Even when it isn’t Halloween time, I often consult a specific pile of horror movies from my DVD collection to serve as background noise for a night spent paying more attention to something else. It may seem odd to treat movies like Halloween 4 and Friday the 13th: Part 2 in the same way others treat fish tanks, lava lamps and those shitty indoor rock fountains that never look or work like the box says, but in lieu of leading a spirited protest against corrupt oil corporations, or chewing rocks, I’ve gotta find my rebel points somewhere.

Frequently, I’ll throw one of these movies on to drown out the silence whenever I feel like reading. The problem is that I’ll find myself rereading paragraphs several dozen times, because my mind will continually intertwine the written words with whatever expletives the onscreen characters shout as Jason skullfucks them. I’m fairly certain that the phrase, “HE’S FUCKING KILLING ME HELP HE’S FUCKING KILLING ME” cannot be counted among the quotations from any known dinosaur encyclopedia.

But Halloween is a magical time of year — and one full of suitable replacements.

How awesome is this? A spin on those sixty-minute “recordings of someone’s fireplace” DVDs they sell during Christmastime, this low-cost, low-rent Haunted Evening DVD adds an eerie ambiance to any room with a TV/DVD setup somewhere inside it. Featuring five different sequences, each “chapter” presents a motion video of a fairly stationary Halloween environment, ranging from a graveyard to a dungeon. Stuffed with inobtrusively low-fi Halloween sound effects, this DVD is an absolutely perfect way to set a spooky mood without paying a lot of attention.

I don’t want to infer that the “mood films” on this DVD are a big production, because they’re not. Example: One chapter features a shot of a plastic witch’s cauldron on someone’s coffee table for fifteen minutes. I’m working under the assumption that everything on this disc was the result of some guy pouring over his grandmother’s house one afternoon, with nothing but a bedsheet, a video camera and two red light bulbs to help him secure a spot in the next Cannes Film Festival. I don’t know who this guy is, but I’ve named him Coco. Coco the Nomad.

I don’t know why the photo above came out so dark, but it’s a shot of Haunted Evening playing on my television. I’m not sure if the excitement of this really translates in picture form, but trust me, it was palpable. This particular chapter (titled “Jack-O’-Lanterns”) rotated a few images of carved pumpkins, which sat perfectly still as various lighting and fog effects swarmed in the background.

It’s a simple concept done simply, but it works really well. While the ghost-shaped pinata currently hanging in the corner of our TV room just makes the place look cheap and gaudy, this Haunted Evening DVD actually succeeds in making me feel like I’m sharing living space with the spirits of long dead monsters and murderers. It’s the kind of stuff you can’t put a price on. Even if you could, it’d be far higher than the 9.99 Target charged me.

I suspect that the creators of Haunted Evening would’ve had a hard time trademarking such a vague concept, so there are probably ten trillion versions of this “scary background” DVD lurking in any stores bold enough to part with such treasures.

I just love this stupid DVD. It makes me joyful, and that’s not easy to do when there isn’t free string cheese involved. When I eat string cheese, I like to pretend that I’m an orangutan sucking ants off a stick. I secretly pray for someone to ask me which brand of string cheese I’m eating, so I can respond with a hearty “Polly-Oooh Oooh AH AH” before shitting into my hand and throwing it at them. Was that a run-on sentence? Let’s ask the Halloween Magic 8-Ball.

Fuck you 8-Ball.

Anyway, sorry about the crude orangutan bit. I guess I just have a little “work speak” left inside me from that old gig writing catalog descriptions for JCPenney.

Posted by Matt. E-mail me!