Each October, Trick ‘r Treat continues to further establish itself as a staple of the Halloween season: Sam has become a full-blown Halloween icon.
But Sam actually only appears occasionally during the film as it weaves between different tales of horror all taking place in one small town on Halloween night.
These different tales are what make Trick ‘R Treat the masterpiece that it is, so in honor of this new classic, here’s my ranking of the different storylines.
5. Never put out a Jack-O-Lantern before midnight
The opening scene of the film is also its weakest storywise, which is really by design, as it is merely an intro into the tone and a bit of a setup for the movie. Technically, we are introduced to Sam in this very first scene, but only through a POV shot that you can vaguely tell is viewed through a a burlap sack. We never actually see Sam in this scene.
Instead, we focus on a couple who has returned home from a long day of Halloween festivities. Leslie Bibb, who plays the wife, clearly is put out a bit by Halloween in general and is tired from the long night and extinguishes the jack-o-lantern in front of the house, despite the warnings of her husband.
I do love Sam’s panting breath as he seems clearly upset by the jack-o-lantern being put out from the POV shot. It’s also worth noting that an archival type intro plays before the start of the scene establishing some of the rules of Halloween, reinforcing this setup.
Ultimately, the husband goes inside and starts up a porn tape while waiting for his wife to come in from taking down the Halloween decorations. As she begins to take them down, there’s a creepy feeling that she’s being watched and a nice fakeout with a figure in costume seemingly staring at her from across the street (he’s really just a teen waiting for a ride).
Then Sam attacks, but it’s limited to a struggle seen underneath the ghostly sheet of one of the decorations with blood accentuating the violence.
Finally we get out opening stinger as the husband comes out to check on his wife, only to find her dismembered with a big orange jack-o-lantern lollipop shoved into her horrified face; this is made cooler in retrospect as we see the lollipop as Sam’s primary weapon.
Again, this is really designed to be the least hefty of the tales, even leading into a comic-book style intro that promises “four tales of terror,” so it should really be no surprise that this lands here.
4. Don’t forget to help me with the eyes
In this next segment, we are introduced to Principal Steven Wilkins, chiding one of his students, Charlie, for taking more than one piece of candy from his porch as well as smashing jack-o-lanterns. It’s interesting that Wilkins works in this way as kind of an extension of Sam in punishing Charlie for his Halloween sins by giving him poisoned chocolate; to be clear, Wilkins does not seem to actually care about enforcing Halloween rules, but it fits the themes of the movie and plays into that old trope of poisoned Halloween candy.
This segment really focuses on Wilkins trying to hide Charlie’s body, which becomes difficult as he is bothered persistently by his young son from inside the house and by his neighbor, Mr. Kreeg. As Charlie unexpectedly seems to come back to life within a body bag, Wilkins struggles to keep him quiet without raising Kreeg’s suspicions.
One of the greatest bits of this scene is not made clear until later, as there are flashes of something going on at Kreeg’s house that aren’t understandable watching the film for the first time.
Dylan Baker is also just terrific as Wilkins and is maybe the best performance in the entire movie, so it’s fun to watch him struggle and grow increasingly frustrated.
That frustration leads us to believe he is about to kill his own son, who has incessantly asked him to carve a jack-o-lantern with him. But we get a good twist reveal as he instead plunges a knife into Charlie’s decapitated head as his son looks on with excitement as we realize in horror that the son has been anxiously awaiting to carve out this boy’s head rather than a pumpkin.
As the first truly fleshed-out “tale of terror” it’s a great proper introduction to what this movie has in store.
3. The tale of the school bus driver
One of the things Trick ‘R Treat does so well is give us glimpses of characters before their story properly begins. And so we’re introduced to the main characters of this tale—Macy, Schraeder, Chip and Sara—during the first segment as surprise Trick ‘R Treaters at Wilkins’ house.
They don’t realize the blood on Wilkins’ shirt is real, and go about their trick-or-treating as normal. Macy asks Wilkins for his jack-o-lantern, telling him it’s “a scavenger hunt for UNICEF.”
We later catch up with them picking up another jack-o-lantern at the house of a very drunk and inappropriate teacher in a cat costume. This supplies one of my favorite underrated moments as Chip notices in the background a man in a hot dog costume grinding against a woman in a pig costume. Chip later remarks that the man in the hot dog costume is one of their coaches, and that they witnessed him “butt-f***ing” a pig.
Before long, the group’s plan is revealed to the audience: Macy is actually gathering the jack-o-lanterns as part of a cruel prank to be played on “Rhonda the Retard,” who one of the kids corrects her is actually an “idiot savant.” Schraeder is cast as the charmer to flirt with Rhonda and keep her preoccupied, but there’s also a sense that Schraeder actually cares about Rhonda and is uneasy about the prank.
Regardless, the group leads Rhonda to the edge of a rock quarry, where Macy relays the story of a bus driver who conspires with the parents of special needs students to drive the bus over the edge of the quarry. One of the students, however, drives the bus off the edge with the driver still inside.
The jack-o-lanterns are to be taken down to the edge of the pond to pay tribute to these slaughtered students, Macy says, as she gets on an elevator with Schraeder and Sara to head to the bottom. Meanwhile, Chip and Rhonda wait to follow.
In the fog, the three that went ahead begin to scream and Rhonda goes to investigate, only to find two monsters coming after her. As she runs away, she sees Chip apparently having his intestines eaten by a third monster. The shock causes Rhonda to lose her glasses and slip and hit her head.
When she awakens, the group reveals that it was a cruel prank and plans to leave for home, but they soon her strange noises coming from the area. These are the real spirits of those slaughtered children.
As the group runs for the elevator, they find Rhonda inside with a jack-o-lantern lit to keep her safe. They beg her to let them in, but instead she silently reaches for the button and ascends back to the ledge, as the kids screams are followed by gnarly bone-crushing and squelching noises.
The scene ends with Rhonda and Sam crossing paths, with the Halloween spirit merely acknowledging her respect of the traditions and moving on.
This is a great sequence that only gets better when the story reaches completion in the next segment.
2. Always hand out candy
We’re introduced to Wilkin’s neighbor, the curmudgeonly Mr. Kreeg, by showing him scaring off trick-or-treaters by dressing his dog up in a costume. He even steals the candy from the children that they dropped in terror as they fled his porch.
Obviously, this is a no-no on Halloween and along comes Samhain, the Halloween enforcer in form of a costumed child wearing an orange onesie and a burlap sack mask.
This is not the first time we see Sam in the movie (he’s not actually named in the movie, by the way, although a character talks about Samhain as the ancient name for Halloween), but this is our only full interaction with him.
Sam makes his fury clear by suddenly decorating the house with numerous jack-o-lanterns and scribbling Halloween greetings/threats all over the walls and ceilings before attacking Kreeg outright.
This interaction plays out in continuity with the Wilkins segment, giving reverse perspectives from Kreeg that scratch a certain satisfying itch putting the timeline together.
The fight is pretty brutal, with Sam cutting Kreeg’s Achilles with a razor blade embedded in a chocolate bar, his other weapon of choice, and Kreeg falling down stairs on candy and landing in shards of glass. Kreeg manages to remove Sam’s mask, revealing a grotesque blend of skull and jack-o-lantern before shooting him. But the shot doesn’t knock Sam down for long, as he soon begins to recover and advance on Kreeg again, taking a bite out of that big orange lollipop from earlier to create a jagged edge for stabbing.
Just when it appears Sam is going to kill Kreeg, it pans down to reveal that Sam has stabbed an errant chocolate bar on Kreeg’s chest. Sam slowly pulls the chocolate bar, seems satisfied, and simply walks away. Clearly the intent is that Sam accepted this as Kreeg giving him candy, absolving him of his Halloween sins, and is one of the best moments in this movie. Kreeg cleans up his act and learns his lesson too; like the Grinch, this experience leads him to shape up and celebrate the holiday correctly.
The segment gets a boost as an epilogue ties it together with the rest of the film, revealing that Kreeg is not just a grumpy Halloween miser, but the bus driver from the earlier tale. And though Sam spares him, he meets a well-deserved fate at the hands of the children he killed
1. Little Red Riding Hood
This has always been my favorite story of the bunch, even though it doesn’t directly involve my little horror icon, Sam.
We are introduced very early on to a group of seemingly slutty sisters, who are trying to initiate a fourth sister Laurie (Anna Paquin), who is dressed in a much more modest Little Red Riding Hood costume.
The sisters appear to be egging Laurie on in some kind of sexual initiation, as if she is a virgin and tonight is the night she will lose her virginity at a Halloween party. Laurie does not seem as eager as her sisters about this.
Every time the girls are on screen, there’s is a ton of wolf-inflected dialogue that on first watch is disguised as being a reference to Laurie’s red riding hood get-up.
We’re later introduced to a seemingly unrelated story where a man in a black hood with sharp teeth bites a woman while making out, then proceeds to chase her down and kill her. He hides her among the other drunks covered in blood as a Halloween costume and disappears into the night.
Later we see Laurie walking the streets looking for potential suitors. One is revealed to be part of a couple in one of those two-person horse costumes. Another is revealed to be a muscular woman. Each reveal makes it seem Laurie is destined to not find a date in time for the party.
The mysterious fanged man shows back up and begins stalking Laurie, finally pouncing on her. As the sisters wait anxiously back at the party, a figure in a red hood falls helplessly from the trees. The concerned sisters all back the hood, revealing the fanged man has taken the place of Laurie.
Laurie dramatically enters the party from another angle, her neck covered in blood. She apologizes for being late, and said she played ‘hard to get” with the fanged man, resulting in him biting her.
The fanged man is revealed to be none other than a confused and terrified Steven Wilkins. As he looks around he realizes that the other men there are dead, and asks incredulously “Who are you people?”
This kicks off a scene where the women begin a swaying, erotic dance, ripping off their clothes to Marilyn Manson’s “Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This).” But they don’t stop at their clothes; they begin to tear away their very flesh, revealing furry, gruesome appendages underneath.
Laurie asks Wilkins to be patient with her, as it’s her first time, as she begins her own transformation into a werewolf.
I recently rewatched this with a newcomer to the film and they did not see this coming either. Looking back, it seems almost obvious, but it really does hold its cards just right until the right moment.
But no matter whether you know the twist, this story kicks ass as a role reversal of predator and prey. The Red Riding Hood costume casts Laurie in the role of prey, and when the fanged man arrives, it seems this is the wolf of the story. But of course we get the role reversal and Wilkins gets the comeuppance he deserves.
The scene ends with a great transition too of Sam sitting amidst this wolf party merely as an observer, with his head cross-dissolving into a full moon fro the next scene as the wolves howl.
Closing
I’ve already addressed the true final stinger of the film with the students from the bus attacking Kreeg.
But before that, there’s a moment that really scratches my brain. In the very opening, we follow a little red wagon down the street in close-up. We see it cross the street and almost get hit by a car.
At the end of the movie, we get to see that scene again from a different angle. As Kreeg steps out on his porch, he looks over to see Wilkins’ son sitting on the front porch, handing out candy, waiting for a father who will never return. And we see Rhonda pass him, pulling a wagon with one lit jack-o-lantern in it. She crosses the street, causing a car to stop. Laurie and her sisters are laughing inside.
And then there’s Sam, at first watching to keep Kreeg in line. Until he sees a couple across the street dressed as a knight and a robot put out a jack-o-lantern early. Bringing us right back to the opening scene.
What a terrific little movie. Nothing scratches that Halloween itch for me quite like this one. What do you think about my rankings? Let me know in the comments below.
