The American Scream (2012)

I hadn't heard of this until a friend loaned it to me.  This documentary - directed by Michael Stephenson (who made Best Worst Movie about Troll 2 which Stephenson also starred in when he was a  child) - focuses on three families in Fairhaven, MA who take Halloween and their home haunts very seriously.

The driving force are the men in the family who range from perfectionists to enthusiastic amateurs. While the haunts are all at different levels of competency, each is enjoyed by lines of people every year.  Each family dedicates a huge amount of time getting their haunt ready each year for Halloween and considers it a labor of love.

The main focus of the film is Victor. He works in IT, has a wife and two daughters.  He talks about how his family didn't celebrate Halloween when he was a kid due to his mothers religion, which sounds too much like a cult.

Victor has been doing walk through haunt for the past 8 years. He  spends the entire year planning and working on his haunt, and often puts in 14 hours a day. He's skilled at carpentry and does some basic sculpting.  He's a perfectionist so if something doesn't meet his expectations, he'll tear it down and start over.  As Halloween gets closer, his need for perfection makes him insufferable to his wife and the friends who help him put the haunt together.

Father son duo Richard and Matt are at the opposite end of the spectrum.  They use basic supplies and junk to make their their own props, which are primitive at best and often fall apart.  The father and son team seem nice, but are rather odd. They are best friends, do volunteer clown work, and live together.  When one of their pieces falls apart at the last minute, we watch them bicker over how to fix it (they can't). They also bicker over the set up, with son Matt being a bit more high strung.

Our third home haunter, Manny, is somewhere in the middle. He likes putting together different items made out of finds in the junkyard, which are a few steps up from the Richard and Matt's homemade items.  Perhaps Manny is the most laid back because he had a heart attack a few years ago and thought of giving up the haunt. But after the neighborhood told him it wouldn't be Halloween without his decorations, he decided to continue.

It's an interesting documentary as we not only see the families delve into making the haunts, but it also gives us a little insight into their lives.  By the end of the film, Victor's IT job is being outsourced. So he takes his severance pay and invests in his dream to open his own haunt, named Ghoulie Manor. He's a likable guy so here's hoping it's successful.