One of the great celebrations of amateur horror filmmaking, Halloween Party is a backyard mini-epic by an ambitious teenager who gained control of Connecticut public access on Halloween night
On Halloween night 1989, Connecticut public access broadcast the DJP Halloween Special. The evening’s entertainment was a variety show hosted by “Egor,” a young man dressed up in a black robe with googly eyes and stage blood splattered on his face. Stitching together the various segments, Egor guides the program with rubber knife gags and “take my wife” style humor. Included were two music videos: one is a remix of Nightmare on Elm Street clips set to “All I Have to Do Is Dream”; the other features two hand puppets mouthing along to Bon Jovi’s “Living on A Prayer.” Between the musical offerings is a short film about a vicious sasquatch terrorizing a New England suburb, endearingly titled Sasquach. It stars pre-teens acting as doctors and police officers. They eventually take down the creature after its killing spree claims the lives of many victims — including a disinterested house cat, whose death scene was clearly footage stolen without the feline’s awareness while it napped. Egor makes concessions to the program’s low budget, and is clearly a little nervous and giddy before the camera. “I’m starting to laugh. I don’t want to have a blooper, but this whole thing is a blooper… Did you notice that I’m standing in a hula hoop?” But through it all, he doesn’t seem too concerned about any potential shortcomings as he builds to the special’s second half.
Now, this may all sound like a mere lark pulled together by a high school film class or group of aspiring filmmakers. But all of the evening’s entertainment was helmed by a single mastermind, and he also happened to be playing host as Egor. DJP stood for David James Productions, which was the “amateur movie company” of David Skowronski, a local teenage auteur from Cheshire, a small town located between New Haven and Hartford. As Skowronski makes clear throughout the program, the night’s main attraction is his latest project: a horror film called Halloween Party. He hypes it up between his comedy bits and promises it won’t disappoint. Halloween Party is certainly more ambitious than his previous offerings on the broadcast, but it is less the actual craft of the piece that makes the film stand out all these years later, and more a matter of what Skowronski captures within it. The film itself is split in two parts: The actual narrative and an extended coda. At its most basic, the film is a remarkable document of its time. As Joseph A. Ziemba writes for Bleeding Skull, Halloween Party is “a time-warp treasure chest… a document of teens hanging out and being themselves during a time that will never exist again.” But while it brilliantly evokes its bygone VHS-era, it isn’t just nostalgia that has drawn a small cult of appreciators to the film. If it were just a well-preserved time capsule, it wouldn’t be worth as much. Instead, Halloween Party deserves to be recognized as an essential example of backyard horror filmmaking, regardless of its era.
The narrative portion of Halloween Party plays in familiar territory, but that shouldn’t be held against it. Skowronski’s now-teenage actors play teenagers this time around. A girl named Becky throws an incredibly innocent Halloween party with some friends. News reports share that a gravesite has been “vandalized” in the local cemetery and a resting place has been dug up, but we know different. The film opens with an extended graveyard credit sequence, which concludes with a hand breaking out from below the surface. Sure enough, this hand belongs to a long-dead and psychotic farmer who went on a murder spree on the land where Becky’s house now stands. Now, inexplicably reanimated, he returns home for another Halloween massacre, featuring Becky and her party guests as his victims.
The film itself is far from anything revolutionary if one chooses to look solely at its narrative. The story plays like a Halloween remake by kids who had to imagine what it was about because they weren’t old enough to see it. Obviously, this wasn’t the case — Michael Myers’ famous theme music receives heavy rotation throughout the film (Don’t tell Mr. Carpenter!) — but an imagination-gone-wild feeling is discernible, as if they were told the basic story secondhand and had to flesh out the rest themselves.
Halloween Party hits so many sweet spots, many of which I doubt its young filmmaker was completely aware of at the time. I mean no disrespect by saying that, but catching the film as an adult, it brings back all those childhood memories of making monster movies in the backyard, not just of the finished product, but of the activity and atmosphere of wrangling a group of friends together to make a movie with few resources. Performances from the non-actor kids are so overcome with the excitement of being in a movie that they radiate a different kind of presence — one that doesn’t uphold an illusion of reality, but instead shatters it and encourages us to share in the excitement.
The movie is both entirely charming in its earnestness, and, admittedly, kind of creepy. The killer’s mask and the video’s murkiness often mesh into a blurry nightmare. The under-lit murder scenes make viewers scramble through the darkness to catch the mayhem, which is an effect that really should be utilized by more filmmakers. We know that scary face is lurking somewhere within the frame, but being able to catch only flashes amid the black night and surface of the videotaped image make his appearances all the more disturbing.
The film’s form, inadvertently, proves more substantial than expected. While the narrative aspect is given top billing, the second half of Halloween Party shifts gears into a blooper reel that runs as long as the actual film. This odd structuring transforms the movie into a child’s-eye reflection on the process of filmmaking. It becomes something more than a mere tacked-on gag reel. We see the filmmaker’s mom hovering just out of frame and the kids goofing off during and between takes. A toilet flushing gag presents a particular challenge for actors tasked with keeping a straight face. It not only confirms the energy and fun that shines through the murkiness of the narrative portion of Halloween Party, but it also fills in the cracks and comments on the preceding final product while reinforcing all the perfect imperfections with a joyful abandon.
The program’s big finale is the whole cast singing and dancing along to “The Monster Mash.” The stars of Halloween Party reunite in the studio for a choreographed routine, loosely keeping up with the steps. The zombie farmer jumps in for a big entrance and almost immediately runs out of dance moves. All the while, Skowronski slinks along the foreground and lip syncs to the song with relish as he unifies the live in-studio material with the world of his latest epic. The dance feels like a humble victory lap. I don’t want to slip into a “They don’t make ’em like they used to” type argument, but it is so rare to find movies that radiate such genuine awe over the joys of getting together to make a movie with friends. I can think of only a small handful of films — a few of which we are covering in this October Horror series, including those by the Motern Media gang — that blend such spirit, sincerity, and ambition in a backyard production.
Sure, anyone can look at this movie and dismiss it as the work of kids and say, ‘who should care?’ But few movies capture such genuine creative glee on screen as Halloween Party. Rather than a film about a Monster Squad and their adventures in horror, this is a film by an actual Monster Squad that stands as an incredibly successful translation of a boundless love for all things horror into moving images.
Halloween Party is currently available on Youtube:
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