Trick 'r Treat

A quartet of horror stories all set in the same town on Halloween, connected by a weird malevolent little monster disguised as a trick or treater named Sam (for Samhaim!): an elementary school principal who moonlights as a serial killer, a virginal college age girl who runs afoul of some weirdo dressed as a vampire, a group of kids who play a mean prank on a lonely girl and suffer bizarre and gruesome consequences, and a cantankerous old man who learns the true meaning of Halloween. In a novel twist, the movie somewhat cuts between stories instead of simply telling them one after another.

I mentioned before when I watched Trilogy of Terror that I had a soft spot for horror anthologies. Trick 'r Treat is one of the best I've seen in a while, a winning combination of flashy style, gruesomeness, and a heavy dose of dark humor. And I mean it when I say dark, I can't remember another movie that even attempted to mine laughs from a sequence about a child being murdered and buried in a makeshift grave, let alone make such a sequence hilarious. Trick 'r Treat is most comparable to the Tales From the Crypt TV show, playing up the laughs, outlandish violence and crazy twist endings.