Toronto After Dark 2009 – Trick ‘r Treat

On October 5th it will be two years since Trick ‘r Treat was supposed to have been released. Working the festival circuit and selected screenings where it could get them, the film has achieved a cult following that most films can only dream of, but few of its ‘followers’ have even seen the film. After waiting two years to see it and pouring over stills and write ups aplenty, I can honestly say that Trick ‘r Treat did not fail to impress.

Trick ‘r Treat is a comic book style collection of stories that occur over one Halloween night in one town that are all eventually interconnected by one small, supernatural entity – a child demon called Sam who wears a burlap sack over his head and takes the holiday very seriously. A group of children go in search of an old gory legend; a girl leaves her pack of friends behind to search for a man she hope will be “her first”; a old curmudgeonly man who screams at his neighbours is haunted by his past; and a seemingly normal man hides some dark secrets in his basement. The stories tell their own narratives in a linear progression but the film itself wraps around to pick up on connecting bits in other stories in order to link all four together.

A stellar cast including Brian Cox, Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker, Leslie Bibb and Tahmoh Penikett performs their over-the-top vignettes perfectly, providing the audience with both the creeps and the giggles. Writer/director Michael Dougherty has created a film that will certainly become a Halloween classic in that he has made a movie that appeals to a wide range of ages.

I found the movie to be charming and endearing in a very surprising way: there’s lots wrong with it. There’s some hokey stuff in the script, there’s some really obvious and cliche stuff about it, there’s some slightly wonky special effects and there’s more laughs than scares – and from what I can tell it’s all intentional. On the way home from the screening I was listing off all the things that didn’t work in the film when I suddenly realized that there were too many of them to be an accident. In fact, I realized that when taken all together they all work extremely well. From the prosthetics on wee Sam to the hiding of the major gore to the use of atmosphere and dialogue rather than effects, the non-traditional narrative that really only makes complete sense in the last moments of the film, it all comes together to make one cohesive picture. What Trick ‘r Treat actually is is a love-letter to classic old-school horror. It certainly has a story to tell and, in my opinion it’s very effective on that level, but it also creates a sense of nostalgia for the viewer that can only be a throw back to the horror of the 70s and 80s, which I suspect is also Dougherty’s horror.

Many of the people I spoke to about the film didn’t like it, which astonished me. They pointed out the many things I also felt didn’t work, but never got to the warm, fuzzy nostalgic place that I did. Many of them felt that the nudity was out of place, that the script wasn’t smart, that they could have done without certain elements of the story, the list goes on. Frankly, I’m a little baffled. Why, for instance, are we willing to hold the original 1984 Nightmare on Elm Street in such high esteem when it was hokey, gory, and a little stupid, with some bad prosthetics and more than a few laughs where none were intended a pass, but not Trick ‘r Treat when these things are intentional? Am I the only one who loved Pumpkinhead and he Puppet Master series specifically for their faults? The original Friday the 13th too? All of these movies genuinely intended to scare, but came out a little on the light side instead, beomcing classics for exactly those reasons. Why should we not celebrate Dougherty for creating something in this tradition? Because it was made with a modern budget and modern tools available? I don’t think that’s a good enough excuse.

In a sea of genuinely crappy horror out there in wide release these days I felt that Trick ‘r Treat was a great time that allowed me to sit back and enjoy a filmmaker’s vision of a terrible Halloween night for these characters. I think that Dougherty should make more movies of this kind, but I’m not sure a sequel should be one of them. I think this movie is an excellent, fun Halloween stand-alone and when it comes out on DVD in October I’ll be snatching up a copy to watch with my copy of Puppet Master and Pumpkinhead on Halloween. Might even become a tradition.

Toronto After Dark runs from August 14 to 21, 2009 at the Bloor Cinema in Toronto. Click here for our coverage.

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