Screen Slashers: Serial killers and urban legends in ‘Trick ‘r Treat’
If all goes well, this will be the first of a “Screen Slashers” column I will do once a month. In each one, I will pick a film that features a serial killer or mass murderer and describe the infamous, historical figures they may or may not have been based on. I’m doing this because I love psychopaths and want more excuses to talk about them. Researching which sickos inspired by favorite fictional sickos happens to be a hobby of mine, so why not also write about it? I thought about doing Michael Myers from Halloween since the holiday itself is just around the corner, but I already did a breakdown of Myers about a year ago when I wrote for Hidden Remote and I didn’t feel like doing it again. You can read it here if you want. That being said, I decided on Trick ‘r Treat instead.
Trick ‘r Treat is an anthology horror film released in 2007 that tells five different stories set on Halloween night. They are connected through the presence of Samhain, the literal embodiment of All Hallows Eve, watching over the night. The film deals with the “rules” of Halloween that must be followed, rules that are largely forgotten as respect for the holiday has been thrown out the window. One of the characters observed throughout the film is Steven Wilkins. He may honor the holiday but he’s got a much different problem, his backyard “stinks like a dead whore.”
Steven Wilkins
Despite the presence of the demonically adorable Samhain, the true villains of Trick ‘r Treat are the people. Specifically Mr. Kreeg and Steven Wilkins. Kreeg is responsible for a school bus massacre that, from what I’ve gathered, is not based on real-life events. It was actually inspired by “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” special. So, Steven Wilkins it is. The school principal with a smelly backyard filled with bones.
Played by Dylan Baker, who also co-wrote the script with director Michael Dougherty, Wilkins is a charming local man who happens to be a serial killer. His targets of choice appear to be anyone of convenience, in this case, a few trick-or-treaters and a frightened young woman at a parade. There is a possibility that Wilkins is based on either John Wayne Gacy or Andrei Chikatilo, two sadistic serial killers that primarily targeted children while presenting themselves as “respectable” members of their communities.
Most people already know the name Gacy thanks to the many films and biographies about him. He worked as “Pogo the Clown” at children’s events and would often lure them over while still in costume, prompting him to be known as the “Killer Clown”. Meaning, don’t blame Stephen King for killing the clown industry, Pennywise didn’t come around until eight years after Gacy’s arrest. He was put to death on May 10, 1994, for torturing, raping, and murdering an estimated 33 boys. Burying their bodies in the crawl space of his house. Despite the high body count, hardly anyone suspected Gacy of anything, even though he was arrested and convicted of sexual assault in 1968, and then two more times in 1971. His final arrest was in 1978. To put it bluntly, it really shouldn’t have been that much of a surprise that he was a serial killing rapist. I can’t speak for the family, but how did they not know there were bodies in the house? According to his sister, the house always smelled a bit musty but apparently, no one thought enough to question it. “When [he and his second wife] moved in, there was always this kind of musty smell,” she [Karen Gacy] says. “In later years, he kept saying that there was water standing under the house and he was treating it with lime [and] that’s what the mold smell was.”
Though greatly diluted, Steven Wilkins of Trick ‘r Treat shares many similarities with Gacy including killing children, having a child of his own, and burying bodies on his property. In particular, the cheerful creepiness emitting from the character feels very Gacy.
Another killer that could have gone into Wilkins’s creation is Andrei Chikatilo, “The Rostov Ripper” or “Red Ripper” who sexually assaulted, murdered, and mutilated at least 52 women and children between 1978 and 1990 in Russia. Chikatilo’s crimes, although sexual in nature, were primarily motivated by rage. He was just a walking flesh suit filled with hate and resentment.
Chikatilo grew up during WWII and was forced to witness the horrors of war at a very young age. He lived through the Nazi occupation of Ukraine that forced his family into underground hideouts. His father was at war, leaving just him and his mother, sometimes completely homeless. It’s been theorized that Chikatilo’s mother had been raped by a German soldier sometime during the war as she suddenly got pregnant and gave birth to a daughter. A rape that many believed Chikatilo had witnessed.
Naturally, Chikatilo grew up to have a great deal of emotional and psychological issues. To the point where murder and violence became therapeutic for him, a way to purge the rage. He didn’t seem to have a preference regarding gender, or even age, which is unusual among pedophiles, and often serial killers in general, suggesting he likely chose children because of his own stunted mentality, and for convenience. Anything alive would do.
This is exactly the case with Steven Wilkins who doesn’t pick and chose an exact target but simply killed anyone he might get ahold of.
Death by candy
Death by candy becomes one of Wilkins’s methods of murder, which fits right into the Halloween theme. As mentioned above, one of the running themes of Trick ‘r Treat is honoring the “rules” of Halloween, including checking for tampered candy. Anyone who has ever trick-or-treated knows this rule and remembers how annoying it was. We all remember our parents demanding we hand over our buckets and pillowcases of goodies that we spent all night collecting so that they could check it for open wrappers, because according to them and the news, there was always some wacko just waiting to put arsenic or razor blades into your Snickers.
This is actually one of my personal issues with the holiday, or with the misconceptions of it. The way so many people continue to associate it with violence, murder, and Devil crap.
Parents worry. It’s part of being a parent, but everyone seems to go a bit overboard about Halloween. It’s a Kentucky Fried Mouse situation, a story no one has experienced firsthand but they know a guy who knows a guy who knew someone that it happened to. Despite all the stories about poisoned candy, there’s only been one recorded case of it actually happening, and it wasn’t random at all.
In 1974, a man named Ronald Clark O’Bryan poisoned several Pixy Stixs with potassium cyanide that he distributed to five children, including his own son and daughter. After the other children went home, O’Bryan’s son Timothy asked to eat some of his candy before bed, unfortunately choosing the Pixy Stix. He died less than an hour later. It turns out that the O’Bryan family was drowning in debt and Ronald had murdered his son in order to collect the life insurance policy. He’d hoped to collect the policy on his daughter as well but after what happened to Timothy, all candy was confiscated by the unknowing mother.
This is primarily where the myth of tampered candy comes from and it was exactly what the pearl-clutching fake Christians crying Devil needed to “prove” their case about the evils of Halloween. A study published in “Threatened Children” by Joel Best in 1993 found no credible accusations of poisoned candy to happen before or after the O’Bryan case. To this day, Best continues looking for cases and has yet to find any.
Early versions of this myth occurred in the form of pranks. Older teens would supposedly insert harmless things in candy or hand out items other than treats to shock children. In Best’s book, he describes how in the early 1950s, some people would heat pennies on skillets then dump them in children’s hands. As for lethal objects such as razor blades being pushed through candy wrappers, roughly 100 cases have been reported since 1958 with over 95% of them turning out to be fake. The ones which turned out to be true were all harmless.
There’s an amazing book by David J. Skal called “Death Makes a Holiday: A Cultural History of Halloween” that explores the candy myth in-depth.
This just in, this year’s candy fear is cannabis! Police are warning parents about candy masquerading as edibles in states where marijuana is legal.
To a lot of fans, this is the film that killed the franchise. It says a lot that the next installment is yet another retcon. Halloween VI: The Curse of Michael Myers attempts to explain Michael’s unrelenting evil, which lead to mixed opinions from longtime fans. There are two cuts of the film, theatrical vs producer’s. For a lot of people, the latter is the only one worth mentioning. Aiming to be as accurate as possible, I will be talking about the producer’s cut. Let’s begin!
Plot
We start Halloween VI with a six-year time jump from part five. Jamie is now barefoot and recently pregnant, running away from Michael as he wants her baby. While she manages to hide the little one away, Michael finally gets his hunger satiated by killing her. The moment is one of the most brutal ways in the franchise up until that point. Rest in peace, Jamie, you held your ground for as long as you could, the sequels were just too relentless.
The movie then cuts to a whole different scene going on. We have a new family living in the Myers house and their youngest child is hearing voices telling him to kill his loved ones. Tommy Lloyd is watching the family, played by none other than Paul Rudd in his first-ever theatrical role. Tommy still carries trauma from the events all those years ago when Laurie Strode was babysitting him. So when he finds Jamie’s baby, his part in the story becomes even more essential.
Dr Loomis also stars in what was Donald Pleasance’s final role before his passing. He and Tommy try to stop Michael once and for all before the cycle can repeat itself. As it turns out, Michael is a victim of a druid cult which makes him want to kill his family members every Halloween. Thorn, the cult in question, thinks they can control Michael and make him do their bidding. This results in catastrophe and Michael goes berzerk and kills all the cult members. Once again, it’s one of the most gruesome montages for the franchise up until that point.
Tommy and Kara are left to face Michael on their own which they manage to do with some corrosive liquid and good luck. However, nothing stays dead in this franchise as it’s soon revealed Michael somehow escaped and this time Dr Loomis might not be so lucky…
Overall thoughts
I would say for me personally Halloween VI definitely ranks somewhere near the bottom. The whole point of Michael is that there is no rhyme or reason to his killings and this film tries to go against that. I am glad the mistake was rectified by the upcoming installment. There were still some good things about it, such as Paul Rudd’s acting that reveals some raw talent as far as I’m concerned, as well as some direction choices and musical score. However, I also think it absolutely deserves all the criticism that it gets.
(2.5 / 5)
We’ve reached the final episode of American Horror Stories, season three. After the ups and downs of the season, I didn’t know what to expect. I felt that we were due a big finish, Killer Queens. But I feared we were in for a big letdown.
As it turns out, The Thing Under The Bed was neither.
The story
We begin our story with a little girl named Mary, who is scared of something under her bed. She sneaks out of her room, only to be caught by her father and sent back to sleep. And of course, there is something horrible waiting for her under her bed.
This scene cuts away to a woman named Jillian. She has strange dreams, including one about Mary. But her husband, Mark, doesn’t want to hear about it. He’s only interested in a little lovemaking because he wants a baby. Jillian doesn’t, which makes total sense because she’s already married to one. But her irritation with her childish husband goes away when he goes away. And by goes away, I mean he’s sloppily devoured by something vicious under their bed.
What worked
In short, this episode just worked. The acting was professional and believable. The cinematography and lighting work were wonderful, adding spooky effects and startling moments without impairing visibility.
Best of all, the story was solid. There were no plotholes to be found. Our main character, Jillian, was relatable and sympathetic.
This was maybe my favorite part of the story. I thought Jillian was a remarkably sympathetic character. She was dealt a hand she never asked for, having her husband slaughtered in their bedroom. I don’t think she missed him, so much as she was afraid of the legal ramifications of being caught with literal blood on her hands.
Then, when it would have been safest for her to just lay low and save up for a good defense attorney, she instead goes into unlikely hero mode. She does her best to save people, putting herself in legal and physical danger. It’s hard not to root for her.
It’s also a little hard not to root for the antagonist, too. I don’t want to ruin the twist for you, so I’m going to tread lightly here. But it’s great when you have an antagonist who might be off their rocker, but also maybe has a point.
What didn’t work
I can only really think of one complaint with this episode. And that is how frequently one character says the word Chickadee. And if you’ve seen the episode, you know what I am talking about.
I get it, he has a pet name for his daughter. It’s adorable. It’s meant to convey that the two of them have a healthy loving relationship and I get it. We all get it. Blind monks get it. But the fact remains that no parent on Earth calls their kid by their pet name every single time they speak an individual sentence to them. It was just too damn much.
All in all, this was a good episode. It was a classic story, turned on its head, told by professionals from start to finish. And I hope that if there is another season, we see more stories like this one. But after the efforts put into this season at large, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is the last we see of American Horror Stories.
(4 / 5)
If you’ve watched enough short-form horror anthology shows, you’ll notice that some stories are mainstays. Each show seems to put on the same sort of episodes, with the occasional surprising storyline that we’ve never (or at least rarely) seen before.
Leprechaun was an example of a repeated story—the story of a greedy thief whose punishment far outweighs the crime.
The story
We begin our story in 1841, with a drunk man leaving the bar one late night. He’s distracted by something glowing at the end of the well. When he reaches down for the glowing thing, he falls in. Moments later, he screams.
We then cut to the modern day. The well is still there, and now it’s surrounded by a dying town. In this town lives a young man named Colin. He’s married, his wife is pregnant, and he’s out of work. Like many of his friends.
Desperate for cash, Colin and his friends decide to rob a bank. They put together an Equate version of Ocean’s Eleven, and break in one night. But, of course, they find that the gold is nothing more than bait. And the creature waiting for them is something they never expected.
What worked
The first thing I want to point out is how real this episode felt. At least to anyone currently living in the same small town they grew up in. These characters felt like guys I went to school with. Guys I would see at the bar.
I appreciated the real anger and frustration these characters are feeling. Especially Colin. He’s bitter, and maybe he has a right to be. He did exactly what he was supposed to do to succeed. He went to school and invested in his career, and yet now he’s out of work and struggling to support his family. I probably don’t need to tell you how that feels. Because of this, we can all kind of understand why he was tempted to rob a bank.
I also want to talk about the fact that this was, as I said, an often-explored story. That can be a bad thing, but it can also be a good thing. This story is told over and over because it’s a good story. A relatable story. And there’s nothing wrong with that.
What didn’t work
That being said, this version didn’t try to do much to break out of the mold.
Because we have seen this story so many times, most of us could tell the story themselves. I would have expected something new, or some twist. But, in the end, the story didn’t bring anything new to the discussion.
Maybe because of this, the ending left a lot to be desired. Trapped in the basement of the bank, everyone just sort of stares at everyone else, until the thieves give up. And that’s it. The ending wasn’t scary, shocking, or funny. It was just sad, on multiple levels.
Overall, this was an okay story. It was entertaining, if not surprising. I would compare this episode to homemade macaroni and cheese. Everyone’s got their own version, they’re all pretty good, and none of them are exciting.
There’s just one episode left in this season of American Horror Stories. Let’s hope they’ve saved the best for last.
(3.5 / 5)
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