Open Post: Hosted By The Teaser Trailer For “Spirit Halloween: The Movie”
No, not a movie about your conventional ghastly Halloween spirits, a movie actually based around the Spirit Halloween store that pops up in the abandoned JCPenney in your town every spooky season that sells costumes and decor and where John Travolta probably purchases his dreadful wigs. What, was the As Seen on TV store already booked for a movie deal? I personally find both ShamWow’s Vince Shlomi and My Pillow’s Mike Lindell exponentially more terrifying, but a trailer for Spirit Halloween: The Movie dropped yesterday and it looks just about how you’d expect.
According to The AV Club, the movie’s plot revolves around the haunted happenings in a branch of the store that used to be a Toys ‘R’ Us and stars Christopher Lloyd (ok, kind of on-brand for him) and Rachael Leigh Cook (after all she gave us in She’s All That? She deserved better).
Spirit Halloween: The Movie…seems to be about a group of kids who decide to spend a night in a Spirit Halloween (the “how about a night locked in here” moment where one kid shows a picture of a goddamn Toys R Us with the Spirit banner covering the old logo is one of the best trailer moments of the year), but—unfortunately for them—it seems to have been built inside a Toys R Us that was built on cursed land (a flashback shows Christopher Lloyd forcing some woman off of her land and getting cursed).
The Spirit Halloween is now haunted for real and the various Halloween props and costumes are coming to life to try and kill the kids, forcing them all to bond and grow up/retain their childlike sense of fun or whatever.
Here’s the trailer! Check out that bootleg Stranger Things arthritic levitation moment:
Not since Cats has anyone tried less with a movie, but Spirit Halloween stores have always turned lemons into lemonade by creating symbiotic relationships with abandoned properties, so I can see their next crafty move now–slapping each store location on Airbnb for two months a year so movie fans can spend a night in the “haunted” dressing room of an old Wet Seal. And while the production company’s YouTube says that the movie will be in theaters soon, Variety says that it heads straight to streaming on October 11. Either way, they’re doing better than I would have guessed, since this mess looks like it should move straight to Betamax
Pic: Strike Back Studios