Trick 'r Treat (2007)

Trick 'r Treat arrives as a relic from a more innocent era of horror, which is to say 2007, when a filmmaker could assemble four interlocking stories about poisoned candy, drowned children, and werewolves without anyone demanding a thesis statement. Michael Dougherty's anthology concerns itself almost entirely with the enforcement of Halloween etiquette, a subject carrying no discernible social freight. Sam, the burlap-sacked enforcer in orange footie pajamas, punishes those who blow out jack-o'-lanterns early or withhold candy from strangers. This is folklore policing, not moral instruction, and the film seems content to leave it there.

The cast includes a few performers of color, who drift through the proceedings as serial killers, werewolves, and assorted victims without the screenplay ever acknowledging them as anything but horror archetypes. There is no romantic or thematic space for anyone outside a conventional heterosexual arrangement. The werewolf segment, in which a group of women shed their skin and devour their male dates, offers a flicker of inversion, though it reads as genre mechanics more than argument. Bodies here are dismembered, devoured, and arranged as decoration, which is to say the film holds no position on bodily acceptance beyond the position that bodies make excellent props for mayhem.

A segment invokes institutional cruelty toward disabled children, then uses them as lake-dwelling zombies, a choice that resists any affirmative reading. The film has no interest in climate, capital, or the reinterpretation of history. The remainder is a tight, playful tribute to seasonal dread, competently assembled and entirely unconcerned with the cultural questions of a decade it did not live to see. We classify it accordingly, with the mild respect owed to any artifact that knows precisely what it is.