As Halloween approaches, the platforms are speeding up their inevitable terrifying bets. Disney+, of course, does it from a more accessible perspective for all audiences, but it has a couple of surprises from one of its more adult branches, Hulu. From there comes the nice story of a possessed pumpkin, ‘Killer Pumpkin’, and the somewhat more sophisticated ‘Mr Crocket‘, which could even be seen at the last Sitges festival.
‘Mr. Crocket’ is a proposal that mixes lots of references to classic American television, children’s entertainment faction, to create an atmosphere of terror, given the sinister nature (seen with today’s eyes) of many of these programs, and which has been exploited in fictions such as the much-lamented ‘Channel Zero’. The core of ‘Mr. Crocket’ is a haunted VHS television show whose host hypnotizes and kidnaps children and slaughters adults.
The multiplicity of references is very clear in Mr. Crocket’s program. The immediate reference is the legendary Mister Rogers, although Mr. Crocket’s African-American race also makes one think of predecessors like Bill Cosby or Richard Pryor, whose private lives – especially the former – already give a dark touch to the fiction. Another wink: the catchy theme song of the Mr. Crocket show It’s as hellish as Barney the dinosaur (which, let’s not forget, was used to torturing unfortunate people in Guantanamo).
But the real terror comes when Mr. Crocket becomes a kind of Freddy Krueger capable of altering reality at will, often with nightmarish versions of the already quite insane props he has in his show. The result is a film of friendly and uncomplicated horror (although with its good explosions of gore)and that does its job very well of proposing obvious but disturbing links between the dreamlike, the cathodic and the always foggy world of childhood panics.
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