For this week’s Midnight Screenings, being that Halloween is upon us and all, here are reviews of three modern would-be Halloween films destined for years of “Midnight” Screenings all throughout the land. 

Ever heard of Creepshow? Well, Trick ‘r Treat certainly has, and it wants you to know it. It’s a quintessential omnibus anthology film, but at the least, its four stories are a little more diegetically connected this time out, all taking place on the same night (naturally, October 31^st). This doesn’t so much sacrifice episodism as it bends it toward the film’s own more leisurely, fluid pace, with characters cavorting about and moving between segments just like the sublime, giddy chaos of Halloween itself.

Essentially, this gives us an anthology film without quite the explicit guiding hand of a narrator or wraparound narrative to explicitly render these stories “fiction”, making this film somewhat more grounded in traditional narrative filmmaking. And if this inter-connectedness doesn’t do much, the connections at least lend a sense of mundane physicality and place to the film’s spooky Halloweenisms. They dial up the assumed realism of the world (where-as most anthology horrors would have a guiding narrative to explicitly render the segments “fiction stories”) so that the general lunatic-terror of the film’s atmosphere invading that realism is that much more loopy. It’s the kind of place that mimics reality only to reveal another layer of uncanny, unstated gruesomeness, as if Halloween night is the true identity and the face of the year around it is just for show. Continue reading →