Every small town has one: an unassuming neighborhood house that transforms into a haunted attraction at Halloween. Some are low-budget, with only a walk-through carport of oddities. Others are impassioned spectacles that took years of labor to create. As a child you never bothered to know who lived there, why would you? Halloween was a time when the world catered to your every whim and doors were just candy portals.
Now as an adult, you can't help but wonder who those people are, and how they came to choose that particular obsessive path.
That's the source material for a new documentary by Michael Paul Stephenson, who won us over a few years back with his docu-love-ode to Troll 2, Best Worst Movie. His new film, The American Scream, digs into the freshly tilled graveyards of three residential haunted houses in small town Massachusetts. And right now, you can help bring the film to Dallas.
American Scream takes us into the homes of men who compulsively toil with terror's minutia -- finding the perfect color of paint for a corpse; ripping apart machinery to refashion as a haunted pipe organ -- all to satisfy their creative itch, and also to leave a legacy behind.
Dallas film review duo We Drink Your Milkshake caught American Scream at this year's Fantastic Fest. They became enamored with it and decided to share the spooky love story with you. There's a tentative date scheduled to screen the film at Texas Theatre on Monday, October 29th followed by a Skype Q&A with director Michael Paul Stephenson. Making it happen -- well, that's where you come in.
WDYM has booked the thing through Tugg, which requires a mandatory number of per-registrations at its events. Currently only three folks have signed up, so if you want to see this movie in Dallas (yes, you do), 56 more reservations are needed in the next six days. You can secure a spot here, and grab some seats for your friends while you're at it. We can't let Austin have all the fun.
