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(How Do YOU Halloween?) The Rules of Samhain in TRICK 'R TREAT

By. Bee Delores

 

Writer/director Michael Dougherty manifests the very spirit of Halloween with Sam (Quinn Lord) in his 2007 film TRICK ‘R TREAT–and I only now realized that Sam must be short for Samhain. All Hallow’s Eve pre-dated Christianity and “celebrated on the one night between autumn and winter when the barrier between the living and the dead was thinnest,” Rhonda (Samm Todd) tells her friend Chip (Alberto Ghisi), “and often involved rituals that included human sacrifice.”

Of course, there’s far less human sacrifice these days and continuing rituals have simply evolved. Whether you go trick-or-treating, hand out candy, marathon horror favorites, or perform some witchcraft, Samhain remains a special holiday where the strange are honored. There are no wrong ways to do Halloween. Dougherty’s TRICK ‘R TREAT not only delightfully relishes Samhain traditions, but it also supplies some very important rules.

 

Perfect Anthology Structure

The perfect anthology film still serves as the benchmark by which all others shall be judged. Hell comes out to play in Warren Valley, Ohio, much like in Devil’s Kettle in Diablo Cody’s Jennifer’s Body released two years later. There’s something cursed about small U.S. towns where ghouls, witches, and other sorts of peculiar creatures lurk in the shadows and slither into the silver moon when darkness falls. TRICK ‘R TREAT presents its four stories as interconnected occurrences that also stand on their own two gnarled stubs and feed into one another, showing how one person’s actions are dominoes in a great, more horrifying game.

Tales of a wanna-be vampire, werewolves, kid mutants, and a maddening serial killer create a disturbing sense of the darkest parts of human existence. “We’re all afraid of the darkness within ourselves,” warns Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) in Rick Rosenthal’s Halloween II (1981). It’s a sick and twisted nature that often becomes what we should fear the most, and in TRICK ‘R TREAT, Dougherty draws parallels between fantastical beasts and the very real terror in suburban life.

Allegory for the Queer Experience

“Surprise Party” tells the bloody tale of a group of young women with a deadly secret. Laurie (Anna Paquin), a self-proclaimed “virgin,” dresses up as Little Red Riding Hood for the Halloween festivities, which involve her and her friends getting dates for a party in the woods. If these clues didn’t give it away, they are werewolves and plan to sacrifice men. While her sister Danielle (Lauren Lee Smith) and friends Maria (Rochelle Aytes) and Janet (Moneca Delain) go on ahead, Laurie stays behind to find her date.

Her search leads her to Steven in a vampire costume, and she lures him into their secluded afterparty. Dropped from a tree, Steven meets a gruesome end as Laurie and her friends tear away their skin and become who they were always meant to be. This story, in particular, embodies the queer experience–of finding your identity that feels comfortable and right. When I was growing up in a tiny West Virginia town, I felt othered and fated to burn in all eternity for just being who I was. And I didn’t exactly have words for it either. Being trans or non-binary was something rarely ever represented in popular media. If it was, it was treated as a punchline. 

I’m reminded of an episode of Will & Grace, titled “An Affair to Forget.” During a bachelor party for Rob (Tom Gallop), who’s marrying Ellen (Leigh-Allyn Baker), both friends of Will (Eric McCormack) and Grace (Debra Messing), Will hires a female stripper. No one else at the party will allow her to give them a lap dance except for Jack. When she does, Jack becomes surprisingly aroused and questions his sexuality. Turns out, the female stripper is trans and hasn’t undergone bottom surgery yet. The episode treats the character like a joke, further othering the trans community.

A film like TRICK ‘R TREAT with subtext around werewolves positions the story as innately a queer one. The journey to discovering and embracing one’s queerness is never a linear one, and it looks different for everyone. But what I feel when watching this segment is that I’m seen, heard, and accepted. There’s also an incredible amount of respect during the big reveal. We see Sam nonchalantly perched on a nearby log, simply watching the bloodbath. Given the nature of the film and its rules (see below), the film underscores the different and the othered, also evidenced through the “Halloween School Bus Massacre” story.

Rule of Samhain #1

 

Keep your jack o’lantern lit until midnight.

We open on a couple coming home from a Halloween parade downtown. Emma (Leslie Bibb) hates all things magical while her husband Henry (Tahmoh Penikett) adores all things ancient and scary. When Emma starts to blow out their jack o’lantern, he stops her and shares the first rule on this list. Folklore has it that the holiday’s central symbol protects you from evil. If you dare to extinguish the flame before midnight, you invite bad luck and monsters to torture you the next Samhain. 

“It’s Halloween, not Hanukkah,” Emma scoffs, the candle dissipating with a solitary puff. From across the street, Sam notices her blasphemous disrespect and sets his eyes on teaching her a lesson. He tackles her with a ghost’s sheet before severing her limbs and stuffing a broken lollipop into her mouth. Much like Michael Myers, he likes to be playful with his horrifying displays, setting up her body parts as additional Halloween decorations for Henry to discover. If only Emma had shown just an ounce of respect for Samhain, she wouldn’t have met such a grisly end–but it’s ultimately an appropriate, much-deserved death.

 

Rule of Samhain #2

 

Respect the dead.

Principal Steven Wilkins sees a young kid named Charlie (Brett Kelly) smashing pumpkins and stealing candy from his porch. “It's okay,” he says with a sly smile. “Believe it or not, I was just like you when I was a kid till my dad set me straight, that is.” His father taught him that Samhan is “about respecting the dead,” he continues, “because this is the one night that the dead and all sorts of other things roam free – and pay us a visit.”

He adds, “All these traditions–jack-o'-lanterns, putting on costumes, handing out treats–were started to protect us, but nowadays... no one really cares.

The commercialization of the sacred of all sacred holidays turned honoring the dead into a night of frolic, as Winifred Sanderson laments in Hocus Pocus. Growing up in the mid-2000s, Charlie had no real awareness or understanding of Samhain, so much so that he destroyed jack o’lanterns for his amusement and took more than one piece of candy. His actions were nothing short of sacrilegious. 

By smashing every single pumpkin, he beacons evil, coming in the form of Steven and his son Billy (Connor Levins). Just like Sam, Steven enforces this rule by chopping off Charlie’s head and helping Billy with the eyes using a large butcher’s knife. Respecting the dead is an easy enough rule to follow, yet so few people actually do it.

Speaking of the Sanderson sisters, Bee Delores recently defended HOCUS POCUS in our How Do YOU Halloween? series, exploring how the 1993 favorite celebrates community and resilience beneath all that witchy chaos. Winifred Sanderson might not approve of what Halloween has become, but Bee certainly has a few things to say in its defense.

 

Rule of Samhain #3

 

Cherish the innocent.

While honoring the dead, Samhain is also about cherishing the life we’re given. In the “Halloween School Bus Massacre” segment, the bus driver murders a group of ostracized kids, wearing various costumes like Dracula, when he drives the bus over the edge of a cliff. The children’s parents have been ashamed of them for a very long time and conspire to kill them all in one full swoop. The driver, who we come to learn is Mr. Kreeg (Brian Cox), Steven’s curmudgeon neighbor, gets his due when Sam shows up and brutally attacks him. Sam sets the stage for the walking corpses of the kids to come back to pay him a little visit.

 

Mr. Kreeg sacrificed innocent children all because the parents hated them. While historians claim that Samhain is rooted in human sacrifice and that the “hills ran red,” as Conal Cochran describes in his menacing villain speech in Halloween III: Season of the Witch, there is no verifiable proof in Celtic folklore. It’s simply a myth. Samhain, which honors the dead, also cherishes human life. It’s a celebration of the two inevitable cycles of humanity. We live, and we die. And that’s it.

The traditions in TRICK ‘R TREAT remind us that Halloween has always been about our relationship with death and the things we don't quite understand. Ray Bradbury understood that better than most, filling his stories with the strange magic of October and the fears that follow us from childhood into adulthood. In another How Do YOU Halloween? essay, Professor Horror explores why Bradbury will always be the voice of Halloween and how his writing shaped a lifelong fascination with horror.