Halloween According to Old Weird Harold
1985 · 7m · Canada
Directed by Eva Szasz
Genres: documentary, family, historical
Tones: contemplative, whimsical
Old Weird Harold recounts how Halloween was once celebrated in rural Ontario, including vanished pranks such as tipping over outhouses.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
A seven-minute doc about outhouse-tipping feels like the opposite of subversive until you realize Szasz is genuinely mourning a folk practice that *worked* — anarchic, communal, purposeful — in a way our sanitized pranks never will; it's sneakily devastating.
Szasz positions this rural Ontario oral history within a lineage of vernacular documentary and folkloric preservation, letting Harold's voice carry the formal weight while the editing builds quiet nostalgia for a vanished social grammar — a model of restraint.
The decision to let Harold anchor the entire piece through voice alone, with minimal visual accompaniment, transforms what could be quaint family trivia into something genuinely elegiac; the sound design does all the heavy lifting.