Minor Horror #15: HalloweeNight
This is the fifteenth and final in a series of fifteen pieces on “minor” horror films that I’ve published here throughout October. For more information, please see this post.
HalloweeNight (Mark Polonia, 2009)
HalloweeNight is a movie whose profound beauty and warmth will either be immediately self-evident to you, the hypothetical viewer, or anything but. Which it will be is mainly a question of whether you really understand what it means when, at the very beginning, the words “for John” appear on the screen.
The thing is that there are two very distinct kinds of people that are going to be watching a Mark Polonia movie from 2009: those who are just looking for a horror movie to watch, any horror movie, so long as it looks like it might be fun, and choose this one more or less randomly, with little to no awareness of its position within an oeuvre – OR, those who, at some point in their past, probably when they were between 16 and 21, saw one of the early Polonia brothers efforts that have earned them a still-growing cult following, Hallucinations or Splatter Farm or, possibly, Feeders, and had their minds blown wide open. The very fact I am writing about this film at all should make it obvious which camp I fall into – the ones in the former, usually lacking the context to understand what they’re seeing, generally don’t go to the trouble.
Those early efforts, made in and around their small Pennsylvania hometown when they were still teenagers, feel like minor miracles, SOV portals into a world of teenage anxiety and obsession as structured by B-horror, sci-fi, fantasy, the bloodier the better, raw and unfiltered in a way that would be all but impossible were it not for the particular lack of self-consciousness common to youth, and the strength of the bond that must exist between twin brothers who are also best friends. There’s an impulse, in certain circles, to treat these early videos like jokes, because the Polonias were awkward and dorky-looking and had high, nasal voices, quintessential representations of a certain conception of Middle American uncoolness – but although they’re often intentionally funny, the fact is these are works with real ambition, real ingenuity, real affective depth, and to refuse to recognize them as such is to do a disservice not only to their accomplishment, but to yourself.
It’s been a long time since then, though. HalloweeNight is not the work of kids imitating, in their own wonderfully crude, perverted, idiosyncratic way, their favorite repeat rentals, but of a grown man, past 40 and with decades of accrued experience in low-budget filmmaking, processing the untimely passing of his brother by making the movie he had wanted to, and never got the chance to – and, of course, it’s about Halloween night. It’s about a janitor named Creepy Harold whose only friend is his scarecrow, and who uses black magic and a human heart stolen from a medical lab to get his revenge after some “teenagers” (played gleefully straight by guys clearly old enough to have mortgages) tear it up as a “prank”. He brings the scarecrow to life, he shows up with the scarecrow to the party the “teens” are throwing, the scarecrow takes them out one by one. This all happens, of course, on Halloween night. When else could it? How else to honor the memory of your brother who loved a good slasher flick, and loved Halloween even more?
There are a lot of Polonia movies (especially from more recently, in the streaming era) that, whatever their merits, are optimized for that first kind of viewer discussed up above, the person just looking for something fun to watch – a lot of stuff with “Amityville” in the title, a lot of stuff promising different types of shark (Virus Shark, Doll Shark, Mummy Shark, etc.). They’re made quickly and, of course, cheaply, to be put up on as many streaming services as possible, and hopefully bring in enough of a profit to finance the next one, and, maybe, the one after that. I don’t think there’s anything shameful in this – quite the opposite, I think it’s beautiful that a man who clearly loves making movies is able to do it all the time – but they’re commercially-oriented projects, shot, edited, and sent on their way. HalloweeNight is different, because it’s personal. Mark really cared about this one, in a way I doubt he did, say, Frozen Sasquatch, and it shows. You can see it from the very beginning, in the beautifully garish autumnal scene-setting, in the effort and attention put into the montage where everyone gets their costumes on and gets ready to head out for the big night – Harold included.
It’s not that anything incredibly unexpected happens in this movie, so much as you can tell how much love went into hitting all the notes, and in giving them that personal touch. There are bizarre plot decisions and awkward cuts and unconvincing line reads, yes, but this is the poetry of a Polonia film, the reason they’re worth watching, worth writing about. The appeal of something like this is to see real people doing something they believe in. The motivation to make something like this is in not being able to imagine living your life any other way. There’s a brief scene, shortly before the straw really hits the fan, so to speak, where two guys are sitting at a kitchen table drinking beer. The party is basically over; almost everyone has gone home (or has been killed, but not yet discovered). A third guy is passed out in his chair between them. One suggests going to the “all-night video store” (did such things really still exist in 2009?) and renting a horror movie. The other reminisces, with great fondness, about the movies he and his brother would get out as a kid, how they would stay up until the small hours of the morning watching them. It’s a quiet moment, and it passes without being underlined, but you understand its significance. It’s the heart of the film. Beneath the goofy kills, the fart jokes, the bald guy who looks about 37 telling a girl who looks about 25, “Are you kidding? My parents would kill me if they knew I was throwing a party. But they’re going to be gone all week…” – there is a real sadness, a real melancholy. But it’s not a bitter sadness, not a despairing melancholy; it is the sadness and melancholy of knowing something is at an end, of wishing it hadn’t come so soon, but tempered with an immense gratitude that it ever happened at all, that there were all those nights spent with those rented horror tapes, that, at some point, it turned into an entire life. Rest in peace, John. Happy Halloween.