A Scary Time

“Tonight, we are dressing up for fun. As scary goblins and skeletons. As witches and devils and things we’ve never seen. That’s what we do on Halloween.” Speaking in rhymes here is Peter Henry “skeleton” Wilcox. The American lad dresses up for an annual round of trick-or-treating with his school friends in this black-and-white public service announcement, filmed in 1960. However, their night’s haul won’t benefit themselves. With a UNICEF collection box and pickets in hand, they'll raise money for children in the Global South suffering from famine.

Stunningly choreographed night scenes of costumed children at play make Scary Time a technically impressive film, but Clarke and Hughes’ uncomfortable parallel edit makes it truly stand out. Cheerful images and sounds of the well-off Henry and his schoolmates constantly alternate with those of crying, undernourished children. While the American children can take refuge in the safety of their scary tradition, the directing duo offers a sobering view of a different kind of fear that is close to impossible for them to imagine.

The dialectic that arises between the two isn’t particularly subtle, but no less effective. Some necessary breathing room is given through a cross-cultural dance montage. Scary Time is an undeniably difficult watch with an outdated geopolitical worldview, but within a film-historical context, the techniques and audacity employed by Hughes and Clarke make it a remarkable time capsule.