In short: Tales of Halloween (2015)

This anthology movie takes place during a single night in a US small town with a particularly high death rate on October 31st. The ten segments were directed by eleven more or less well-known horror directors – like Adam Gierasch, Axelle Carolyn, Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall – and feature a horde of horror people of varying prominence in cameos, regular acting bits, and funny make-up.

The film feels first and foremost like a fannish project, so the tone tends to the low-brow, there’s deeply silly – that’s not a complaint – gore aplenty, and the comedic bits won’t scare anyone away with subtlety. This certainly isn’t a Trick’R’Treat with its single director and a unity of tone, style, and theme, but feels more like a bunch of professionals and semi-professionals from a specific scene letting their hair down and having some fun.

For my taste, the film leads off with two of its worst segments – Dave Parker’s “Sweet Tooth” just isn’t very interesting, and Darren Lynn Bousman’s “The Night Billy Raised Hell” is just aggressively unfunny for what’s supposed to be a comedy. Afterwards, Tales of Halloween finds its feet, though. The later segments actually hit the comedic mark they aim at, or have a lot of fun with throwing together classic horror clichés and tropes and twisting them sardonically. There’s even room for slightly more atmospheric (Axelle Carolyn’s “Grim Grinning Ghost” with house favourite Alex Essoe) or substantial yet still fun (Lucky McKee’s “Ding Dong”) fare, leading to some diversity in approach and tone that does the film good. It is also very hard to argue with Neil Marshall’s tale of a man-eating carved pumpkin and the tough female cop hunting it.

So, if a viewer makes it through the first couple of tales, there’s a good chance they’ll have quite a bit of fun with the film, at least on the kind of October night when one is struck for the mood of a film by horror people having fun made for horror people to have fun with.