#Jaiden J. Smith

[abs0luteb4stard]

W A T C H E D

(October 2nd 2024)

[fromthestacks]

Spirit Halloween: the Movie

[brokehorrorfan]

Spirit Halloween: The Movie will be released on Blu-ray on August 22 via Strike Back Studios. The 2022 supernatural horror adventure was previously only available on DVD.

Rachael Leigh Cook and Christopher Lloyd star with Donavan Colan, Marissa Reyes, Jaiden J. Smith, Dylan Martin Frankel, and Marla Gibbs. David Poag makes his feature directorial debut from a script by Billie Bates.

The first pressing includes four trading cards with monsters from the movie. Special features are listed below.

Special features:

Behind-the-scenes featurettes and interviews with cast and crew

Spirit Halloween store grand opening footage

Trailer

Teaser trailer

TV spots

Alternative posters

4 trading cards

When a new pop-up Halloween store opens in a deserted strip mall, three middle school friends who think they’ve outgrown trick or treating make a dare to spend the night locked inside the store Halloween night. But they soon find out that the store is haunted by an angry evil spirit who has possessed the creepy animatronic characters. The kids will need to embark on a thrilling and spooky adventure in order to survive the night and avoid becoming possessed themselves.

Pre-order Spirit Halloween: The Movie.

[blood-red-reviews-blog]

Spirit Halloween (2022)

Written by Billies Bates Directed by David Poag Starring Donovan Colan, Dylan Frankel, Jaiden J. Smith, Marissa Reyes, Marla Gibbs, Rachael Leigh Cook, Billie Roy, Brad Carter and Christopher Lloyd Plot: a group of kids find themselves trapped, overnight, in a haunted Spirit Halloween store. This movie has automatic nostalgia and such for me. I have enjoyed horror movies since I was pretty…

[bebe-benzenheimer]

CANCELLED MOVIES MEME [72/∞]- THE MOTHERSHIP

year: 2022

plot: One year after her husband (Omari Hardwick) mysteriously vanishes from their rural farm, Sara Morse (Halle Berry) and her children (Jaiden J. Smith, Quinn McPherson) discover a strange, extraterrestrial object underneath their home, which leads them to embark on a race to find their husband, father, and most importantly – the truth.

reason for cancellation: post-production reshoots unable to be done due to the child actors' aging

[moviemosaics]

Spirit Halloween: The Movie

directed by David Poag, 2022

[anhed-nia]

BLOGTOBER 10/31/2022: SPIRIT HALLOWEEN - THE MOVIE. SIGH.

I have this vivid memory of what was probably my first Halloween. I grew up in a blue collar suburb in Upstate New York where there were lots of kids, lots of shady teenagers, and lots of cemeteries and creepy old buildings. It was as perfect a Halloween environment as you could ask for, in my humble opinion, but this memory has nothing to do what people were wearing, or who had the scariest decorations, or any of the usual holiday cheer. It was early still, right after school let out, and we had just set out to go trick-or-treating. The streets were still quiet, and we hadn't hit any houses yet; choosing the right one to start with seemed like a loaded decision, and you had to pick based on visible decorations, because a lack thereof usually indicated abstainers who didn't want to be annoyed by sugar-crazed children. While there was this mounting tension in the air, my mind locked onto a moment where we were passing along the yard of an unadorned house with a pool that belonged to an older couple, the kind your parents warned you not to bother. There was a 6' chain link fence around the yard with green plastic privacy slats, which offered a zoetrope-like view of their private space as we walked along. I was hypnotized by this half-obscured vision of the forbidden realm of other people's lives; it ratcheted up the suspense I was feeling unbearably. Nothing happened there, of course, and we went about our business, but this became the most potent image I have from what was surely a more eventful evening. It had a strange potency: a mystery, a threat. A feeling I don't often get as an adult.

This is the specific collection of Rudy Munis, but it's basically how the stores felt.

Another feeling I don't often get in my adult life is being really freaked out by Halloween decorations. I liked (still like) all Halloween decorations, really, but as a child I felt the difference between the kid stuff and the adult stuff really starkly. For the most part my parents made our costumes, but once in a while we'd get to go to an actual store loaded with absolutely terrifying Don Post masks and home decor that lit up and screamed at you and everything. When I was little I was just as drawn to these things as I was repulsed by them, and we all kept a mental record of which houses in our extended neighborhood had really intense Halloween displays. They ranged from fun-scary to SCARY-scary; I remember reaching some of those places after dark and just standing on the sidewalk while a whole field of demented animatronic devices howled and moaned at me, and sometimes I'd just totally lose the nerve to walk up to the door and get candy. And like god forbid there'd be an angry teenager in there with really gory makeup just waiting to ruin some kid's night.

I'm bringing all this stuff up because…well, mainly because I don't have too many positive things to say about the SPIRIT HALLOWEEN movie and I don't quite have the heart to trash it even though I obviously have a strong opinion about what kinds of feelings it should have evoked. I mean there's no mistaking this for anything other than a cash grab, which is fine, but just being in an actual Spirit Halloween location is a lot more stimulating than this. Just in case I haven't revealed myself to be a dyed in the wool wussy at this point, I really love horror just because I'm so fucking sensitive; I won't go in a haunted house attraction because it makes me nervous enough when a normal person tries to interact with me, let alone when someone in a scary costume acts like they're going to kill me. When I'm in a Halloween store, some part of me still remembers how easily threatened I was just by electronic decorations, and it's kind of an exciting feeling. I'd submit that anybody who is at all alive inside fantasizes about playing with every single thing in Spirit Halloween, let's say, if you were locked in the store by yourself and you could do whatever you wanted. Which is exactly why the SPIRIT HALLOWEEN movie is so disappointing.

I didn't really mention her but Marissa Reyes is the best thing in this movie.

The threadbare plot involves a group of friends hovering on the eve of being too old to trick-or-treat, who try to make the most of "Fright Night" (the local iteration of Devil's Night, I guess assuming the word "devil" was too provocative for this kind of production) by sleeping over in a Spirit Halloween. Unfortunately the ghost of Alec Windsor (Christopher Lloyd) has just awakened—the evil developer who originally built up the town—and he is looking for a new body to possess, hopping from one spooky decoration to another in pursuit of a child host. It's not a bad idea, but the movie shows little understanding of what's so fun about a Halloween store. You'd get more joy and creativity out of just documentary footage of real kids running around in one of these places with a free pass to wreak havoc, but instead we get a limp montage of the gang hitting each other with plastic swords and rolling around on the ground in front of an iPad, accompanied by some pretty awful low rent hip hop music. Plus, for a movie that's meant to be a feature length advertisement, the actual wares of Spirit Halloween aren't shown off that well; what's in the background on the racks is often just as interesting or more so than what Christopher Lloyd's ghost is dragging around, and it's telling that one of the main featured products is just rubber balls.

Nothing happens in this scene.

And speaking of balls…why are they constantly talking about balls? I mean, I know why: The movie is trying to make a point about growing up and setting aside childish things, I get that. But it feels weird that we're not saying Devil's Night, and the boys have to say "darn" and "heck" even in their most heated arguments, but then they're still having all these exchanges about their balls. It's gross and confusing. There's a decent amount of confusing stuff here for a movie that's so simple-minded, for instance the voodoo shack in the middle of a cave system underneath Spirit Halloween where the gang learns what to do about the possessing wraith that's hunting them. I mean…it's the most interesting image in the movie for sure, but why doesn't anyone wonder how it got there? Not that anybody asks, but it turns out to be related somehow (via a very off-handed epilogue) to the family of Bo (Jaiden J. Smith), the little Black boy whose dead-eyed grandma (Marla Gibbs) keeps scaring everybody, and who is probably related (I think? Right?) to the witch in the movie's opening flashback, who kills Alec Windsor when he tries to evict her family from their land. So there's this voodoo-y flavor about all that that's kind of taken for granted, which I think is a bad thing to be so glib about; and like, if all of this supernatural drama is specifically related to Bo's ancestry, then why is the movie almost exclusively focused on the fight between Carson (Dylan Frankel) and Jake (Donovan Colan) about whether Jake needs to grow out of his childhood obsession with Halloween? It really seems like Bo should be the star of the movie, and maybe Alec Windsor should be going after him as an act of revenge.

And about Alec Windsor: It's actually really funny that, in a movie about a store that famously takes over dead mall spaces like a commercial version of the cordyceps fungus, the main villain is an evil landlord. I mean…come on, you guys. Missed opportunities absolutely abound here. And if I can make one last complaint about what SHOULD HAVE happened in this movie, I would have enjoyed at least one joke about how the name of the store is not the more natural appellation "Spirit OF Halloween". Just because, personally, I'm still struggling with that one.

PS Damn, this movie got a PG-13 rating? That must have been so frustrating when they seemed to have gone to pains to make it really innocent, what did they even do to get that? Musta been all the balls.

[don-lichterman]

SPIRIT HALLOWEEN: THE MOVIE Trailer #2 (2022) Haunted Store Horror

SPIRIT HALLOWEEN: THE MOVIE Trailer #2 (2022) Haunted Store Horror

SPIRIT HALLOWEEN: THE MOVIE Trailer #2 (2022) Haunted Store Horror PLOT: When a Spirit Halloween Store opens in a deserted strip mall, three middle school friends who think they’ve outgrown trick or treating make a dare to spend the night locked inside the store Halloween night. But they soon find out that the store is haunted by an angry evil spirit who has possessed the creepy animatronic…

[fundie-names]

Name analysis: Jayden Carl Bates

On January 27, 2021, Zach and Whitney Bates announced that their new baby is a boy and will be called Jayden Carl. Whitney has already confirmed that he is due on June 18. He will join older siblings Bradley Gilvin, Kaci Lynn, and Khloe Eileen.

First of all, I totally thought they were going for a K names for girls, B names for boys, all ending in an '-ee' sound theme so I would just like it known that I am high key disappointed. I love a name theme.

Jayden is an interesting name in my nerdy opinion. While the names Jaden and Jadon are of Hebrew origin, possibly meaning 'thankful' or 'he will judge', and can be found in the Bible, the spelling of Jayden is a bit of a modern invention and I think can be placed in a group with Aiden/Aidan/Ayden, Hayden, Kayden/Caden/Kaiden, Brayden etc.

According to Nameberry, Jayden entered the top 1000 in the US in 1994 and in 2019 it came in at #39 (Jaden is #267 and Jaiden is at #360). Jayden reached its peak in 2010 and 2011 when it sat in fourth place. Since then, it has gone down in popularity consistently year on year. In the UK, it ranked at #79 in 2019.

Jayden is a name that has been used for girls as well. It did not appear in the US top 1000 in 2019 and was only at #978 in 2018. It peaked at #172 in 2007 and like Jayden for boys has been falling in popularity since.

Jaden Smith, son of Will Smith and Jada Pinkett Smith, is almost certainly the most famous bearer of this name.

Despite my disappointment at it not following the theme we all thought Zach and Whitney had going on, I think it's a good choice for a fundie couple. It has Biblical connections and 'thankful' is a nice meaning. It definitely goes well with Bradley, Kaci, and Khloe as well.

According to Whitney, Carl is after her Dad whose name is J.C. Perkins. I'm assuming the C is for Carl but I have not been able to find what the J stands for. I wonder if Zach and Whitney chose a name beginning with J on purpose for the first name so the initials would be the same.

Carl (or Karl) is the German variation of the name Charles and means 'free man'. In 2019 it ranked at #754 in the US. In the past 120 years the highest this name has ranked was #22 in 1915. It was a top 50 name until 1957 and a top 100 name until 1977. It gets less and less popular every year.

Famous Carl's include the current King of Sweden, Carl XVI Gustaf and late American astronomer Carl Sagan.

(information from Nameberry)