Trick ’r Treat (Michael Dougherty, 2007)
A handful of fun-size candy Halloween tales.
This was a fun little confection of a horror movie that I’d ignored for years entirely on the basis of that awful title. I’m glad I finally watched!
The movie takes place in a small town on Halloween night, and it’s sort of like Pulp Fiction meets Are You Afraid of the Dark? as there’s no central story to the film, rather a number of similarly spooky takes intersect and overlap in a style that’s more a series of intercut vignettes than traditional anthology film.
The main stories concern an elementary school principal with a fondness for murder, some kids venturing to the site of a deadly school bus crash, some slutty girls seeking hookups and a party, and an old man terrorized by a child-like monster.
Some brief flashes of nudity aside, I’d be comfortable with my younger teens watching this. Nothing about the film is particularly horrific. There are some scary-ish moments, and a lot of blood is spilled, but overall it’s on the level of, say, Wednesday. Nothing that’d give you nightmares. This is the theme park version of a horror movie. It’s colorful, unserious, and a lot of fun.
But these fun-sized stories work, for the most part, really well. As the film jumps back and forth in time throughout the evening, there are lots of opportunities for characters from different stories to interact with each other, or for us to catch glimpses of things from another angle.
Especially fun is the fact that this film revels in the fact that it’s a horror film actually set on Halloween night — and it goes for broke leaving nothing on the table: there’s contaminated candy, ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and plenty more besides. All the treats you’d want from such a cocktail are present and correct — and the film takes great glee in playing with them.
But Trick ’r Treat isn’t about to rest on its laurels, the film is chock full of entertaining twists and turns throughout. Practically nothing is what it seems and almost every scene has some sort of surprise revelation that changes everything, and that you didn’t see coming. This keeps the whole thing feeling fresh and fun as it employs a variety of traditional Halloween iconography but adds twists to everything so that it’s not just a mindless retread of things that have been done before.
It’s also quite a short film, and given the structure of its storytelling, the whole thing is a breeze to watch. It is highly entertaining.