The American Scream (2012)

The common Christian stereotype is that Halloween is almost always celebrated by Pagans and Satanists, as well as people with a demented sense of reality. What the director of “The American Scream” Michael Stephenson accomplishes, is destroying such an antiquated cliche and explores a world of folks who adore Halloween and are just working class individuals looking for an escape from their lives. “The American Scream” has an undercurrent of sadness to it where the happiness and smiles are really seeking to cover the heart ache and desperation behind the subjects who treat Halloween like an event every single year. I’m proud to be one of those people who anticipate the month of October right around the beginning of August, and these folks featured aren’t so different.

Michael Stephenson has a talent for featuring the unusual and the odd facets of life, and he manages to find another topic that connects one of the most popular holidays of the year with a small grouping of folks who rely on the holiday to keep them going. Director Stephenson doesn’t manipulate his subjects nor does he really interview them, so much as he watches them and films them in their element. Often times “The American Scream” finds a new importance to the holiday and tries to unveil why Halloween is the holiday that these three families in Massachusetts find so infatuating or enchanting. This could easily have been a film about the lure of Thanksgiving or Christmas, but director Stephenson devotes much of the activity to the allure of the Halloween holiday and peels away the layers to explore what it means to the heads of these families, all of whom garner their own motivations for celebrating and preparing so vigorously every year. The caveat of the documentary is that Stephenson doesn’t quite succeed in providing answers. In the end we understand the motivation for celebrating the holiday and using it as a means of distraction and escapism, but the exact reason why Halloween is so passionately expressed by these families is never actually uncovered.

The stories themselves find their own resonance in the individual beauty of Halloween as Stephenson focuses on a family man who uses the time to bond with his group of children hoping to inspire them to love the holiday, while a father and son devote their time to building monsters and machines bonding endlessly and keeping their relationship tight knit. The most interesting of the sub-plots though is the father who expends much of his life savings just to build the perfect haunted house and hopes to instill the same passion in his children. Clearly his love for the holiday goes beyond ghosts and goblins and through haunted houses he hopes to build a legacy and build riches on his own terms as he faces unemployment, possible homelessness, and deals with a wife who supports him in spite of the fact he spends thousands a year on an attraction that is free of charge.

Director Michael Stephenson doesn’t seek to pity or patronize the three families behind this documentary, so much as he explores their own hobby that keeps them alive, and how it invokes this sense of purpose within them that allows them the opportunity to make other people feel alive. When you’re watching your beloved father become sicker and sicker, your kids grow older and abandoning the magic, or are confronting financial turmoil, you have to find something to give you motivation to press on. Director Michael Stephenson breaks down the ignorant misconceptions of the appeal of Halloween and really offers a look at three families who find the magic and allure of Halloween irresistible, using the mystery and legacy as a means of connecting with their loved ones and the outside world. For a celebration of the holiday or a look at how hobbies can fuel our lives, this is very much worthy of your attention.