I was not expecting to write the following sentence today, yet here I am, so here it is: Back to the Future’s Doc Brown (Christopher Lloyd) and She’s All That’s Laney Boggs (Rachael Leigh Cook) are signed on to be in a movie about Spirit Halloween, aka, “the seasonal Halloween store that takes over my old Circuit City, and should REALLY stop playing games and stay there permanently.”
We truly live in bizarre times as the “open all year long” news (posted on April 1) is a joke, but the movie news—which sounds fake—is real. Not only is it real, but filming has wrapped for the movie, and production is aiming for a, you guessed it, October release this year. The movie serves as a directorial feature debut for David Poag with Billie Bates having written the screenplay.
What we know about the Spirit Halloween movie so far
According to Variety, the pop-up Halloween store has teamed up with Strike Back Studios, Hideout Pictures, and Particular Crowd to create the movie. Billed as a family adventure film, Lloyd and Cook star in it alongside Donavan Colan (Zoe), Dylan Frankel (Raven’s Home), Jaiden Smith (Blue Bloods), Marissa Reyes (Raven’s Home), and Marla Gibbs (El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie).
“One of the reasons I immediately connected with the script is it is very much inspired by some of my favorite kid adventure films growing up from The Goonies, Gremlins, Monster Squa’ and so many great films made by Amblin Entertainment,” says Noor Ahmed, president of Strike Back Studios. Ahmed will be working as the film’s producer along with Shannon Houchins. Tomás’ Yanelevich, Peter Bevan, Mariana Sanjurjo and Clay Epstein are executive producing.
While we don’t know who the cast is playing, we do have a synopsis of the movie.
“When a new Spirit Halloween store appears in a deserted strip mall, three middle-school friends who think they’ve outgrown trick-or-treating make a dare to spend the night locked inside the store Halloween night. But they soon find out that the store is haunted by an angry evil spirit who has possessed the creepy animatronic characters. The kids embark on a thrilling and spooky adventure in order to survive the night and avoid becoming possessed themselves.”
Now I’d personally hoped the film would be about a Spirit Halloween that refused to disappear into the night on November 1st, but that wouldn’t be scary, as we’d just go shopping for Halloween goodies for the rest of the year.
My money’s on Lloyd playing the evil spirit and Cook playing a mom who’s still in the Halloween spirit despite her kid giving her a judgmental “omg that’s so embarrassing” look—or maybe it’ll be the other way around with Lloyd being the “I still decorate my yard” grandpa and Cook being the spirit that scares Halloween back into these kids.
Maybe neither is the evil spirit, who knows, but what I do know is that I’m laughing at the inevitable moment where I walk into a Spirit Halloween later this year to see them advertising for the Spirit Halloween movie that no one saw coming.
(Image: Getty Images/Spirit Halloween)
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