Those of us of a certain age will remember a particularly sinister version of Halloween that pesky get much play these days. We remember the Satanic panic and the ever present fear that candy may be laced with razor blades. This world is explored in a movie called the WNUF Halloween Special, which presents its story in a unique format: a found footage news telecast recorded and discovered on a bootleg VHS. The original copies were distributed via VHS tapes at places like a VHS convention. (DVDs are available on Amazon, though that’s just not as fun.)

Director Chris LaMartina shot the film on vintage film stock. The crew then made multiple copies on several VCRs to degrade the film copy so they could get that authentic bootleg look. Like a recording of a televised program languishing on your parents’ shelves, the footage contains more than the Halloween Special itself. A news crew sets the stage a half hour prior with their mandatory Halloween costumes, bland family friendly jokes, and forced cheerfulness even as they report on the depressing news stories of the day. There’s a puff piece about a dentist with a candy buy-back program, an interview with a religious nut, the weather forecast, and a local murder.

In between, there are the commercials. If your favorite part of RoboCop was the bit where the family is playing a nuclear war board game, then WNUF Halloween Special is the movie for you. They’re fun parodies of public service announcements, political attack ads, and Z-grade TV shows. These commercials also help flesh out the sleepy suburban community the story takes place in, though. You get glimpses of a mall, an arcade, and the local strip club. It’s a bygone era where mom and pop shops hadn’t been driven out by franchises yet, and the loud guy trying to sell you carpet was just as familiar face as Mickey Mouse. (In a touch that seems designed to remind me of the days being sick with the chicken pox and watching local TV all day, some of the commercials are played again throughout the entire telecast.)

They’re quite well done, too, making me forget that these scenes were filmed less than a decade ago. WNUF’s budget was $1,500, and my guess is most of that went to make-up and costuming to perfect a look of period appropriate trashiness. I’d say that LaMartina did a better job than the Duffer Brothers in nailing what that decade actually looked like.

The broadcast moves to the Halloween Special itself, which unfolds like Geraldo Rivera and Al Capone’s vault. Reporter Frank (Paul Fahrenkopf) vows to hold a seance in a house where a family had been murdered by a teen who claimed to be under demonic influences. His guests include paranormal experts Louis and Claire Berger (Brian St. August and Helenmary Ball) and Father Joseph Matheson (Robert Long II). Frank approaches the upcoming seance with a hefty dose of sarcasm.

Things are almost immediately off, though, as frank noticed something moving in a window. He and his producer insist that this wasn’t staged. The paranormal investigators, too, immediately sense an evil presence. They plead that the police should be called, or that they at least leave the house. Frank, though, needs to fill his one hour time slot, and running away is bad television. The show must go on.

The Blair Witch Project remains an icon of the found footage genre because, unlike its peers, it feels like actual footage and not a barely convincing facsimile cobbled by professionals. By being such an amateur production, WNUF Halloween Special manages to touch upon the same sense of authenticity as well. The acting is not great —- the woman playing the religious fanatic is particularly bad. And yet real humans wouldn’t act professionally in front of a camera. They’d be stilted and awkward. Like those townspeople in opening of the Blair Witch, the performances enhance rather than detracts.

There’s also an interesting bit of ambiguity at the end, too. The newscasters are so chipper and non-plussed that you half suspect that, storywise, this was a hoax being put on for the benefit of the audience. If you’d seen something like this happen on your local newscast, you’d rightly assume this was a ratings ploy. But are these newscasters chipper because that’s the only way they’re allowed to process the events on screen?

Rating: 4/5 stars.