Video Advent Calendar: 7 Days 'til Halloween

I am so sorry you guys, I watched this Cursed Halloween VHS and now we’ve only got 7 Days ‘til Halloween. 

Don’t believe me?  Give it a watch. 

(If you’ve never seen The Ring this bit may not make any sense at all…)

This... this is one of my favorite videos of the entire Video Advent Calendar.  

When I impulsively gave myself this video-a-day challenge, I had not thought out what ideas would be best on what days.  But a couple days into the month this idea for the '7 Days 'til Halloween' solidified:  I was going to do a Halloween parody of the cursed VHS from The Ring.

Step one was reviewing the movie within the movie (thanks to "The Peoples' Archive," YouTube, I was able to reference it without pulling up the full film).  Worth mentioning:  I was using the remake/American version of the film, not the original.  No slight on the original, I've seen both, but I prefer the Gore Verbinski version.  

As for the cursed VHS film, it had a lot more shots than I had remembered.  However the key to a good parody is to take only what you REMEMBER--- and take artistic liberties with the rest.  

Let's do a comparison shot by shot breakdown:  a still from the original vs. my 'Halloween-ified' version-- with behind-the-scenes commentary for each.

Usually the opening shot is of 'the ring' (SPOILER: looking up from the bottom of a well, as a lid is slid on top of it).  I was going for a fun vibe, not a creepy vibe, so I thought the best roundish thing that could be used was a bowl of Halloween cereal.  I went with the new-that-year General Mills Monster cereal:  Carmella Creeper.  This was also the moment when I had to decide if my cursed movie was going to be in black & white (with a tinge of blue/green and sporadic red) like in the theatrical film, or color.  I went with a desaturated color-- enough color so you could tell what an item was, but not so much as to ruin the parody.  

To get the ring-glow around the bowl, I reused my fake full moon shot from my "23 Days..." short.  It worked perfectly.  

To mimic the ocean of blood, I turned to another new 2023 Halloween product:  Fanta's Zero Sugar 'What the Fanta' mystery flavor black soda.  I tried filming this a few ways and getting the opaque black liquid to register on-camera proved WAY more difficult than I thought.  I was trying to rock it back and forth in a large white bowl but too much rocking showed the bottom of the bowl and too little rocking just made it look like a black screen.  I finally made the executive decision to include part of the bottle to at least give a clue as to what people were seeing.  In hindsight I maybe could have snaked a straw in just off-camera and tried blowing bubbles to give it some fizz and make it more visible, but I was doing a video a day and time was a-wastin'.

For the shot of the starkly lit, table, chair, and glass, I was first going to try and use a can of that year's VooDew with a single light source.  Buuuut I didn't have a can.  I had a bottle.  There's also a centipede that crawls from under the table, but that was too creepy (and I didn't have a rubber centipede laying around), so instead I just leaned on the stark lighting and swapped in a Halloween object.  I used my beloved skull pail (which I've written about HERE).  Lighting was done by the good ol' daytime sun and I just timed it so this shot was the point in the day when it blasted through a particular window.  

The window to the house shot:  Had I more time, I may have actually set up a camera outside a house and stood in the window wearing a Ben Cooper costume.  I did not have time.  'Video a day,' remember?  SO INSTEAD--- I took a shot I had in my files of a full moon out our INTERIOR window, looking OUT and used that.  The way it was framed it COULD have been outside looking in.  And, yes, that is an ACTUAL full moon.  A Harvest Super Moon I believe...

For this disturbing shot, I chose to NOT do anything GROSS.  Instead, I used the Skull Memoji that's included with iOS's Clips App.  I just had to track my own face leaning back and making a weird jaw movement.  Then I cropped it close and boom:  cute... slightly weird... and free.  Using a Halloween staple:  a skull.

(As I typed this, I realized it could have been fun to use a Nerds Rope and 'moving jaw' Halloween mask but again-- time... timetimetimetime... videoaday...

Avoiding gross again, I did NOT want to push in on a box and see wiggling fingers.  Nope.  Not in my video.  A BOX of Halloween cereal seemed the best idea, and I went with the Carmella Creeper again because it was its' debut year.  You can see that desaturated color again in this shot--- it's baaaaarely green.  In hindsight I should have caught that the box is in the wrong orientation and reshot it, but I didn't discover that until I was in editing with the clock ticking toward midnight.  What's that old saying?  'Films aren't finished, they're abandoned.'

Spooky tree on fire!  Playing a little word association in my head, when I think tree-Halloween I think of Ray Bradbury's The Halloween Tree.  I didn't want to copy anyone's specific cover, so I took Canva and whipped together my own book cover-- very, VERY quickly.  I was pretty proud of this idea, but the execution could have been better.  Maybe if I set an copy of the book on fire too?  Oh well...

For the bowl of squirming maggots, it was easy:  a bowl of Halloween Rice Krispies in 'Shocking Orange' (2023 had the Kellogg's 'head in a jar' series with Snap, Crackle, & Pop as fanged werewolves).  Not only do you get the look, but you also get the sound.  And instead of a distressed-film cut to squirming bodies in the water (like in the actual cursed tape), I did a weird wavy edit to some candy corn.  I think this may have been the quickest idea to film shot I did.  

For the horse eye, I had plenty of eyeball selections to choose from in my photo reel, photo morgue, and Halloween decorations.  Due to time, I reused the shot of the floating eye that I created for the "30 Days..." post that started this whack-happy daily exercise.  I took out most of the color and cropped the shot.

I'm skipping a few random shots I stuck in to make my parody more Halloween-ey just so I can get to this shot:

If there is one shot in this Ring parody I'm most proud of, it's this one:  Getting a Sour Patch Kid to throw himself off the table.  

In the actual film, there are number of shots that set this up:  a shot of the empty seaside cliff, a separate shot of the mother on the edge of the cliff looking out, and a shot of her falling off.  I didn't have that kind of time, money, or energy.  The only shot I needed was of something falling in slow motion.  But what would be Halloween-ey AND funny, I wondered.  At first I tried using a small skeleton action figure (who shows up later).  That just wasn't working.  He was too stiff.  There was no humor.  Then it hit me:  a Sour Patch Kid.  Just the thought of a Sour Patch Kid throwing itself off of something made me giggle.  Well there was the idea, now how was I going to execute it?

A regular sized Sour Patch Kid would be too small (in orange, of course, because 'Halloween').  

Too small to rig... too small for a viewer to register for a 3 second shot.  

But a LARGE Sour Patch Kid (knowns as 'Big Kids') would work.  They're about an inch and half long-- which is big enough to work with.  And with no other items around to compare scale, it would just read as a Sour Patch Kid.  Perfecto.  

I then set about to figuring out how to get him to stand up by himself, and fall on cue.  My first attempt was using a twisty-tie (like you'd get on a bag of bread).  I taped the tie to the table, leaned the Kid against it, and affixed a piece of thread to the tie.  My idea was to yank the thread, removing the tie, and the Kid would fall forward.  In actuality what happened was I yanked the thread, and the thread came off.  Take two had the tie come off but the Kid sort of spun off to the side.  I then abandoned the thread idea and instead let the camera run (my iPhone in Slow Mo mode), ducked under the table, and held the twisty tie just off camera with the Kid leaning against it.  I pulled the tie down & away and let the Kid fall.  It took a few takes but by the third try I got what was used in the film.  

The exhilaration of accomplishing this and putting it in the film is quite a rush.  I've come to really enjoy CREATING or MAKING during the Halloween season, and the thrill it provides is unmatched.  This shot may be my crowing achievement for this season.  

I DID get that skeleton figure (a Xevoz Skull Jack figure, mentioned above) in the film, and he WAS falling.  Instead of a ladder (which figures into the story of the movie) I just needed some Halloween iconography and stark lighting.  So this is what was used.  Getting him to fall over is just me off camera doing a big huff and a puff and blew him over.  Movie Magic. 

The last shot of the well was the other shot that I knew from the beginning.  With the 2023 appearance of McDonald's Boo Buckets Halloween Pails, I knew that a bucket would be my perfect 'well.'  I chose the jack o' lantern, of course.  But I had to create the shot in post, in Snapseed, because--- time.  The last few sands of the hourglass were falling and a quick photo cut and paste did the trick.  I used a photo I took of a park, and just quickly used Snapseed's 'heal' to paint out the picnic tables.  I used a fog/cloud effect from Capcut over the still to give it a little motion.  

When it was all cut together I layered in some in-app public domain soundscape, and ran it through Rarevision's VHS app to give it the random tracking lines throughout.

It was done.

But it didn't feel finished.

Knowing this was going to be the "7 Days to Halloween" post, I thought "Well in the movie, the phone rings after someone watches the tape."  That's it.  The phone should ring.  That's what happens.  And I got excited all over again in coming up with the 'real world' end scene.  

I dug out my VCR (yep... still have one), dusted off an old tape, slapped a new label on it, and then enlisted a friend's help.  I renamed their contact in my phone, gave them a new profile pic (the Halloween Thing logo), and then actually called them to explain what I needed them to do.  In the next 10 minutes.  In the middle of their workday.  

Good friends are hard to find.  

So I counted to 60... hit eject on the VCR... and that was when the friend call came in.  Timing!

What you see is one take.  

Added some VHS-like end titles.

Added some VHS TV-hiss sound effects (pulled from my own VHSes) and I had finished a 2023 Halloween time capsule in the guise of a horror movie-within-a-movie parody.  Might be one of my favorite things I've created to this point.  

Hope you enjoyed the video, and the behind-the-scenes scramble it took to pull it off.  

7 Days 'til Halloween...