Film / Tales of Halloween

Tales of Halloween is a 2015 American Horror Comedy Anthology Film. It features ten interlocking stories, all taking place in one neighborhood on All Hallows' Eve, punctuated with commentary from a radio show host (Adrienne Barbeau).

The stories are:

• "Sweet Tooth": Mikey, having just finished trick-or-treating and currently eating his candy, is cautioned by his babysitter Lizzy not to eat all of it. Lizzy and her boyfriend Kyle tell him the tale of Timothy Blake, a boy whose parents regularly forbade him from eating his candy. One Halloween 15 years ago, Timothy discovered that his parents ate the confiscated candy themselves. In a rage, he murdered them, then cut them open and ate the candy in their stomachs. Timothy's murderous spirit, dubbed "Sweet Tooth", roams the neighborhood every Halloween, looking for any candy he can find, even if it is already eaten. Despite warning Mikey that it is only a story, Lizzy and Kyle soon discover that the legend of Sweet Tooth is all too real, especially since they have just finished eating all of Mikey's candy.
• "The Night Billy Raised Hell": Billy Thompson, alongside his older sister Britney and her boyfriend Todd, attempts to begin trick-or-treating early in the afternoon. The teens persuade Billy to egg the house of Mr. Abaddon (Barry Bostwick), a stingy neighbor who has never given away any candy over the years. When he is caught in the act, Billy learns that Mr. Abaddon is the Devil himself, who vows to teach him what a real Halloween prank is. To that end, Mr. Abaddon and Billy go out on a crime spree, tormenting the townsfolk with various morbid and deadly "pranks".
• "Trick": James, Maria, Nelson, and Caitlyn are a group of friends who are spending Halloween lounging around, smoking weed, and handing out candy to trick-or-treaters. Suddenly, Nelson is assaulted and fatally stabbed by a girl dressed as a witch, prompting the group to panic. The others are attacked and killed one by one by various children in costumes, but it would seem that these homicidal children have a certain motive for their actions.
• "The Weak and the Wicked": Alice, Isaac, and Bart, a group of leather-clad sociopaths (Grace Phipps, Booboo Stewart, and Noah Segan), are interrupted from tormenting a kid dressed as a cowboy when they are confronted by a teenager dressed as "The Demon of All Hallow's Eve". Despite warning them that the demon will come for those who harm the weak, the bullies pursue him into a dead end, where they learn that he is a person from their past. When they move into finish the teen off, the bullies end up meeting the real Demon of All Hallow's Eve, who shows them exactly what happens when the wicked torment the weak.
• "Grim Grinning Ghost": Lynn attends her mother's Halloween party, where she tells the story of Mary Bailey, a girl who was mocked all her life for her disfigured appearance whose ghost rises from the grave to take the eyes of anyone who looks at her. After leaving the party, Lynn's car breaks down and she can't call a tow truck, leaving her to walk home by herself. Hearing footsteps and ominous laughter in the distance, Lynn begins believing that her mother's story is true, and that Mary's ghost may be stalking her.
• "Ding Dong": One year ago, Bobbie is left despondent over the fact that she has no children. Her husband Jack tries to cheer her up by dressing their dog as Gretel, but this ends up with Bobbie, who is revealed to (possibly) be a witch, assaulting him into submission. This year, as the two go out to greet trick-or-treaters dressed as Hansel and a witch, Jack grows more and more concerned with his wife's obsession with children. When Bobbie nearly kidnaps a boy who is also dressed as Hansel, things between the couple end up reaching the boiling point.
• "This Means War": Middle-aged Boris (Dana Gould) proudly decorates his house for Halloween, setting up a classic, graveyard themed display. Any trick-or-treaters who attempt to observe his decorations are frightened away by the loud music being blared by his neighbor, Dante, an obnoxious rocker who has set up a morbid, gore-themed display at his own house. Boris asks Dante to turn the music down, but Dante refuses and mocks his decorations. In retaliation, Boris wrecks Dante's sound system, prompting Dante to break the head of Boris's animatronic skeleton. This causes the two to go to war, wrecking each other's decorations and engaging in a fistfight... that leads to a tragic conclusion.
• "Friday the 31st": Deep in the forest, a backwoods slasher with a mask (not that one) pursues his latest victim, a young girl dressed as Dorothy Gale. After he finishes off the girl with a spear through the chest, a UFO suddenly appears overhead. A tiny, costumed alien greets the killer and repeats "Trick-or-Treat!" constantly. Unable to give the alien any candy and annoyed with his constant repetition, the killer ends up crushing the alien with his foot. The alien's remains slither the mouth of the killer's victim, causing her to become possessed. The possessed girl goes after the killer, who discovers that the tables have turned and attempts to fight back.
• "The Ransom of Rusty Rex": Hank and Dutch (Sam Witwer and Jose Pablo Cantillo), a pair of bank robbers, watch as Rusty Rex is let out by his father, millionaire Jebediah Rex, to go trick-or-treating. Seeing the opportunity of a major score, the two criminals kidnap Rusty and hold him for ransom. When they call Rusty's father for their demands, they are shocked to learn that Jebediah doesn't want his son back. It is revealed that Rusty is actually a malicious imp who has actually been holding his "father" hostage for years. Rusty proceeds to attack his kidnappers, leaving the duo scrambling to get rid of him by any means necessary.
• "Bad Seed": Ellen Bishop watches in horror as her husband Ray, who had previously been carving pumpkins in the kitchen, has his head bitten off by a sinister looking pumpkin that escapes out the back door. Detective McNally (Kristina Klebe) is called in to investigate the crime scene, and after some initial disbelief, the forensic team proves to her that the killer was indeed a pumpkin. Police Captain J.G. Zimmerman assigns McNally to track down the monstrous pumpkin before it can cause any more damage to the neighborhood, but discovers that the pumpkin may not be the only member of its kind.

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This film contains examples of:

• Aerosol Flamethrower: In "Trick", one of the murderous children uses an aerosol flamethrower to torch one of the adults.
• An Aesop: "Sweet Tooth" makes sure you know not to gorge on all your candy the night you get it.
• As Herself: Adrianne Curry makes a cameo as herself in "The Night Billy Raised Hell", with Billy and Mr. Abaddon carjacking her.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Caitlyn and her friends are brutally murdered by a group of kids... who wanted to rescue their friend and avenge all the other kids Caitlyn's group murdered for laughs.
  • Alice, Isaac, and Bart — all three of whom are cruel, murderous teens — end up killed when the child of two of their victims summons a supernatural vigilante as revenge.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: "Bad Seed" has a killer pumpkin.
• Bear Trap: Combined with Burning Bag of Poop in "The Night Billy Raised Hell". Billy places a flaming paper bag on the doorstep and rings the bells, but when the householder goes to stomp it out, the bag contains a bear trap that snaps shut on his leg.
• Big Bad:
  • "Sweet Tooth": Sweet Tooth.
  • "The Night Billy Raised Hell": Mr. Abaddon.
  • "Trick": Caitlyn and her friends.
  • "The Weak and the Wicked": Alice.
  • "Grim Grinning Ghost": Mary Bailey.
  • "Ding Dong": Bobbie.
  • "This Means War": Boris.
  • "Friday the 31st": The unnamed killer.
  • "The Ransom of Rusty Rex": Rusty Rex.
  • "Bad Seed": Milo.
• Bigger on the Inside: In "Ding Dong", Bobbie's oven looks normal from the outside, but is large enough inside to take the body of a full grown man. (However, this may be a case of Through the Eyes of Madness.)
• Bloody Hilarious: All over the place, but "Friday the 31st" takes it to the logical extreme.
• Book Ends: "Bad Seed" serves as this for the film, as it brings together elements from the previous stories. Lynn's "hysterical blindness" from "Grim Grinning Ghost", Boris and Dante's fistfight from "This Means War", Mordecai's crime spree from "The Night Billy Raised Hell", and the UFO from "Friday the 31st" are mentioned in reports that Captain Zimmerman shows to McNally. A pair of officers also mention to McNally that Mikey from "Sweet Tooth" had been arrested for supposedly killing his babysitter.
• Burning Bag of Poop: Combined with Bear Trap in "The Night Billy Raised Hell". Billy places a flaming paper bag on the doorstep and rings the bell, but when the householder goes to stomp it out, the bag contains a bear trap that snaps shut on his leg.
• The Cameo: All over the place, considering that the film carries an all-star cast. Examples include:
  • In "Sweet Tooth", Mikey's parents are revealed to be Greg Grunberg and Clare Kramer, reprising their characters from Big Ass Spider!.
  • As mentioned above, Adrianne Curry appears As Herself in "The Night Billy Raised Hell", with Billy and Mr. Abaddon stealing her car.
  • "The Weak and the Wicked" has Jack Dylan Grazer play the kid dressed as a cowboy who the bullying trio torment in the alley. He also plays Jimmy Henson's younger self in a flashback.
  • In "Grim Grinning Ghost", Barbara Crampton, Lisa Marie Smith, Mick Garris, and Stuart Gordon are guests at Lynn's mother's Halloween party.
  • In "This Means War", [adult swim] voice actor Andy Merrill is among the neighbors who watch Boris and Dante's fistfight.
  • "The Ransom of Rusty Rex" has John Landis play Rusty's "father" Jebediah Rex.
  • "Bad Seed" has John Savage play police captain J.G. Zimmerman and Joe Dante as Prof. Milo Gottleib, creator of the super-pumpkin.
• Captain Ersatz: The slasher from "Friday the 31st" is a big deformed man wearing a mask and wielding a machete, a dead ringer for Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th series. Heck, Just look at the title.
• Cat Scare: In "Grim Grinning Ghost", Lynn has arrived home safely and is brushing her teeth: having almost convinced herself that the ghost was just a figment of her imagination. Suddenly the bathroom door swings open and she looks round in panic, only to discover that her dog has just pushed the door open.
• Chainsaw Good: In "Friday the 31st", the killer uses a chainsaw to cut off Dorothy's arm during their final fight.
• Child Eater: Bobbie, from "Ding Dong," spends the entire segment trying to get a child to eat. It is kept ambiguous whether this is literal or metaphorical.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: The main characters of "Trick" are revealed to be serial torturers of children.
• Dangerous Key Fumble: In "Grim Grinning Ghost", Lynn runs up to her front door, convinced that she is being chased by a ghost. As she attempts to unlock the door, she fumbles and drops her house keys.
• Dark Is Not Evil:
  • The Demon of All Hallow’s Eve is a monstrous being that looks like something fresh out of Hellraiser and Silent Hill, but he is also a punisher of the guilty.
  • The creepy children are Ax-Crazy killers who cut down the homeowners on Halloween night. Its later revealed that the creepy kids were Good All Along and were hunting down the homeowners who were revealed to be sadistic child murderers.
• Denser and Wackier: "The Night Billy Raised Hell" is definitely one of the most comedic stories of the film, with Mr. Abaddon and Mordecai pulling off various morbid pranks on the townspeople, punctuated with wacky cartoon sound effects.
• Disproportionate Retribution:
  • Sweet Tooth began his evil career by murdering his parents for eating all his Halloween candy.
  • Mr. Abaddon frames Billy for a killing spree because the kid egged his house.
  • Boris is upset that his new neighbor outshined him in Halloween decoration and is playing loud music during a party, so he destroys his property and assaults him, ending in both getting impaled on a sharp piece of wood.
• Domestic Abuse: Bobbie in "Ding Dong" regularly smacks and beats her husband. It's not clear if this is because she really is a monstrous witch, or if that's how Jack sees her as because of her abuse, but either way he's terrified of her . He got a vasectomy behind her back because he knew she'd be just as harmful towards any child they might have.
• Downer Ending:
  • "The Night Billy Raised Hell": Billy is released from his bounds and shot dead by the police for the crimes he was framed for.
  • "Grim Grinning Ghost": Our heroine manages to get home and escape the ghost trying to remove her eyes... who's on her couch.
  • "This Means War": What starts out as a comedic battle over haunted attractions ends with a murder-suicide.
• Escalating War: "This Means War" is about a war between neighbors over Halloween decorations that gets completely out of hand.
• Evil All Along: The lead characters in "Trick" are actually psychopaths who kidnap and torture children, and what the trick-or-treating kids are doing to them is part of a rescue mission to save their current victim.
• Evil vs. Evil: In "Friday the 31st", a Hillbilly Horrors Serial Killer faces off against the possessed corpse of one his victims which has been reanimated by an alien with a taste for human flesh.
• Extremely Short Timespan: Covers the events of one Halloween, combined with a couple of short flashbacks.
• Foreshadowing: The main characters in "Trick" discuss how a lot of kids are dressed as pirates for Halloween, with one joking they might all be missing eyes. It turns out they've been torturing kids by cutting their eyes out, making the joke especially heinous.
• For Halloween, I Am Going as Myself: In "The Night Billy Raised Hell", Mr. Abaddon is horned demon. On Halloween night, he strolls the street with his horns out, with everyone assuming that he is in costume.
• Greek Chorus: Adrienne Barbeau plays a radio DJ whose comments provide a strangely appropriate commentary to events going on in the town, despite not knowing what is happening outside the studio.
• The Hero Dies: "Ding Dong": Jack is shoved in the oven after his wife learns he had a vasectomy.
• Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: Halloween.
• Human Jack-O-Lantern: In "Friday of 31st", the Serial Killer has mounted the head of one of his victims inside a jack-o'-lantern.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: "This Means War" ends with Boris and Dante both impaled on a broken wooden stake in Boris' front yard.
• Louis Cypher: In "The Night Billy Raised Hell", Cranky Neighbor Mr. Abaddon turns out to be the Devil himself. Abaddon is the name of the angel of the bottomless pit in the Book of Revelation, whom some scholars identify as Satan.
• Machete Mayhem: At the start of "Friday the 31st", the Serial Killer is wielding a machete as a Shout-Out to Friday the 13th.
• Man-Eating Plant: The monster in "Bad Seed" is a self-mobile, man-eating pumpkin.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: "Ding Dong". It is unclear whether Bobbie truly is a demonic witch who wants to eat children, or if this is a metaphorical visual trick to show that she is really just an abusive and unstable woman who wants to be a mother, her appearance as a child-eating witch representing the abusive mother she would definitely be to a child.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: In "Ding Dong", Bobbie sprouts several extra arms in her Wicked Witch persona and uses them to attack Jack.
• Murder by Cremation: In "Ding Dong", Jack is shoved inside the flaming oven—which is much larger on the inside than it has any right to be—by his wife after she learns he has had a vasectomy.
• My Car Hates Me: In "Grim Grinning Ghost", Lynn's car (which has already been described as 'a piece of crap') stalls out when she has stop suddenly on her drive home, and refuses to start again, forcing her to walk the rest of the way home. On her walk, Lynn becomes convinced that something is following her.
• Needle in a Stack of Needles: In"Bad Seed", the man-eating jack-o'-lantern hides from Detective McNally in a display of jack-o'-lanterns.
• Our Demons Are Different: These are Horned Humanoid monsters who can take more human forms and love murder. However, despite that descriptor, they aren't Always Chaotic Evil. Some are vigilantes who bring Karmic Death on the wicked.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: These are homicidal beings who resemble rotting corpses and will do anything to achieve their goals.
• Pity the Kidnapper: In "The Ransom of Rusty Rex", two kidnappers abduct what they believe to be the son of a millionaire. However, their victim actually turns out to be a malicious goblin that has been plaguing the millionaire's life for years. Now that it is gone, he has no intention of ever taking it back.
• The Public Domain Channel: The film consistently uses the old horror standby of Night of the Living Dead (1968).
• Pyromaniac: Alice in "The Weak and the Wicked" likes to burn things. When first encountered she about to burn the lost trick-or-treater with her cigar; she later douses the Stranger in high-proof alcohol and tries to light him up; and a flashback shows that, as a child, she killed the Stranger's parents by burning down their caravan with them inside.
• Real After All: In "The Weak and the Wicked", Alice and her gang of bullies discover too late that the Demon of All Hallows Eve the stranger claimed to have summoned is actually real.
• Rewatch Bonus: There are a lot of subtleties in "Trick" that are picked up on a lot easier after The Reveal.
• Shear Menace: During her showdown with the killer in "Friday the 31st", Dorothy stabs him in the neck with a pair of scissors.
• Shout-Out: The candy that is left for "Sweet Tooth" is a Carpenter Bar.
• Sinister Shiv: In "The Night Billy Raised Hell", a dentist gives Billy a toothbrush instead of candy. Mr. Abaddon sharpens the toothbrush into a shiv, and then sends Billy back to the dentist's door, where Billy stabs the dentist to death.
• Strapped to an Operating Table: In "Trick", the little girl who is missing an eye has been taped to the table that Catlyn and her friends are using as an operating table for their perverted experiments.
• Teens Are Monsters: In "The Wicked and the Weak", Alice and her gang torture and murder people For the Evulz. However, a flashback shows that they were like this even when they were children.
• Too Dumb to Live: The adults in "Trick" don't try to call the police for help and one stupidly leaves the house to start her car, leaving her open for the other kids. Of course, this is because if the police came, they'd find out about the pool house being used by the four to torture children. The last member of the group is shown considering dialing 911, but instead opts to delete the photos of her and her friends carving up a young boy's eyes.
• To Serve Man: The twist of "Friday the 31st" is that the alien is trick-or-treating for human flesh.
• Troubling Unchildlike Behaviour:
  • The murderous children in "Trick" attack and kill the homeowners silently and with no expression on their faces, using a variety of weapons including knives and an Aerosol Flamethrower. However, the kids are actually the good guys, attacking a gang of Serial Killers to rescue one of their friends. Their behavior is still creepy and unsettling.
  • In the flashback in "The Wicked and the Weak", Alice and her gang are shown as children, casually watching as two people burn to death in a fire that she set.
• Vigilante Man:
  • "Trick": The murderous children are revealed to be vigilantes going after the main characters, who are serial child torturers.
  • "The Weak and the Wicked": The Demon of All Hallow's Eve acts as a supernatural vigilante, bringing vengeance on all who harm anybody who performs the ritual to summon him.
• Villain Protagonist
  • "Trick": The main characters are revealed to be serial child torturers.
  • "This Means War": Boris is a controlling, sexist prick who resorts to property damage, assault and murder-suicide over his neighbour's haunted attraction overshadowing his own.
  • "Friday the 31st": This segment follows an unnamed backwoods Serial Killer.
  • "The Ransom of Rusty Rex": Hank and Dutch are two bank robbers who have taken up kidnapping.
• Vomiting Cop: When the cops arrive to find Boris and Dante Impaled with Extreme Prejudice in "This Means War", one of them immediately throws up.
• Would Hurt a Child: "Trick" reveals the main characters are a bunch of psychopaths who kidnap children and torture them by removing their eyes.
• The X of Y

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