By: Paul Farrell

Spooktacular!

Imagine a world without haunted hayrides. A place devoid of Halloween haunts. A time before costumed performers at theme parks worked diligently and relentlessly to terrify, unnerve, and just plain scare the pants off you.

Well, thanks to David Bertolino, you don’t have to.

Spooktacular! chronicles the life and death of the world’s very first horror theme park. From its humble beginnings as a haunted hayride in the middle of nowhere Massachusetts to its sold-out, highway-closing peak as a non-negotiable destination for any person of any age who ever grinned at a VHS cover of a Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, or Michael Myers flick, the film highlights the blood, sweat, and tears that made Spooky World something scarily special.

Peppered with interviews and testimonials from some of horror’s top talent, executive producer and special effects legend Tom Savini among them, the documentary embarks on the ups and downs of theme park entrepreneurship. Bertolino plays the part of a macabre P.T. Barnum, intercut with archival footage from a variety of Vincent Price films, establishing a spooky showmanship befitting the man’s playfully sinister aims. Still, between innovations to bolster his ever-expanding attractions and distasteful publicity stunts, Bertolino’s story is reflected honestly, showcasing both his heart and hubris in equal measure.

Spooky World birthed an industry for an audience that no one even knew was there. The site capitalized on a moment in time when horror transcended expectations — when supernatural killers became household names and a global community finally started to develop a shared language, finding a home amongst the corn stalks, wax figures, and haunted attractions of Spooky World’s hallowed grounds.

Spooktacular! isn’t about people who put together and worked at an amusement park, it’s about a family that found a way to expand and celebrate the bonds that the strange, kooky, and oft-overlooked of the world share and hold dear. It’s a celebration of all that goes bump in the night and shows how one idea can spark an industry, its legacy eternal even if its place on this earth was not.

The Wait

Beautiful and desolate, the seemingly infinite sandy landscape holds a cruelness that only the patient can appreciate. Intimacy is inherent in such a climate, quietness expected against the hollow winds, where life manages to eke out a cautious path and where men tend their land as they do their family: with love.

The Wait ruminates on the painful brutalities and warming comforts of that love, tracing goodness as it winds down evil’s corrosive path. Víctor Clavijo plays Eladio, a gamekeeper who takes a bribe to expand the hunting grounds he keeps watch over on an estate in rural Spain. The decision leads to a series of events that strips Eladio of everything he loves and, along with that, his purpose for existing. Clavijo carries himself with quivering regret and boiling rage, a tapestry of ever-evolving, explosive emotion that adds a sense of danger and grounded human realism to the increasingly fantastical events on screen.

As Eladio transgresses further, seeking revenge and losing himself to grief, he becomes more attuned to the starkness and isolation of the desert around him. His path wavers between damnation and righteousness as he slowly uncovers oddities dispersed and hidden around his home. Buried boxes with decaying skulls and submerged parcels with old clothes suggest a far more sinister spiritual depreciation, and, in the end, innocence is rendered moot by the inevitable guilt all tread thickly toward.

Director F. Javier Gutiérrez crafts the exquisitely forsaken tale with affection and savage honesty, leveraging intense interpersonal drama and striking, disturbing supernatural effects in innovative ways. It’s an engrossing and distressing experience, rewarding in its ability to mine sustenance from that which appears otherwise lifeless. After all, when the land is family, it is death — not life — that sows its soil.

Where The Devil Roams

A bygone era presents itself, the darkened corners of its frame flickering in the dancing exposure of ancient black and white film. A legless performer pulls himself forward to the center of a stage. He’s an entertainer, ready to recite a poem about a demon from below, the woman he loved, and the resulting tear in the heart where the devil doth roam.

The epic poem is the backbone of Where The Devil Roams, a film constructed top to bottom by the Adams Family, whose previous efforts, The Deeper You Dig and Hellbender, share similar micro-budget charms and impressive ingenuity. Still, Where The Devil Roams is more expansive in scope in some ways — set amongst a traveling circus during the Great Depression — which makes for a shaggier experience than the aforementioned films, but a gravely affecting one all the same.

The story plays as a dark parable lost to time, following a trio of traveling performers as they work on their struggling act and commit atrocities across the American countryside. John Adams and Toby Poser play Seven and Maggie. Seven suffers from crippling anxiety at the sight of blood after serving as a medic in World War I, and the film chronicles the savageries he witnessed and committed in flashbacks that pepper the runtime. Maggie is uneducated and borderline sociopathic, exacting violence on anyone who so much as looks at her sideways. Zelda Adams plays Eve, their mute daughter prone to photographing the horrors her mother commits. Though she cannot speak, Eve is capable of communicating through song, her haunting lyrics serving as the centerfold of the family’s circus act.

Mr. Tibbs, played by Sam Rodd, is another roaming performer, known for his ability to sever his own fingers with a large pair of shears. The story shifts when Eve discovers the secret of his act: an enchanted heart penetrated with a needle and thread, which allows the owner to reassemble their severed whole when the right song is sung. After stealing the heart, Eve attempts to make her family whole once more, discovering the soul of their act in the process.

The film moves carefully, developing and fleshing out the marauding family’s relationships with one another as though their souls weren’t charred black. Like a desaturated and restrained The Devil’s Rejects filtered through a Grimm fairy tale, Where The Devil Roams treads forward with progressively colorless frames and a settling decay that makes for a deeply disquieting experience right up until its final moments. The narrative is muddled at times and the measured pacing doesn’t always pay off, but the message comes through abundantly clear. Nothing good rots, tears in the heart included.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines

The infamous words of Judd Crandall pour out of the frame as viewers are welcomed to Ludlow, Maine 1969. A fog of pain, guilt, and restlessness hangs over the people there — not unlike the atmosphere that pervades Stephen King’s It —brought on by the thick of the Vietnam War and the overwhelming confinement unique to living in a small, rural town.

Pet Sematary: Bloodlines acts less as a prequel to the first film and more as a standalone story that exists within the boundaries of its cursed ground. Fleshing out the tale that Judd Crandall recites in full in the pages of Stephen King’s Pet Sematary novel, the film mines the dark history of the land that runs concurrent with the families that have made their home there. Mixing the anxieties and resentments elicited by Vietnam’s destructive path with the obsessions and grief that the twisted whispers of the damned so fervently prey upon, the film finds a town of disparate souls banding together to fight the evils it hath wrought.

The film bleeds a misty atmosphere of tension and unrest, leaning on some of the franchise’s key elements — undead pets, for example — while incorporating entirely fresh characterizations, like a resurrected Vietnam War veteran, drawing comparison to films like Bob Clark’s Deathdream and Joe Dante’s Homecoming. All the while Judd keeps his gaze set on the horizon beyond Ludlow, planning to leave the town with his girlfriend to join the Peace Corps and finally escape the clutches of his homestead. However, as his friends and family are swallowed by the dark truth of their shared past, it becomes clear that some places are inescapable.

With stellar performances from Jackson White, David Duchovny, Forrest Goodluck, Natalie Alyn Lind, and Pam Grier, Pet Sematary: Bloodlines expands and deepens the emotional strength of its parent story and crafts a unique horror experience all its own. Director Lindsey Beer balances the emotional complexities on display with craft and care, delivering an entertaining, interesting, and stylistically fitting adaptation that deserves to be mentioned among King’s seminal works.

As they begin the film, so do they conclude it, Judd Crandall’s words softly recounting the philosophy that so entices and damns Louis Creed in the years to come and seems to summarize the swirling, aching fever that has descended upon Ludlow, Maine: sometimes, dead is better.