Trick 'r Treat 2007

If there ever was a quintessential Halloween movie, festive and beautifully realized, it is Trick r Treat, a modern anthology that flat blew me away when I first watched it about three years ago. Warren Valley, Ohio is the setting and all of the stories (tied together extremely well, in fact, this is one of the best horror anthologies ever to involve multiple stories, linking them in various ways, sometimes obvious, other times surprising us) and Halloween in this town is kept dutifully and energetically.

Leslie Bibb says, “I hate Halloween” and pays a heavy price for trying to remove the decorum populating her and the hubby’s yard, in essence, “breaking the rules”, and earning the ire of the “Halloween Spirit”. Oh, and how she (dressed as an old toy robot) bumps into Laurie (Anna Paquin) is one of the many subtle ways this movie ties all of the various stories.

My dad taught me tonight is about respecting the dead because this is the one night that the dead and all sorts of other things roam free and pay us a visit.

This has lots of demented ideas going on. For instance, the town’s school principal is a psychopath who poisons candy just so that this rotund kid (known for smashing jack-o-lanterns and stealing candy) will be used as a means to bond with his son. A foursome of babes are planning to hook up with some local boys while in town, Laurie needing to pop her cherry, but their use of the word “virgin” is far different than what we are accustomed to. How the principal and these babes eventually meet is just one of many reasons to check out Trick R Treat.

You even have a Halloween Scrooge, Kreeg (played by an awesomely curmudgeon Brian Cox) who must learn the value of the season…the hard way. This movie even works from differing perspectives. The principal, Steven (Dylan Baker), sees, after burying the body of the big kid (the kid who drove Billy Bob nutty in Bad Santa) , Kreeg begging for help from his window inside his house as an obscure figure overtook him and later we see it from the opposite point of view. The movie also uses the Quentin Tarantino technique where alternating stories don’t necessarily play out in linear time, back and forth from one point of Halloween night to another. That produces a lot of the shock value, twists, and surprises that develop as the movie continues. 

The Halloween School Bus Massacre, for instance, and the supposed vampire who might be a threat to Laurie (in a Red Riding Hood outfit, quite the clever disguise). The tale about a school bus full of kids who were to be driven off a cliff of an abandoned rock quarry, by their driver no less, paid by parents that were embarrassed by their handicaps, and how it relates to a prank pulled by a party of cruel of kids (led by Britt McKillip) towards an “idiot savant” (Samm Todd) who enjoys a past time of carving innumerable pumpkins with all sorts of unusual patterns and shapes and faces. 

The film ties Kreeg to the school bus massacre; the pranksters visit Wilkins for treats; the dead are able to walk the earth thanks to Samhain so the school bus massacre provides a special treat for both the pranksters and Kreeg. The movie does this a lot. All of the characters are associated with Warren Valley and so their coming in contact in special ways is definitely how I think Trick ‘r Treat excels in the anthology format. The freedom to toy and fool around with story/character structure is at the heart of Trick ‘r Treat and writer/director Michael Dougherty playfully carries us all over the town, and ties everything up at the end most amusingly.