With visitors of seasonal haunted houses, there’s no telling what might scare them most. However, the partners behind the Asylum Haunted Scream Park know exactly what terrifies them: the stake of their life savings. The 2011 debut of this Kentucky-based Halloween venue, starting 83 days before its uncertain opening, is documented in Brian Cunningham and Joe Laughrey’s Monsters Wanted.

Touting four themed attractions in one, Asylum Haunted Scream Park was established, says co-owner Rich Teachout, to “raise the bar of Halloween in Louisville.” He and girlfriend Janel Nash — the one who talks to a sock puppet during the doc’s talking-head segments — get serious about that statement. To them, the park is more than an income — it’s the way they long to live, no matter the time of year.

Granted apparent all-access, the camera captures the entire process, including monster auditions (hence the title), actor training and dress rehearsals. It’s one fraught with problems and setbacks and failure and conflict; tensions come to a head between Rich and another partner, resulting in a screaming match you expect to come to blows. The warts-and-all portrayal gives Monsters Wanted credibility, from run-ins with city inspectors to Rich and Janel handling their meager budget with knowing fiscal irresponsibility. Who needs groceries?

Getting to know the people behind the haunted house is the film’s greatest asset. As deadlines loom and pressure mounts, Janel downs instant coffee — in powder form, mind you — and chases it with a swig of soda. One of the more colorful (to put it lightly) personalities among the cast is a bald, beefy grandpa who takes a little too much delight in terrifying kids with a chainsaw, to the point of prompting defecation. And to think the only bodily fluid Leatherface dealt with was blood. —Rod Lott

Buy it at Amazon.

Some years back — ’84, ’85, I’m no “pray TV” expert — this freaky religious nut named Gary Greenwald made a freaky religious propaganda program, Deception of a Generation, in which Greenwald invokes the name of God to denounce children’s Saturday morning cartoons as All That Is Evil.

It’s funny because he is not joking, and it’s not funny because he is not joking. (It’s also quite funny because Greenwald is quite hairy, but that’s beside the point.) Greenwald welcomes a guest — whose name I didn’t feel was important enough to write down, but he talks like a girl and wears glasses — who claims God told him to spend years studying cartoons to unearth the satanic elements within them.

So Gary and Guy (as I’ll call him) go back and forth chastising the likes of The Smurfs and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe. For the whole, it unfolds something like this:

Greenwald: “Now we’re going to watch another clip from Scooby-Doo, is that correct?”
Guy: “Yes, watch how witchcraft and astral projections play a part in this clip.”
Greenwald (post-clip, flustered): “Well, I must say, this is not the Scooby-Doo I remember, what with all the witchcraft and astral projections!”
Guy: “Amen.”

They go on to imply that the writers for these shows are not under the employ of Hanna-Barbera or Filmation, but Beelzebub; in reality, it’s not likely they were worshipping the dark one with their quickly written scripts, but rather flying higher than a kite. —Rod Lott