Why Trick 'r Treat is a Modern Halloween Classic

Since its release in the late 2000s, Trick ‘r Treat has steadily grown in popularity to where it’s not only a huge cult hit, it’s become a Halloween staple, and Trick ‘r Treat’s signature character Sam has become a well-known icon like Freddy Krueger. But Sam, a small figure that covers his head with a burlap sack with two buttons for eyes, is very different from Freddy, much like Trick ‘r Treat, differs from every other Halloween viewing staple. So why did this film steadily grow in popularity and become part of the modern Halloween experience?

There is no shortage of movies you could watch to get in the Halloween spirit, but only a few become standard viewing for Halloween fans. John Carpenter’s Halloween is one, while Hocus Pocus is another. But aside from the fact that they are both films with scary elements that take place on Halloween in the Midwest, Halloween and Trick ‘r Treat have very little in common. The key difference is in tone.  

Beetlejuice is a fun movie. Hocus Pocus is a fun movie. Halloween is not a fun movie. Halloween is superb entertainment and excellent filmmaking, but it’s not a fun movie. It’s a serious film in the vein of other 1970s classics such as Jaws and The Exorcist. This is not surprising, as one of its key influences was the 1960 Hitchcock classic Psycho. The result is a very serious film, that while is certainly a classic, has no interest in being fun. The Scream franchise incorporates far more satire than Halloween, especially in the sequels, but it’s also hard to label the Scream franchise as fun. Like Halloween, the films are certainly entertaining, and the first film is without question a genre game changer, but at their core, these are films that grapple with serious issues in an unflinching way. That ability to satire film tropes and still be incredibly unsettling is not only unique, it’s what makes the Scream franchise unique.   

Trick ‘r Treat is made for adults like Scream or Halloween but has much more fun with both the idea of Halloween and what it represents, like Hocus Pocus does. If Halloween is a tribute to the serious side of what the holiday represents, Trick ‘r Treat revels in embracing the holiday’s unique sense of fun and mischief. Calling the film Trick ‘r Treat is appropriate because it revels in being a fun treat for Halloween lovers. 

The character of Sam is very different from other scary movie antagonists because he’s there strictly to observe and occasionally enforce the rules of Halloween. Not only does this allow for much more creativity when crafting situations he may observe, this makes Sam unique because, unlike the vast majority of scary movie antagonists, he’s sincerely interested in just observing people, and he seems to find it entertaining. But Sam is not only not trying to scare people, he’s also actively trying to celebrate Halloween while he observes. Sam helps illustrate the difference between Trick ‘r Treat and other films because Trick ‘r Treat is an outrageously fun story of how people in a small-town experience and celebrate Halloween, while Halloween is a serious film that explores the idea of evil. 

It’s this sense of fun along with its unique format that allows Trick ‘r Treat to do what Halloween couldn’t do, because when they tried to do something different in Halloween 3 that was separate from Halloween and Halloween 2, the reception Halloween 3 received famously led to the return of Michael Myers in Halloween 4 several years later. 

But the final thing that makes Trick ‘r Treat unique is that it’s not only about how people in a small town celebrate Halloween, it’s about how much the holiday has grown in interest and passion since Halloween was released in 1978. Trick ‘r Treat came out three decades later, and within that time, Halloween became a very different holiday, and it shows. The movie shows how large a role the holiday plays in everyone’s life in the town, regardless of age. It’s also important to note that despite the title and its inherent connection to how children celebrate Halloween, except for Kreeg (Brian Cox), the older characters in Trick ‘r Treat seem to be having the most fun. This means that if Halloween is about the darkness and what comes with it that the holiday was originally founded on, Trick ‘r Treat is about how people have taken that idea and turned it into a unique celebration that transcends age. Sam is both the trick and the treat because he represents both the darkness that Halloween represented in the past and the fun that has emerged from that tradition. This makes it stand out from Hocus Pocus because while both are fun movies, Hocus Pocus brings with it a powerful sense of nostalgia. It may be a more recent film than Halloween, but Hocus Pocus is very much a product of the 1990s, which is a huge part of its unique appeal. Trick ‘r Treat is the first truly modern Halloween classic, which makes it stand out. 

But aside from its originality and creativity, Trick ‘r Treat stands out in one other way, because its anthology format predates the wildly successful television series American Horror Story by only several years. Nor is the format the only thing that they have in common because it’s easy to imagine several of the stories that take place within Trick ‘r Treat being at home in American Horror Story as well. That’s because Trick ‘r Treat takes a modern approach towards Halloween and everything it represents; it doesn’t deny the darkness that Halloween and its predecessors commemorated, but it shows how our understanding and practices have either changed or acquired more nuance. And it does it with a wicked sense of fun.