TRICK 'R TREAT

Directed by Michael Dougherty. United States, Canada. 2007.

I. Every day is Halloween at my house

I have no real interest in holidays. I don’t put up Christmas trees or hang decorations. I don’t have boxes of knick-knacks and tchotchkes in the attic waiting for the seasons to change. I don’t exchange gifts or attend holiday gatherings or parties. I'm too cool to be invited to those kinds of things. Being single means I don’t have to worry about Valentine’s Day, and being perfect means I don’t need to worry about New Year's resolutions (that’s a joke). I don’t even care to celebrate my birthday, even though it should be a national holiday (that isn’t a joke). Thanksgiving isn’t a holiday, just an excuse to gorge myself on good food and watch 12 hours of Mystery Science Theater 3000. Maybe even 14 hours if I’m feeling frisky.

Now, I’m not some Scrooge McDuck who spits at the idea of celebrating a holiday. I’m just too old and too jaded for most of them. They’re just days, no different than every other day. They come and go, the music on the radio changes, and the commercials on the TV do, too. I like the idea of families swapping gifts and new lovers sharing a kiss under the mistletoe. I just don’t feel like I’m missing out on those things anymore. I arrived at that conclusion naturally over time. It used to bother me, the loneliness and disgusting spend-spend-spend consumerism of it all, but that’s all faded into apathy. They're just days now.

It’s a myth that suicide rates spike during the holidays, but it’s easy to understand why that idea persists. You turn on the TV and see families gathered at the dinner table or sitting around the Christmas tree. Everyone is happy. Everyone loves each other. Everything is the way it should be. But then you look around your own house. You wonder why your phone hasn’t gone off once yet. You wait for invitations that never come. You check your Facebook page to see who has liked your ‘Merry Christmas!’ post, but so far, no luck. Something is horribly wrong with you. It must be, right? Everyone else seems to be having a good time. Everyone seems loved. But not you. Advertising sets the expectations, and then social media engagement determines if you've lived up to them or not. It's the kind of thing that could drive one mad if you put too much stock in it.

With Halloween in particular, I never felt like I moved on from it as much as the world around me did. When I moved back into the city, I thought it would be revelatory. Decorations would be hung around. Halloween night would bring packs of kids to my door, all dressed up as ghosts and goblins, looking for candy. Halloween would finally feel like it did when I was a kid. But when I look out my window today, I see fewer than a half-dozen homes decorated for the holiday. My first year back in the city, I bought candy, but no one knocked at the door. Not a single kid. They all go trick-or-treating at the mall now, the same place they spend every other day in. Kids can get a piece of candy from the store employees while they pitch mom and dad on the latest sale. Sometimes it feels like Halloween is only celebrated in Instagram reels. No, I didn’t outgrow Halloween. Time just took it away.

All that said, Halloween has, by and large, escaped the kind of crass commercialism and conformity that has turned most holidays into nightmares. You don’t see commercials shaming you for not having family to eat a big meal with. You don’t see diamond ring commercials that make you feel like trash because you can’t afford that piece of jewelry for your significant other. You’re not made to feel inadequate because no one is waiting for you in the living room, chomping at the bit to tear open presents. I repeat: Halloween is not free from gross consumerism; it’s just a damn sight more forgiving for people who just want to curl up on the couch and watch a creepy movie. Maybe even turn all the lights off and keep the candy for yourself. For someone like me, it makes the whole thing more tolerable. Halloween might not be overwhelmingly celebrated in my neighborhood, but that’s OK. It is always celebrated exactly the way it should be right here in my home: by rejoicing in the simple pleasures of the creepy and the kooky, the mysterious and spooky, and the all together ooky.

That’s why every day is Halloween at my house.

II. ATMOSPHERE ON DEMAND

I don’t need a designated month to watch horror movies or read spooky stories. The weather doesn’t need to get colder to put me in the mood. Hell, half of this October felt like Springtime here. We’re long past predictable weather patterns, even in Pennsylvania. If I were waiting for Fall weather to get me in the Halloween state of mind, I’d be waiting until who the fuck knows when? Maybe January? No, Halloween is whenever I want it to be, but if I really want that true Halloween atmosphere, thick and terrifying like it was when I was an impressionable little child who still believed in the boogeyman, well, I can just put on TRICK ‘R TREAT.

This movie is like a scented candle. You press play, and within a few minutes, you can smell the damp, fallen leaves and feel the cold prickle of Autumn air on your neck. It takes you right back to when you were a little kid, dressed like a monster and carrying that plastic pumpkin bucket up some stranger’s steps to claim your piece of candy. Remember when you got older, and Halloween stopped being about trick-or-treating and started being about parties? This movie has you covered there, too. Hell, if you are on the precipice of becoming a true bah humbug miser about everything All Hallows’ Eve, this movie might just save your life.

TRICK ‘R TREAT is ostensibly an anthology film, albeit not one told in true episodic fashion. The film follows several groups of characters whose lives intersect over one blood-soaked Halloween evening. Sometimes, these characters interact with one another directly, like grade school Principal-cum-serial killer Steven and his miserable, Halloween-hating neighbor Mr. Kreeg. Other times, the connection is merely incidental. On their way to an abandoned rock quarry, a group of kids hears a pack of wolves howling somewhere off in the distance. Or were they werewolves?

This shift from a one-after-the-other story structure to a more free-flowing narrative makes for an endlessly rewatchable film. It’s an infectiously charming flick replete with lovely costuming and some of the most evocative cinematography this side of Mario Bava. It’s also a love letter not just to Halloween, but to the genre most closely associated with it, especially the macabre EC horror comics and their particular brand of karmic justice. This isn’t some throwaway anthology flick. It’s a celebration.

III. JOLTING TALES OF TENSION

A couple returns from a Halloween party while a roving POV, complete with heavy breathing, watches them from afar. The woman wants to take down their copious Halloween decorations early, but her husband warns her not to. It’s tradition, after all, to leave the jack-o-lanterns burning and the ghosts and spiderwebs hanging up until morning. Undeterred, she sends him inside and gets down to cleaning the yard. He blacks out in bed while she’s mauled by whatever was watching them from across the street, a rather vicious punishment for disrespecting holiday tradition.

A fat ginger named Charlie waddles down the street, smashing pumpkins, his face smeared in chocolate. Steven catches him pilfering his candy bowl and sits him down. Steven tells the disgusting little glutton all about the sanctity of tradition. Charlie is too busy shoveling candy down his throat to pay much attention. He really should have. Maybe then he would have learned the most important tradition of all: checking your candy before you eat it. That’s an important tradition to follow, especially when you’ve just raided the candy bowl of a serial killer who gets a kick out of poisoning children.

A bevy of out-of-towner babes get ready for a party in the woods. Laurie is dressed like Little Red Riding Hood. Her three friends, Maria, Janet, and Danielle, are dressed like Disney princesses. From the way they’re talking, one would surmise that Laurie is a virgin. Despite her friends’ insistence that her first is merely a formality, Laurie wants her first time to be with someone special. Her friends quickly find dates and head to the party, leaving Little Red Riding Hood all alone to be stalked by a Big Bad Wolf of sorts: a mysterious, black-cloaked masked man with sharp fangs and fresh blood on his lapel.

Trick-or-treaters Chip, Schrader, Macy, and Sara are out gathering jack-o-lanterns for their meet-up with Rhonda, an awkward, possibly autistic, girl who talks like Velma and clearly adores Halloween. Once together, they drag their wagon full of jack-o-lanterns to an old abandoned rock quarry, the site of a horrible local legend Chip describes as the Halloween School Bus Massacre. Supposedly, many years ago, a school bus full of troubled and developmentally challenged children was driven over the edge of the quarry, drowning the kids. The bus driver survived but has been missing ever since.

The jack-o-lanterns are meant to be offerings to the souls of the eight children who were chained to their seats before being mercilessly drowned that day. They load the pumpkins into the service elevator that runs down to the quarry. Schrader, Macy, and Sara get inside and head down. The elevator soon returns, and as Rhonda and Chip descend into the darkness below, they begin to hear their friends screaming.

I can’t forget to mention Sam, a peculiar child-like figure wearing a burlap bag over his head. This curious little guy passes through all the stories like a silent observer, maybe even the literal Spirit of Halloween itself. Sam plays a major part in a single story, but it’s a doozy. In fact, it’s the film’s closing chapter and it's masterpiece, a wonderfully nasty bit of home invasion terror in which the miserly Mr. Kregg learns the true meaning of Halloween.

IV. LOVE BOMB

If the selection of character names on offer hasn’t clued you in to the fact that TRICK ‘R TREAT is sloppily in love with the genre, you’re probably not a regular watcher of horror movies. The most glorious of them all is the final story. Mr. Kregg is clearly costumed to look like a haggard John Carpenter. Sam attacks him repeatedly with a razor blade wedged inside a candy bar. Sam’s disembodied hand runs around like Ash’s possessed limb from EVIL DEAD 2, and there’s even a “you gotta be fucking kidding” tossed in for good measure. It’s insanely glorious, easily the best bite-sized bit of horror since Karen Black got chased around her apartment by a racially insensitive Zulu doll on crack.

The fact that all of these stories are written with an EC Comics attitude towards karmic justice makes them even sweeter. The Little Red Riding Hood tale ends with a double twist, and although one surprise is fairly obvious, the other pays off a previous story wonderfully. TRICK ‘R TREAT is a litany of delicious ironies and satisfying paybacks, especially for those of us who were treated as weird little freaks for having an interest in horror in general and Halloween in particular. It’s gruesome but filled with a certain kind of sadistic, comedic glee that turns all the yucks to yums, inducing belly laughs and chills in equal measure.

It’s a gorgeous film, fantastically directed by Michael Dougherty, filled with extraordinary cinematography and art direction. It feels more like Halloween than HALLOWEEN. This thing drips atmosphere from start to finish, flitting between Tim Burton, Mario Bava, CREEPSHOW, Hammer horror, and the hand-drawn details of an EC Comics panel. I’ve seen more than my fair share of movies set on Halloween night, but none have ever come so close to resembling what I see when I close my eyes and think about the holiday. If we as a society ever forget what Halloween was, this film would be the perfect reminder.

That said, visual glory cannot save a bad narrative. Thankfully, that isn’t a concern here. TRICK ‘R TREAT is consistently entertaining, a remarkable feat for an anthology film. Outside of CREEPSHOW, I can’t think of another anthology film that doesn’t miss a single beat. Each story is perfectly paced and expertly acted, coming together to create a wonderful Halloween experience. Each joke is measured perfectly. Each performance is full of life and energy. Every scare, every splatter of fluids, every bit of costuming, every uniquely carved jack-o-lantern, everything, EVERYTHING is wonderful. It’s a brutal, funny, irresistible concoction, the perfect way to spend Halloween night. Or the perfect way to turn any night into Halloween night.

Buy a copy. Then every day can be Halloween at your house, too.