Halloween represents a lot of different things to a lot of different people. For younger kids, it’s a chance to dress up as a beloved figure, going door to door to amass unreasonable amounts of candy. For teens and young adults, the holiday is a chance to get together with friends for Halloween parties, typically partaking in lighthearted revelry. Older enthusiasts will either get to supervise their own kids as they quest for candy, or possibly marathon their favorite horror offerings. While a number of movies have embraced all of these premises, 2013’s WNUF Halloween Special taps into a very specific slice of nostalgia to honor those of us who would tune into event programming that aimed to unsettle audiences on a low budget. Not all audiences will be able to connect with WNUF, but for those of us who do, it feels both like an evocative blast from the past and an entirely fresh approach to honoring All Hallow’s Eve.
Set on Halloween night in 1987, the WNUF Halloween Special begins with a news broadcast featuring anchors talking about fictional news stories as they’re dressed up in Halloween outfits. The anchors discuss regional topics, like a dentist offering cash for candy and local law enforcement offering tips to stay safe while trick or treating. The broadcast then introduces Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf), an anchor who is conducting a live investigation into a supposedly haunted house.
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The WNUF Halloween Special isn’t the first project that aimed to replicate the look and feel of a live investigation from a network, as the formerly hard-to-find 1992 movie Ghostwatch had a similar premise. WNUF also isn’t the latest experience that embraces this premise, as one of this year’s best-reviewed horror movies is the David Dastmalchian-starring Late Night with the Devil, in which a talk show host hopes to revive viewership by bringing in a “possessed” girl on Halloween. What really makes the WNUF Halloween Special stand on its own, though, are the interstitials and commercials that both do and don’t pay respects to Halloween.
Before the age of streaming or the rise of home video, anyone with an interest in horror or Halloween would have to rely on TV networks to get their fix. This meant that, in addition to more gruesome movies being edited for content, viewers grew accustomed to movies and locally produced Halloween specials being interrupted by commercials. Many of these promos would be for national brands, though these commercial breaks also featured ads for local businesses. In the ’80s and ’90s, brands of all sizes would channel the spirit of the spooky season for themed commercials, so while viewers were disappointed to see programs interrupted, witnessing a vampire-themed Reese’s peanut butter cup commercial or advertisement for a nearby haunted house could at least keep the spooky atmosphere running.
Developed by Chris LaMartina, Jimmy George, and Jamie Nash, the premise of WNUF is that it is a recording of a broadcast from 1987. One question that audiences often have with found-footage horror movies is who has edited this “found” footage, but the filmmakers behind WNUF were so committed to authenticity, they even crafted dozens of fake commercials for fictional brands. From local drug stores offering Halloween makeup to horror hotlines to nearby farms, WNUF delivers era-appropriate parodies of such promos. Not all of the commercials have a seasonal sheen to them, as we even get commercials for upcoming episodes of fictional sitcoms or spots that highlight music compilations. We even get themed bumpers featuring network identification to fully immerse the viewer in the concept.
To say that the WNUF Halloween Special was a labor of love would be an understatement. With a reported budget of $1,500, LaMartina would spend hours and days crafting each 30-second spot, either by filming new material or by expertly editing together stock footage that could pass for an ’80s-set promo.
“They’re either made from stock footage that we thought could believably look like the ’80s, they’re made from clips from filmmakers that we knew had footage from the late ’80s that were friends of ours that would let us take stuff and use it without any problem, and then also a little bit of public domain-type footage,” LaMartina explained to ComicBook of the process back in 2020. “Basically me and a handful of other writers, most notably this guy Pat Storck, who was incredible, he would knock out … he sent me 30 scripts for commercials, that I probably used like, I don’t know, 10 to 15 of. We wrote to the resources. I literally had this pool of writers come over to my house and I showed them all the clips, and then give them assignments. I’d be like, ‘Pat, would you write a commercial for the arcade footage I have here? Hey, I could go get my buddy [Joe Mitra] to record heavy metal songs. Could you come up with a list of fake bands? And we could do one of those f-cking ’80s, heavy metal compilation commercials.’ I knew the types of commercials I wanted to make, and then it was figuring out, it’s almost how like you use every part of the buffalo, right? There was not a f-cking clip I had that we didn’t use.”
He added, “At the time, I was a single dude. I was working as a video editor at a marketing agency and I was just living in the basement. I would wake up, edit a commercial, come back on my lunch break, because I could walk from my office to my house where I was living at the time, I would come back at my lunch break, edit another commercial, come home that night, edit another commercial, fall asleep. If the commercials were just made of stock footage, I could do three a day. And it was easy. I mean, literally, from script to screen, WNUF was nine months, the fastest we have ever made a movie. And that was sort of great; it was like a f-cking big fever dream.”
There’s a lot of movies and TV shows that honor all corners of Halloween festivities, but WNUF manages to both authentically and specifically pay respects to a bygone era of fandom. If your plans were impeded by weather or illness, if you had your evening cut short, or if you took more comfort in staying home on October 31st, a very specific era of Halloween fans have memories of watching local programming that embraced the spirit of the season and the WNUF Halloween Special channels those nostalgic feelings like no other movie out there. The project is so specific, that it even includes a bit of a post-script in which the Halloween theming has been abandoned, as it takes place on November 1st and signaled that the holiday is officially in the rearview.
Halloween fans have no shortage of content to watch every October, but there’s argubaly only one experience that scratches that nostalgic itch of what it was like to be watching TV on October 31st and all of the fond memories that come with it, and that’s the WNUF Halloween Special.
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