You’ve gotta admit that making the big bad for a Spirit Halloween movie an entity that inhabits another body for a short time every Autumn is pretty smart. If they host a series of specialty screenings in abandoned strip malls, they’ll truly own Halloween.
Plus, Spirit Halloween looks goofy and fun. It’s definitely an extended advertisement for the invasive species of costume shops, but it’s charming! And it has Christopher Lloyd as an eccentric weirdo who turns into a ghost that screams at children.
Directed by first-timer David Poag, the film also stars Rachel Leigh Cook as a worried mom, and a slew of tween and teen actors (Donovan Colan, Marissa Reyes, Jaiden J. Smith and Dylan Martin Frankel) as a ragtag bunch of Halloween fans who decide to spend the night inside a Spirit Halloween store only to find out that it’s got guh-guh-guh-guh-ghosts. Obviously, it’s got some Goosebumps vibes, some young awkward romance, and it somehow got a hold of the same child-raising-in-the-air technology that Stranger Things made a meal of this season.
According to the official press release, “the film features a wide range of iconic animatronics characters and set pieces created by Spirit Halloween,” which is something that only the most diehard of Spirit Halloween fans probably already knew. Fortunately, it’s something we can all become intimately acquainted with when it hits limited theaters September 30th and VOD October 11th.