On an October evening in Bellevue, the gates at Falconwood Park will swing open at 5:30 p.m., and by dusk a crowd will settle in — some in lawn chairs on the grass, some in the beds of pickup trucks, some behind windshields tuned to an FM frequency that won't be announced until showtime. The occasion is 80s Night, and the film is The Monster Squad, the 1987 horror-comedy that flopped in theaters and then spent the next four decades becoming beloved.
It's a fitting choice for a venue that has made a specialty of gathering people outdoors to watch movies on a big screen. According to Falconwood's own announcement, this fall's Fright Nights series marks ten years of outdoor movies at the park — a milestone that arrives after a run of years in which simply staying open was never a given.
The park's story begins with music, not film. Brandon Miller, a bass player for the Kris Lager Band, was looking for somewhere to host a small festival he called Hullabaloo. For its first two years the event was held in Elkhorn, but as the Flatwater Free Press recounted, Miller and his father had "outgrew the space with nowhere to expand." A tip from Mark Grubbs of the Blues Society of Omaha pointed them toward Sokol Park in Bellevue, a 26-acre campground just off Highway 75 about 20 miles south of downtown Omaha. Miller and his dad bought the old park and set about turning it into a concert and event venue.
What followed was a run of disasters that would have ended most ventures. A tornado struck in the park's early years. Then, in March 2019, the combined waters of the Platte and Missouri rivers converged on the grounds in floods that caused an estimated $3.4 billion in damage across Nebraska. Miller remembered sitting with his grandfather at a gas station across the street, drinking Busch Lights and watching the water rise "because there was nothing we could do." Inside the main lodge, the flood crested at roughly nine feet, two inches. The watermark is still visible on the wall after the building was rebuilt — a stain the family has kept as a reminder of hard times and hard work. A pandemic arrived less than a year later.
Falconwood survived all three. Today the 26-acre property, family-owned and operated, hosts weddings, concerts, festivals, camping and glamping, and the outdoor movie series that has become one of its signature draws. The venue describes its screenings as an "intimate outdoor theater experience," with films chosen to span genres, ratings and run times so that audiences of all ages and backgrounds have something to come out for.
The mechanics of a Falconwood movie night are part of the appeal. Car Viewing passes let guests watch from their own vehicles — staff direct drivers to pull in forward or backward depending on preference, and the soundtrack comes through the car radio, through open windows, or through a hatchback or truck bed open to the park's full outdoor audio. Car spaces are limited and first come, first parked, and once they sell out, Park & Walk passes become the only option; those guests park along the guard rail and back lot and walk up to the grassy viewing area in front of the cars. Chairs and blankets are encouraged. Food trucks and Falconwood's own concessions stand supply hot food, popcorn, candy and snacks, and there's a fully stocked bar for guests 21 and over — including, as the park notes, Icees that bartenders will spike with a spirit of your choosing. A playground and outdoor games round out the grounds.
For this particular night, the park is leaning into the decade that produced the film. The Monster Squad was released by Tri-Star Pictures in 1987, directed by Fred Dekker from a script he wrote with Shane Black, with Peter Hyams and Rob Cohen as executive producers. It cost a reported $14 million to make and grossed just $3.8 million in its theatrical run — a flop by any commercial measure. The premise, though, was irresistible to a certain kind of kid: a group of savvy children discovers that Count Dracula and a supporting cast of pastiches of the Universal Monsters — Frankenstein's monster, the Wolf Man, the Mummy, the Gill-man — have arrived in their small town, and it falls to the kids to stop them from taking over the world. The film runs 82 minutes.
What the box office didn't capture was the afterlife. The Monster Squad became a staple of video stores and cable, building a cult following that eventually produced its own documentary: Wolfman's Got Nards, a 2018 film directed by Andre Gower, who as a child actor played the squad's leader, Sean. The documentary's title comes from one of the movie's most quoted lines, a bit of dialogue that has outlived nearly everything else about the release. For a venue celebrating ten years of outdoor screenings, a film that found its audience slowly and stubbornly is a natural fit.
The practical details for the evening are straightforward. Each person needs a ticket, and children 4 and under are free. Films are shown subject to parental discretion, and no outside alcohol is permitted. The movie begins at dusk, with no fixed end time listed. As with all of Falconwood's screenings, times and dates may change if the weather turns — a caveat that carries a little extra weight at a park that has learned, more than once, to plan around the river.
For anyone who grew up on the movie, or who simply wants to introduce it to someone who didn't, the setup is hard to improve on: a fall night, a screen in the grass, a radio dial holding the soundtrack, and a park that has spent a decade — and considerably more effort than most people know — earning the right to keep the lights on.