It’s mid-June and the Internet has just announced that Halloween Returns is slated for production. Marcus Dunstan will direct, but in a better world the job would go to the Angulo brothers.

“That is one of the highest compliments anyone has ever given us,” remarks Mukunda, the fourth of six siblings known as the Wolfpack.

He’s 23 now, but at the age of 15, Mukunda was the first Angulo to leave the family’s Lower East Side tenement apartment, where they’d been held captive for their entire lives by their father, Oscar. Fearing for his safety, Mukunda tentatively made his way around Manhattan dressed as one of his favourite movie characters—Michael Myers, from Halloween.

“We’d never gone outside the house trick or treating,” he explains, speaking to the Straight from New York. “Just walking around in full costume, that was a moment for me. ‘I feel invincible right now.’”

Mukunda’s transgression signalled the end of Oscar’s rule, and it wasn’t long before the entire brood (minus developmentally-challenged sister, Vishnu) was exploring the outside world.

When filmmaker Crystal Moselle stumbled on the Angulos, they were rolling down the street dressed like the characters from Reservoir Dogs. She would discover that this tightly knit group of siblings was obsessed with film (“Tom Hardy as Mad Max just kills it”—Mukunda), with a library of painstaking, shot-on-video remakes of their favourite movies sitting at home.

The Wolfpack (now playing) documents the subsequent years Moselle spent with the Angulos; a transformative period that saw both the kids and their mom, Susanne, emerging from Oscar’s prison. But the central mystery remains.

“Whatever kind of upbringing he had, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t easy, and it really brought out that indifference he has to the world and the choices that he made,” offers Narayana, when asked about Oscar’s own obscure backstory.

“Whatever it was, we don’t really think about it that much now. We’re just interested in moving forward. We grew up with him, we know what he is, and we’re just trying to focus on our own lives. There’s nothing much else you can do. You can’t live on regret.”

Indeed, while the brothers report (with marked affection) that mom Susanne is “loving everything” about the family’s newly established freedom, Oscar only becomes more opaque. It’s as if his power simply evaporated, which might be a salutary lesson for any of us.

“You are totally right,” says Narayana. “I mean, you can only hold somebody down for so long, so once we started breaking free, we were also surprised at how easy it was. Once those first steps were taken, we just took off from there.”

“I think his perspective has changed too, in light of this documentary,” adds Narayana’s twin, Govinda. “And he’s seen the documentary. So he and mom, they’re still together, and he just kinda goes along for the ride now. Our world kinda flipped. When we broke out, immediately we saw the world, and it’s not really a dark place. Everybody’s not out to get you. So in other words: ‘See Dad? Just chill.’”