Things That Go Bump In The Night, by Reeves Media Group, documents the start-up, family-run business Spooky Pinball LLC based in Benton, Wisconsin.
Pinball lover Charlie Emery, CEO of Spooky Pinball LLC, and family started a free monthly pinball-focused podcast in April 2010; long before podcasts, much less ones dedicated to pinball, were as popular as they are now. The Spooky Pinball podcast, which is still active, is believed to be the longest running of its kind.
Growing from a monthly podcast, Spooky Pinball LLC became a manufacturer of pinball games. They have three products: America's Most Haunted Pinball (2014), Rob Zombie's Spookshow International Pinball (2016) and Domino's Pizza Pinball Adventure (2016).
Things That Go Bump In The Night, directed and produced by Joel and Dana Reeves, details the pinball-collecting Emery family’s journey from wanting to have fun and fill the pinball podcast void to creating their own games.
A trailer for the documentary appeared on the Things That Go Bump In The Night: The Spooky Pinball Story Facebook page in November 2016.
In the trailer Mr Emery details how the family began its pinball journey, making Spooky Pinball LLC his fulltime pursuit, the risks of manufacturing pinball machines and why he did it.
“It all kind of started when Squirrel [Mr Emery’s daughter] and I were watching TV one day and there were people playing pinball, and she asked me what it was,” Mr Emery explains in the documentary trailer.
“I was shocked. My kid! How could you now know what a pinball machine is?
“So I decided I was going to take her out and we were going to play pinball. And I couldn’t find one - anywhere.
“Then I jumped on the internet and started doing my homework and understood that the games I grew up on and loved were slowly disappearing.
“So I figured I better buy a game right away before you can’t get one.
“I had no idea it was going to snowball into what it did.”
In 2011 Mr Emery and family took a custom game, a re-theming of the Godzilla pinball table, to the Midwest Gaming Classic where it received a lot of attention.
Two years later, in January 2013, Mr Emery quit his job to build custom and production pinball games fulltime. He was told by many people that he was crazy for doing so, but the labour has paid off.
“Pinball is hard,” Emery says in the documentary trailer. “It’s very hard. I absolutely love it. I haven’t had more than two days off in three years now, but I’m not going to stop.”
The documentary was due to be released in “Fall 2016”, according to the trailer.
However, it has not yet been released.
On the Things That Go Bump In The Night: The Spooky Pinball Story Facebook page earlier in December, the Reeves announced that they were finalising the film’s screening schedule for 2017.
“We're finalizing the screening schedule for the first quarter of 2017 and will announce some dates very soon,” the Facebook post, made on December 2, said.
Things That Go Bump In the Night: The Spooky Pinball Story from Dana Reeves on Vimeo.
