I can't believe I've never heard of this movie before. It's right up my alleyways! This is a comedy horror movie presented as though it were a television Halloween special airing live in the 1980s. There are fake news reports, fake commercials, fast forwarding as though the footage were recorded on a VHS tape and you're watching it later. It's a really fun and cool gimmick. I love the commercials, because they ring true for me. I remember 80s TV commercials, and this is what they were like. The newscast looks real too, so it's a lot of fun. They even have political commercials as though the broadcast really took place in October, right before an election year.
The main bit of the movie is shot in the style of a live TV broadcast where a reporter and crew are at a creepy old house that was the site of a murder 20 years ago. They explore the house and even hold a live "seance" where viewers can call in and participate from home. Unfortunately, the terror starts getting a little too real as the staged seance releases some actual supernatural forces. Whoops. Will the reporter and crew survive?
The broadcast includes a news report before the main seance, and the report has a segment where reporters interview members of a religious group that is protesting the Halloween special because they believe Satan will use the broadcast to capture people's souls. I've attended churches like that in the past, and even though I obviously don't agree that Halloween is evil, it would seem, at least as far as this movie is concerned, they had a point, because actual supernaturally motivated behavior does seem take over the TV special in the movie. No one listens to the preachy religious freaks until it's too late, do they?
I love how this movie has a team of paranormal investigators, a husband and wife team, Dr. Louis Berger and his wife Claire. They're obviously riffing on Ed and Lorraine Warren, the husband and wife team who inspired the Conjuring movies. The couple in this movie bring their cat along with them, since their cat is supposed to be able to sense supernatural activity as well. It's funny to me. My cat would freak out too if I tried this crap with her, so I feel for the poor kitty in the movie (who is probably the smartest character in the movie; she definitely has the most common sense).
Like a lot of these movies, the supernatural happening start small (a flash in a window, a shadow in the hall) then got bigger as the movie goes on. There's a ghostly voice telling them to leave the house, and then they head to the basement, where the bodies were found, and hear crashing noises. Then the plot really gets going. The actors did a really good job playing their parts. It was easy to believe they were real reporters, and the scared priest was a nice touch too. Once the movie reveals its conclusion, it worked really well too and even made me jump and cringe a few times. This is definitely worth checking out. It's one of the better found footage style horror movies I've seen and it deserves a wider audience.
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