it is a tricky balance especially with how close people can get and how they react in closed spaces. Safety now has to be taken in account with security aware of what is going on with both sides. Doing it like Spooky World in the early 90s would now a very gray legal area now, especially with smartphones since reaction is all about perspective. The documentary "Spooktacular" follows the creation and establishment of "Spooky World" in Berlin, Massauchussetts outside Boston in the early 1990s ( around 1991). This writer started covering the first Halloween Horror Nights in 1992 in Orlando for a local newspaper but it was nowhere what it is today.

This documentary follows how the first of the haunted houses were created. It started off as a hayride created by David Bertolino and his then wife who purchased an old barn house and space. He had evolved a costume shop from a novelty store in the more red-light associated section of Boston. When in the 80s finding new money paths had changed they found a way to balance finding, selling and renting costumes like Mike Myers or Lethaerface associated with Halloween. There was a thirst for such things as means of escape Bertolino built the haunted houses from the ground up but what vaulted it was when he got VFX makeup specialist Tom Savini who came to one of the first events and saw the hunger from the back up on the road leading to the barnhouse. Bertolino understood, likely because of the popularity of Star Trek conventions, that people wanted to see their idols from the movies to get autographs but in what would be considered a family friendly place. He started off with people like the actor who Eddie Munster and Savini. However when he tracked down Linda Blair (of "The Exorcist" fame) in Connecticut and asked her to attend is when everything took off.

The documentary talks about how this event grew over the years but also the problems that occurred from power to media coverage (which went both wrong and right). Like with most things after an initial big success, other places, beyond HHN, were coming to bear inside the bigger cities which made the space more competitive. Bertolino, like any big circus creator, had to push the boundaries. He did so after making a trip to California to get one of his biggest guests yet to appear (obviously through a money deal): Robert Englund of Freddy Kreuger fame. Because of an influence and subsequent purchase of some likenesses of Bela Legosi alone with Charles Manson, the new Hellhouse part of his park he created with a 18-year old age limit restriction pushed it forward but maybe beyond what his audience really wanted to handle. It was immensely popular but likely drew a slightly different crowd than he was known for. It was interesting that the scares became more intense but that might have been its downfall. Eventually the city started gunning for them (likely because of the less family friendly aspect) but also because they wanted a piece of the pie. It was the rise and fall of an American entertainment business both in its glories and its failures and the documentary was backed by Savini and Bertolino and through their eyes, so it is both comprehensive but also of a certain perspective (though the motivations are sound). B

By Tim Wassberg