Forget Ouija boards, Harum Skarum is the ultimate experience in board-game terror

Happy Halloween, boys and ghouls! To celebrate the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead growing thin this weekend, we’ve got a really fun, seasonally appropriate short film from Blackmagic Rollercoaster, the Austin-based filmmaker also responsible for two of our favorite hypothetical sequels: The hilarious Powder 2 The People and the hilariously tasteless Casper II: The Beginning.

Blackmagic Rollercoaster’s latest video is an ad for “Harum Skarum,” a sinister, probably satanic board game that’s played like so:

A dirty black box arrives in the mail. Inside you find a HARUM SKARUM set—a collection of homemade masks, trinkets, little weapons, maybe some fireworks, and a deck of cards that dare the players to commit worse and worse stunts (“Take a photo of yourself, looking murdered. Send it to the last person you called”). No two sets are exactly alike. Each player dons a mask and lies, cheats, steals, and burns as many bridges as possible in effort to take away the other players’ masks.

The “ad” plays more like a trailer for a movie The A.V. Club would very much like to see, with colorful visuals, ghoulish Halloween imagery, a ’70s-style score and lots of little kids fucking shit up with jack o’ lanterns and golf clubs. As the pint-sized witch running the game warns at the beginning of the short, “You’re going to get so scared, you’ll wet your bed forever.”

HARUM SKARUM from BLACKMAGIC ROLLERCOASTER on Vimeo.