HauntedWeen: The One Nobody Sent Back

On Sunday, October 25, BG Horror Club is taking over Donna's Bar, and admission is two dollars. That is not a typo. Horror trivia starts at 5:00, and HauntedWeen screens twice, at 6:30 and again at 8:00. The event is twenty-one and up, which, given the venue, tracks.

The movie is a hometown production whether it likes it or not. Writer-director W. Doug Robertson, a Western Kentucky University film graduate, shot HauntedWeen around Bowling Green in August of 1989. Twenty-three days. Sixteen millimeter. Roughly $160,000. WKU stands in for the fictional Tophill State College, the old Sigma Alpha Epsilon house earns its screen time, and an old farmhouse out in Richpond plays the Burber place. If you have lived here long enough, you have probably stood somewhere this movie was shot.

The premise is a model of simplicity. Twenty years after a childhood incident shut down the Burber family's haunted house attraction, a fraternity reopens the place as a fundraiser. The masked son of the original owner has other plans, and the paying customers keep applauding, because the bodies look like part of the show. That is a genuinely good hook, and the movie knows it.

Facts, No Chaser

• 🎬 Twenty-three days of shooting in August 1989, on 16mm, for a budget around $160,000. Getting it onto VHS shelves took another two years.
• 🏫 Tophill State College is Western Kentucky University. The old Sigma Alpha Epsilon house, a downtown warehouse, and a farmhouse in Richpond fill out the map.
• 🔁 The town in the film is Reguaws, Kentucky. Spell it backwards. Co-writer Kurt A. Swauger signed his own name into the geography.
• 🏛️ Local backers included Houchens Markets, Domino's, Subway, RC Cola, Dixie Cream Donuts, and the Capitol Arts Theatre. More than 200 local people worked on the film.
• 📼 Robertson sold 2,628 VHS copies directly to video stores at the 1991 Video Software Dealers Association convention, with a money-back guarantee. Zero came back. The take was about $22,000.
• ⭐ Ben Nagy, writing for JoeBobBriggs.com, gave it four stars and called it "a special, earnest movie that mashes up Halloween, a 1980s college frat sex comedy, and the performance-art aspects of Blood Sucking Freaks."
• 💀 A sequel, Hauntedween 2: The Revenge of Eddie Burber, was announced in 2015. Its crowdfunding campaign raised $385 of a $5,000 goal. The 20th anniversary instead brought an outdoor screening on WKU's South Lawn, and Vinegar Syndrome put the film on Blu-ray in its Home Grown Horrors Volume 3 set in 2024.

Worth Your Two Dollars

Robertson never got his sequel, and he passed away in 2020. What he left behind is the kind of regional horror movie towns used to make for themselves, back when a film degree, a credit line, and a cooperative grocery chain could put a slasher on video store shelves. The movie keeps getting rescued anyway, by anniversary screenings and boutique labels. It keeps coming back. You could say it takes after its villain.

Trivia runs from 5:00, with screenings at 6:30 and 8:00. Entry is two dollars at Donna's Bar, twenty-one and up. Come for the questions, stay for a slasher that was raising a body count in Bowling Green before most of the trivia answers were born.

"Welcome to the House of Horror. Have a chilling, killing time."

— HauntedWeen (1991)