Trick 'r Treat (Film Review)

2007 Warner Bros. Pictures
Written and Directed by: Michael Dougherty
Starring: Dylan Baker, Rochelle Aytes, Anna Paquin, and Brian Cox
MPAA Rating: R; Running Time: 82 Minutes
The Nicsperiment Score: 8/10

Against her husband's wishes, Emma blows out their jack-o-lantern and starts taking down their Halloween decorations, as children are still outside track-or-treating. Meanwhile, a kid knocking jack-o-lanterns off a fence post gets pulled off the street, and onto his sinister-sounding school principal's porch...where the principal hands him some special candy. Out on the town, a group of girls get ready for a party. One of the girls is nervous about her "first time," but her friends encourage her to just let the night take its course. On the outskirts of town, a group of kids try to scare an introverted girl with a prank involving a school bus that once crashed into the town quarry. All the while, through all of these intersecting tales, a curious looking, child-sized figure, wearing antiquated orange pajamas and a burlap sack over his head, watches and sometimes violently interacts. Trick-or-treat. Trick 'r Treat?
It's not often that a new piece of media is entered into holiday cannon. Just think about how few 21st Century songs have broken into the regular Christmas radio rotations. The same goes for Halloween movie monsters/villains. You've got the old classics, Frankenstein's Monster, The Mummy, Dracula, etc., then you've your 1980's crew of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, and Freddy Kreuger. Since the 90's the only figure that's really broken through to public consciousness is Ghostface from the Scream series. However, in the last few years, someone new has begun to pop-up: a small, orange-pajama-clad little guy with a burlap sack over his head. This figure is Sam, I am assuming short for Samhain, the corporeal embodiment and protector of Halloween from Michael Dougherty's 2007 cult classic, Trick 'r Treat.
Trick 'r Treat somehow missed a theatrical release window, and my only memory of it is passing the DVD case on a soon-to-close Blockbuster Video shelf, and thinking that the artwork looked like it came from a Korn album. However, a movie this fun can't stay out of the public consciousness for too long. Writer and director, Dougherty, does several things to ensure this film stands the test of time. For one, he creates a great, classic, spooky, mostly timeless Halloween atmosphere. The fictional town of Warren Valley, Ohio might as well be called Anytown, USA. The colors pop, mist curls around everything, the shadows and textures are perfect. The cohesive visual style here seems to have been painstakingly crafted, including the design work that went into bringing the unique Sam to life.
All that eye candy would be for naught, if Trick 'r Treat's insides were hollow, but thankfully, there's a lot of flesh in this pumpkin. That metaphor doesn't work, because you can't put a candle in a pumpkin that still has the flesh inside, plus pumpkins aren't candy, but anyway, the actual intertwining storylines in Trick 'r Treat are quite entertaining. It's a blast to see how Doughtery non-chronologically unfolds this particular Halloween night, with stories intersecting in unexpected ways, as they shine new light upon each other. Almost everything works, and I am looking forward to watching this film again and again with others, something I haven't been able to say about this type of flick in a long time. The only story that doesn't quite work here involves werewolves, not only because of how silly it gets, but because if what happens here happens every full moon, or even just every Halloween, there wouldn't been any men left in town.
Actually, logic isn't always Trick 'r Treat's best friend. The whole movie's body count just isn't sustainable if this is the sort of thing to happen in Warren Valley every Halloween. However, this film, as much as it hits the perfect Americana notes, works best as a dark and fun fairy tale, one that, in 14 years, has only seen its legend grow.