The year is 1986, the tech is appropriately old-school, and alt-history America empowers a gang of powerful, right-wing zealots to hunt down every creature of the night who dares to challenge the country’s homogeneous ideal. That’s the set-up for Luther Bhogal-Jones’ retro horror short Goodnight, Halloween.
The fun here is seeing that very specific, dystopian John Carpenter vibe (plus, the story is set in Detroit, hat-tip to RoboCop) mesh with the protagonists: a witch, a vampire, and a jack-o-lantern monster dude, all in hiding and frantically trying to figure out who’s been ratting them out and what they should do next.
The Carpenter influence is obvious in the music (by Monzen Nakacho) and production design (just look at the Halloween-y names of the people on the news broadcast), with a future-by-way-of-the-1980s feel that sees the letter “K” rising to prominence (as you no doubt saw, the bad guys are the “Khristian Right of New Amerika”) in a way that’s both inexplicable but also feels exactly correct.
But my favorite part? That pumpkin splatter. Genius.
https://gizmodo.com/totally-radical-a-microhistory-of-1980s-science-fictio-1520998318
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