‘Out There Halloween Mega Tape’ Perfects the Live Broadcast Horror Comedy
Note: This piece contains *spoilers* for both the WNUF Halloween Special and Out There Halloween Mega Tape.
Nostalgia is a hell of a drug, folks. The desire to recreate the cozy feelings of decades past can be a tricky process, but effective if in the right hands. There’s a difference between a hollow imitation and an earnest recreation that makes you feel as if you’re in the presence of a relic lost to time. You can sniff out the people who aim to secure easy brownie points for reminding you of something you loved that once existed, without understanding the historical context of what made them popular to begin with. Enter independent filmmaker Chris LaMartina, whose time-traveling duology of Halloween past brilliantly satirizes the analog sights and sounds of their respective eras, ultimately creating a fresh new stamp on found footage in the process.
In 2013, a cult classic horror comedy was born in the form of the WNUF Halloween Special. Its hazy aesthetic made you feel as if you had stumbled upon someone’s grainy VHS recording of a public access television broadcast from 1987. In order to achieve the uncanny effect, LaMartina shot the film digitally, then ran it through a VCR multiple times to give it that wear-and-tear texture evocative of most tape recordings.
The titular special saw beloved local news reporter Frank Stewart (Paul Fahrenkopf) taking viewers on a live journey through the infamous Webber House on Halloween night. The location was home to a series of grisly murders that took place years prior on account of an Ouija board encounter gone wrong. On the surface, its story plays out like a satirical combination of BBC’s Ghostwatch and the Tales from the Crypt episode “Television Terror”, but WNUF’s presentation is what really sets it apart.
In the midst of Frank interviewing the Warren-inspired paranormal investigators Dr. Louis (Brian St. August) and Claire Berger (Helenmary Ball), bantering with the crowd gathering outside, and unsuccessfully holding an on-air seance, the WNUF Halloween Special is structured as if you were watching the remnants of an actual live broadcast, complete with a wealth of fake commercials and other news stories to break up each new development. You also have an unseen force fast-forwarding the bits they have no interest in sitting through. It legitimizes a functioning world that exists well after the cameras turn off, in addition to commentating on the trends of the ‘80s. For many, this darkly hilarious throwback has become a Halloween staple, and rightfully so.
WNUF was only brought to my attention a few years back when Salem Horror Fest held a special premiere screening for its sequel Out There Halloween Mega Tape. I had no idea it was a follow-up, so I made the effort to check out its predecessor before going and predictably fell in love with LaMartina’s creative addition to the live broadcast gone wrong subgenre.
It made me even more excited for Out There Halloween Mega Tapee because where WNUF captured the spirit of local television in the ‘80s, this would instead expand upon the airwave sensibilities of the ‘90s with more of a sci-fi bent. Watching it with a crowd was an electric experience that I’ll never forget and has quickly become a comfort movie of mine that I have a lot of fun unleashing on people every opportunity I get. Out There Halloween Mega Tape is not only a hilarious companion piece to WNUF, but has easily cemented itself as one of the great dark comedies of the 2020s.
Rather than following one singular night of television, Out There Halloween Mega Tape sets its sights on a more ambitious canvas. This time, there’s another unseen figure controlling how everything unfolds.
The film is structured as a compilation of two Halloween specials, each set a year apart from the other, on a VHS direct from Trader Tony’s Tape Dungeon (a fictional bootleg tape operation that distributed movies and rare underground oddities throughout the ‘90s). The widespread accessibility to the internet made this kind of stuff easier to track down if you knew where to look, but in decades past, if something terrible transpired on live television and you wanted to see that footage for yourself, you would have to go through these kinds of backdoor channels. According to the director’s commentary (which Chris hilariously hid as an easter egg on the original DVD release), the idea of delving into bootleg tapes for the WNUF sequel was modeled after his experience of trying to acquire a poor-quality compilation of Sam Raimi’s short films.
Before the live broadcast segment, the film gets us settled in with a pre-recorded episode of the Ivy Sparks show, starring Melissa LaMartina as the host of her Halloween Spooktacular special. A quietly sinister blend of Ricki Lake and Jerry Springer, Ivy carts out a bunch of “strange” individuals to take advantage of and ultimately show off to the people at home in time for those ratings.
A year later, however, Ivy is without her flagship series but has since found a new home on WNUF’s ACE network (a riff on the Fox network by way of UPN) as a co-host on the conspiracy series Out There, itself clearly modeled after alien conspiracy shows like Sightings. The year is 1996 and Ivy, along with her other co-host Tate Dawson, are hosting a very special live presentation called Alien Exposé where they intend to uncover the mystery behind all of the extraterrestrial activity in the town of River Hill.
There’s a real artistry to found footage, most notably when it comes to presenting a narrative framework. Unlike a traditional filmic structure, some of the most immersive features within the subgenre find a way to manage this balancing act of living in the moment with its characters, while also finding creative ways to tell a fulfilling story. WNUF keeps things fairly straightforward, only breaking into an alternate aesthetic shift in its chilling final scene, whereas Out There Halloween Mega Tape is a bit more flexible with the form.
Rather than being presented as police evidence (The Blair Witch Project), a highly classified military file (Cloverfield), or the remnants of a live stream (Deadstream), the film is technically an example of found footage that in-universe was preserved and reassembled into a darkly comic compilation of history. The recognition that something really bad awaits—to the point that the Out There Halloween Mega Tape special was never aired again—creates an air of suspense amid all the laughs. A routine part of daily life has now become an aesthetic. But what’s even more impressive is how Chris manages to construct an invisible approach to storytelling through the commercials themselves.
Something I found really interesting about reactions to the WNUF films was how some viewers seemed to have grown weary of the constant cutting away to the advertisements, when it’s one of the most important components of the whole experience. They often serve a three-way function as a gag, social commentary, and storytelling that makes you laugh, while expanding the scope of River Hill. If you grew up in the ‘90s, you’ll likely remember the kinds of commercials that used to make it to air and Out There Halloween Mega Tape cleverly subverts how they play out.
The best way to describe how it feels to watch Out There Halloween Mega Tape would be as if you were in the Coherence conundrum (if it took place in the mid-90s) and turned on your television in the other you’s house. Everything looks and sounds familiar, but is ever so slightly off. It’s hard to fully believe you’re watching real television, but LaMartina does his damndest to capture what it would feel like to step into an alternate reality that utilizes the familiarity of your plane of existence to weaponize your nostalgic memories against you. Your online service provider isn’t AOL, but USA Connected. Why read Goosebumps, when you can pick up the latest Nailbiters instead?
You can tell LaMartina is a massive horror nerd by the cheeky little references he manages to sneak into these ads. Some are easy to clock like King’s Trucking School—a cute nod to the cocaine-fueled film Maximum Overdrive directed by Stephen King—while others are real deep cuts. It’s easy to imagine a Silent Night, Deadly Night 5 enthusiast getting a chuckle out of the XTREME ad for CF Rollers (it’s a real CF!) by Yuzna, itself a double whammy nod to both screenwriter Brian Yuzna and a sequence he wrote in which a young kid (played by Yuzna’s kid, Conan) slipping into a murderous pair of roller blades. I’m still catching new ones that initially slipped me by.
What makes Out There Halloween Mega Tape feel especially impressive is how it all manages to come together. Given how the visually distinct ads and all of the glorious puns therein were conceived, written, and filmed out of order across the film’s five-year production history, it’s astounding how the film flows like smoothly controlled chaos.
In terms of storytelling, there’s a great bit of worldbuilding where Republican Gov. Robert Dandridge (Cary Anderson) from WNUF is still running for office nearly a decade later despite the many egregious marks against his character. Some things never do change, do they? Out There Halloween Mega Tape even foreshadows the film’s eventual program shift with a promo that sets up the existence of Out There and what the show entails. There’s a great bit of social commentary in the amount of children’s advertisements airing around the lurid adult content of Ivy’s show. A bumper asks viewers to call in if violent media had turned their child into a delinquent before immediately cutting to an animated ad for the Super Duper Water Shooter, a Super Soaker-inspired water gun that boasts about “blowing your friends away”.
To say nothing of George Stover as cult movie icon Reed Richmond, a B-movie Troy McClure always at the ready with an encyclopedia of factoids about a bunch of fake horror movies he had a hand in. I would watch every single one of them. That’s a true fact! You also have straightforward PSAs sprinkled throughout about getting tested for STDS and preventing rapid climate change before it’s too late (whoops), as well as brief glimpses into news programs about rising concerns of Y2K. LaMartina deftly evokes the political complexities of ‘90s television and nowhere is that more apparent than the Halloween specials themselves.
The genius of WNUF lies in how you’re so preoccupied with the ghost story being sold to you that the revelation of religious extremists orchestrating everything in the Webber house comes as a nasty capper, despite all the clues laid out in plain sight. A similar effect takes place in Out There Halloween Mega Tape, where the rot festers from the very beginning up until its own horrifying conclusion. In the world according to Ivy Sparks, television exploitation doesn’t go away—it changes shape.
The Ivy Sparks show and Out There are two sides of the same coin, each taking advantage of their subjects until one of them ultimately takes things way too far. From what we see in her Halloween Spooktacular, Ivy puts on a constantly upbeat demeanor, pulling out her catchphrase “be nice” whenever things start to get mean. She carts strange individuals onto her program whom she can mold into a “normal” person, such as a supposed vampire named Stefan whose de-gothified makeover makes him palatable to a room of dancing individuals celebrating his newfound assimilation. All Stefan can do, meanwhile, is sadly lament his identity being stripped away. Even the chyrons find a way to take pun-filled jabs at the rest of him and the rest of Ivy’s guests.
A lot of ‘90s daytime television would advertise its time slot as a whole circus. Line up to watch these weird people air their dirty laundry. It’s all about the entertainment factor and what could bring in more ratings than a story about a married woman forming a sexual relationship with the ghost wife of a Civil War soldier? Ivy manages to exploit a dumb husband who’s only okay with his wife’s spectral queerness because it seemingly benefits him, too. It wouldn’t be the ‘90s without queer love being molded to heteronormative standards on television, while an audience cheers on. “I just love a man who’s not afraid to wear purple, ” says Ivy to her bouncer dressed like a grape.
By the time we get to the Out There portion of the film, we’re fully aware of what Ivy is capable of, albeit in a different context. Going from Ricki Lake to Linda Moulton Howe, she not only sets her sights on a religious cult built upon alien contact, but weaves a hilariously strange conspiracy narrative surrounding the sudden disappearance of Frank and the Bergers.
Those who have seen WNUF know exactly how their fates turned out, which makes it all the more interesting to see how Out There Halloween Mega Tape spins a cosmic conspiracy rather than make sense of the obvious culprits. It’s interesting to see her simultaneously platform and ridicule a grifter in the form of the Berger’s niece, who tastelessly writes a book about their disappearance being tied to alien abduction, only to pull a similar self-serious grift herself in the next program. Brooklyn 45 filmmaker Ted Geoghegan is featured here in a hilarious bit as the host of a fictional show called You’re Lying! who’s come to debunk Ivy’s guest with bangers like “I’m not from Mars. I’m from America.”
Ivy saves her biggest trick for last, not seeing its violent consequences until it grants her the ultimate humiliation, immortalized in the annals of television history for the whole world to see. Though a brief final news clip acts as an epilogue to the Out There incident, the broadcast’s big punchline makes you fully believe in the shock of audiences watching live, and their indirect participation. It’s not as frightening as the countrywide panic caused by Ghostwatch, yet it carries its own sinister edge that ends the film on a memorably insidious note.
Out There Halloween Mega Tape makes for a great character study of how two contrasting forms of ‘90s television media ultimately retain a similar air of exploitation. Conspiracy docu-series were fun in the ‘90s before the alt-right dipshits ruined it for everyone, but LaMartina sees right through its facade. Conspiracies are all fun and games until they either ruin someone’s life or get someone killed.
Melissa LaMartina, who recently made her directorial debut with the upcoming For Sale By Exorcist, gives an excellent dual performance that compliments what Fahrenkopf brought to WNUF. It’s clear Ivy’s bullshitting the audience on both counts, but Melissa has an enticing way of sucking you into her yarns. You never get to see how Ivy acts behind the camera, but her two-faced demeanor makes it easy to see the cracks in her armor when she’s live on the air.
Ivy doesn’t seem to care much about a spotlight being shoved in her face until the camera captures her own vulnerability. I get chills thinking about that eerie scene where a horde of Heaven’s Gate-inspired cultists tells Ivy in sinister unison to “be nice” while a wave of horror washes over her. She can never really escape her reputation. It’s those small moments of terror that sneak their way into a film that’s mostly light on its feet until it very much isn’t.
All of the extra effort makes something like Late Night with the Devil, which abandons its live broadcast aesthetic to get characters’ exterior perspective, feel superfluous to the experience of live television where anything can happen. Out There Halloween Mega Tape keeps tensions high with Ivy’s plans kept under wraps. Their shock leaves the film with such a hilariously disturbing punchline that says everything it has to in that one moment.
Though the WNUF Halloween Special and Out There Halloween Mega Tape are the only two features within LaMartina’s filmography that lean into found footage, you can see more of his bouncy, playful dives into horror comedy with films like Call Girl of Cthulhu, What Happens Next Will Scare You, Witch’s Brew, and the slasher flick for everyone’s favorite holiday, President’s Day.
The director’s near-breathless commentary track demonstrates a filmmaker who shows a bursting love for making movies with the people he loves. I had the great pleasure of meeting him at the Hometown Haunts and Brews horror con in Plymouth, MA, last month and it was delightful to hear not only how much he gets the mischievous spirit of Halloween, but also the down-to-earth joys of indie filmmaking. Working with minuscule budgets, it’s actually kind of remarkable how well he utilizes his resources. LaMartina’s dedication to immersion within the film and its media releases is impressive.
Out There Halloween Mega Tape can be a very silly film, but a lot of though went into the film’s expansive scope. A one-off joke about Stefan leading a band called Immortal Daggers led to LaMartina commissioning a full album (one you would have received if you nabbed the Terror Vision set in time). That’s not even mentioning the comprehensive catalog of Trader Tony’s tapes that backers of the film’s crowdfunding campaign received.
Out There Halloween Mega Tape is destined for routine Halloween viewings. I’d be more than happy if this was all we got, but in an exciting turn of events, it appears that the world of WNUF is being expanded upon. In an exclusive interview with Bloody Disgusting, LaMartina announced a few new projects. Among them is a one-hour special called Trick or Treat with Reed Richmond (the GOAT) and another WNUF dark comedy inspired by the 2000s Bush era. In the meantime, the deeply hilarious Out There Halloween Mega Tape doesn’t get nearly enough credit for perfecting the format of live-action television specials as features. It’s a really fun flick. That’s a true fact.
Categorized:Editorials
