Macabre Movies of the Week! (#5)

Time for the Macabre Movies of the Week! There’s something for everyone in this batch: Halloween history, anti-Halloween propaganda, and super hip Ghostbusters. It’s like you blew all three genie wishes on my YouTube picks.

Let’s kick things off with The Pagan Invasion: Trick or Treat, a direct-to-VHS “documentary” that I reviewed several years ago. It was one of those super-religious propaganda pieces that wanted everyone to drop Halloween like a bad habit, but even accidentally, it’s still entertaining as hell.

With wonderful ‘80s footage of everything from VHS conventions to costume shops, it’s also worth watching for the strange testimonies. Lord knows if the interviewees actually believed their stories or were just “in on the joke,” but either way, this has quietly become one of my favorite things to watch during the Halloween season.

The Real Story of Halloween is a History Channel doc from 2010. I guess it’s pretty famous, since approximately six thousand people have uploaded it to YouTube.

I love documentaries like this, which are still all over TV during October. For me, they’re tied with those Food Network shows where people have to bake cakes shaped like spiders or whatever.

This first-season episode of Extreme Ghostbusters is called Home is Where the Horror Is. I’ll swipe the description from Google, because nothing will sell you on it faster:

“The Extreme Ghostbusters try to rid a house of ghosts, only to learn that the house itself is a ghost. The Ghostbusters must defeat it before it feeds on two captured children.”

Enjoy the videos, now or throughout the week! If you missed the previous Macabre Movies of the Week, they’re over here.