Delayed Reaction: Tales of Halloween

Premise: An anthology of playful Halloween-inspired stories.

 

For horror anthology Reactions I like to break up the different segments into little mini responses. I'm won't be doing that for Tales of Halloween for a couple reasons. First, there are too many of them: 10, I believe. Second, I didn't like enough of them to be worth the effort. I get excited about any horror anthology that I hear about, because it means a list of horror filmmakers I could discover. It worked well for the V/H/S movies, which introduced me to many of my favorite names in horror now. Tales of Halloween wasn't as rich with discovery.

 

I'm not a huge fan of playful horror. For horror comedy to work for me, the jokes have to be really good. Otherwise, the playfulness tends to deflate the stakes too much. I often say that I'm all about mood horror: a creeping sensation that I can't shake for a while after the movie. When a horror anthology mixes the playful with the serious, the spell is broken. That's why the V/H/S series is so irresistible to me. They are all serious (in the first two, at least). Tales of Halloween mixes more and the results are more lackluster. The immediate comparison is Trick r' Treat. It's also a horror anthology with some humor and the same "Halloween night in the burbs" premise. I think why I prefer Trick r Treat a lot more is that it has a single writer/director. The film is tighter and more consistent. Even if the comedy breaks the spell, it does feel all of one vision. Tales of Halloween is clearly made by different filmmakers all hitting different tones. The more I think about it, producers really make horror anthologies work or not, and I question the producers of Tales of Halloween's control over the project.

 

That's not to say the film was without merit. I think many of the shorts are very clever. I like the spiritually similar twists of The Night Billy Raised Hell and The Ransom of Rusty Rex. Bad Seed ends the movie on a great note with them starring down the potentially dangerous pumpkin patch. Trick has a really fun flip of the story too. These do feel a lot like the filmmakers each made their segments how they wanted then turned them into the producers to combine them as they wanted. There are only a couple notes of interconnectedness. This is a waiting room movie though. Like, if there was a horror equivalent to the linear HBO channel, when a movie would end at 4:45 and the next one wasn't scheduled until 5, they'd sometimes put on filler content. These shorts would work best there. I preferred them all alone much more than as a film.

 

Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend