Sweet With Teeth: An Interview With Trick ‘r Treat Director Mike Dougherty [Part 1]

 
Halloween may be fun, but it isn’t always fair – why else would crappy little boxes of raisins exist? And sometimes you have go to a lot of houses giving out those nasty little rectangular killjoys, or packages of stale gumballs, or those weird barf-coloured toffees in the orange wrappers, in order to hit the jackpot and find the house on the block doling out full-sized O’Henry bars.

Similarly, there are an awful lot of terrible horror films out there, but there are all kinds of gems if you take the time to look. One of the best horror films of the year is Michael Dougherty’s Halloween-themed Trick ‘r Treat, recently released on DVD and Blu-Ray by Warner. The movie is legendary among genre fans that saw the trailer debut years ago, before 300, and then puzzled as it was pushed back indefinitely. Finally, after a gangbusters festival run, it got dumped to home video – despite the fact that it’s had an overwhelmingly positive reaction from fans and critics; it’s got name stars, such as Anna Paquin, Dylan Baker and Brian Cox and it’s a wonderfully colourful, cinematic big screen film perfect to give crowds an alternative to Saw. Meanwhile… the Scary Movies keep on coming to theatres.

Sigh…

The less you know about the plot of Trick ‘r Treat, the better, because the film is full of surprises. Here’s what else you do need to know, however: it’s an anthology-style film, much like Creepshow, in which four intertwining stories all taking place in the same town on Halloween night unfold, involving a variety of monsters, madmen and bloody mayhem, but also a lot of humour. It’s an instant Halloween classic and when you see it – and you’d better see it, pal – you’ll wonder just how Trick ‘r Treat didn’t go theatrical.

I got to take part in a round-table interview with writer/director Dougherty (who also co-wrote the first two X-Men films and Superman Returns) at this year’s San Diego ComiCon, where he explained some of the reasons the film got shafted, talked about his own Halloween obsessions and described the nostalgic world he was trying to create.

Here’s part one of that interview:

How did Trick ‘r Treat come about?

“I did the short film [version] at NYU, which was my senior thesis. And that was the introduction of the character Sam, this kind of creepy trick ‘r treater. I have an unhealthy obsession with Halloween. … I grew up loving the holiday, mostly because my birthday was right around the same time; I was born on the 28^th of October, Halloween’s the 31^st, so my birthdays tended to be trick ‘r’ treating parties. Might as well kill two birds with one stone, so, yeah, had the friends over, dressed up in costume, went out trick ‘r’ treating, came back, ate candy. October was always a magical month for me growing up.”

Tell us about the world that Trick ‘r Treat takes place in.

“Well, it’s set in a fictional town in Ohio – the state I grew up in. Time period-wise we try to keep it mostly non-specific; you’re not ever going to see characters Googling information on Halloween. The biggest piece of modern technology we have is one cellphone in the entire movie. We wanted to do everything we could to not date the film. Even the costumes are very non-specific. With the kids’ masks, we tried to echo those cheap Halloween masks you got while growing up, from Woolworths or Wal-Mart or whatever – they came in a crappy box, but they’re creepy as hell. You put them on a kid and let them wander around the street and it’s unnerving. … There’s something about not being able to see the whites of the kids’ eyes that’s really creepy.”

You really mix humour and horror in this film, which doesn’t happen very much these days; is that part of the reason this film was a tough sell to the studio?

“It’s difficult. Even Sam Raimi, who did it in Drag Me to Hell – which I loved, I loved that movie – it was hard to get audiences to accept the idea. I grew up watching Evil Dead and Nightmare on Elm Street, which is hilarious – it’s a funny movie if you sit down and watch it. [Switches momentarily to Freddy Krueger voice] ‘No running in the halls!’  Poltergeist is hilarious too. I don’t what it is, if it’s a generation of executives that are terrified of the combining the two. A lot times there are these unspoken mandates in the industry from studio to studio of ‘Oh, that doesn’t work. Marketing! Test demographics!’ Yadda yadda yadda. Or one subgenre becomes successful, so everybody tries to copy it. The last time we had this happen was with Scream. So we had Scream and I Know What You Did Last Summer and we had a lot of copy-cat films. Honestly, it led to a backlash. It led to ‘torture porn’ to wash away ironic horror. Hopefully humour horror will come back.”

More specifically, why did this film get held up for so long?

“Yeah, I was in labour for a while. You have to remember that Warner Brothers is a big tent pole studio; they have their Harry Potters and their Dark Knights to worry about, so a $12 million horror film isn’t exactly at the top of their priority list. The budget of my movie probably wouldn’t even cover Brad Pitt’s trailer in the Ocean’s movies. It’d just not a big thing. And if you think about it, a lot of our favourite horror movies, a lot of our favourite horror franchises, started as low budget, independent movies. Had they been made in the studio system, I guarantee that they would’ve had the same problem this film had. In the studio system there’s a lot of nervousness, a lot of second or triple guessing as to whether something will work or not. It’s a very fear-driven way of making movies. It takes and independent film to get out there, to break the rules, to be embraced by the public. When [John] Carpenter tried to get Halloween out there, he would show it to studios and they would say that it’s the worst thing they’d ever seen. He had an executive tell him, ‘This is the most un-frightening thing I’ve ever looked at.’ It goes to show what she knew. So I feel like this is the type of film which I feel that – in a way – snuck into a studio, got itself made, and the studio kinda looked at the thing when it came out and said, ‘What the hell is this?’”

What you’re saying is that suits have no clue how to sell something orginal.

“It’s weird, it’s not a formulaic horror film, it’s not ‘Five teenagers get into truck. Drive into wilderness. Get killed off one by one.’ It’s not an easy sell. We’re talking about four separate short stories with easily recognizable villain. There is Sam [the little guy on the movie poster], but he’s not the villain in every story. Lots of twists and turns, and kind of a mish-mash of tones. One story is extremely dark and creepy, one’s a bit lighter. And they cross within the horror genre – one that involves a serial creature, one with creatures – so I think it was just an odd movie for them to try to market. It would’ve cost them another $20 million to market and distribute this film.”

[Watch for Part Two of my interview with Mike Dougherty tomorrow]

-Dave Alexander