Ah, Halloween, pretty much my favorite time of the year. I’m certainly not alone in feeling this way, of course, and one of the many people who shares this opinion of that oh so spooky end to October is James Rolfe! Of course, if you’ve seen any of his Monster Madness videos from the past decade or his Halloween AVGN videos you would see real quickly that he clearly loves this time of the year, and always has – this video, however, shows how even as a kid he was all about Halloween.
This video goes over the haunted houses he would make in his parents basement (and eventually garage) over 1993 to 1998. Oh, I wish I had the chance as a kid to make haunted houses and really go all in on Halloween like James did here – we didn’t have the space, time, or other resources freely available to pull it off,but if we had I know I would have had fun.
It’s interesting that this video shows a very strong progression over 5 years in James’ skills at what ammounts to set design – granted, he studied these kinds of things through the years, being a cinema buff, but his own natural style shows a constant progression each year – much like watching his early films and comparing them to later work, seeing these simple childhood haunted houses and comparing them to his film sets for later horror projects you can see a very direct, organic progression. Pretty cool.
The video really explains itself beyond that. It’s been 10 years since this video was uploaded which, incidentally, was 10 years after the last haunted house James was able to do! His life, of course, is completely different now, but I can say one thing for certain – you can tell he still loves Halloween!
Enjoy! Part 2 can be found here!