Halloween and stop motion go hand in hand in most of our minds, thanks to movies like The Nightmare Before Christmas and Mad Monster Party. Now, there’s a new stop-motion addition to your Halloween viewing list this year. Thanks to Boing Boing, we’ve discovered this delightfully quirky stop-motion music video from Boston’s indie rock darlings Hallelujah the Hills for their song “The Memory Tree.”
The whole music video was made in quarantine. It tells the story of a spooky lil’ ghost on an existential journey of self-discovery through the multiverse. You can watch the full video for “The Memory Tree” above.
Hallelujah the Hills’ singer Ryan Walsh spent several months making all these miniature handcrafted ghost puppets. As well as the teeny tiny ghost homes they inhabit. All in order to create a world for this little spook and his friends to live in. Or, as the case may be, to not live in. The attention to detail in the ghost house is pretty great, especially the Ouija board the ghosts use to contact the living. There is some live-action mixed in to the proceedings as well, towards the end of the video. Once the ghost seemingly makes it to our reality, he becomes a dude in a sheet.
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The aesthetic of the video is that of an old silent film from the ‘20s. The main narrative of the six-minute short is that of a ghost traveling through the many layers of reality, until he makes it out his world into the land of the living. The video is also eerily relevant. It starts with a title card that says “tired of more misfortune, he has not left the house in a full year.” In 2020, those words are all too relatable for most of us.
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