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.
Smile 2, a psychological supernatural horror, released in October 2024 just in time for Halloween, sees director Parker Finn (Smile, Laura Hasn’t Slept) return with a sequel starring Naomi Scott (Aladdin) as pop star and recovering addict Skye Riley. While Smile 2 boasts a talented cast, it ultimately falls short of its predecessor, offering a familiar storyline with minor variations and a predictable finale. The film attempts to introduce a new method to combat the parasitic ‘Smile Entity’, but this addition fails to elevate the sequel beyond a pale imitation of its chilling predecessor.
The Plot.
Smile 2 begins shortly after the end of the original; just six days after Rose Cotter’s death. During a short interlude scene, we watch as the now cursed Joel attempts to pass the Smile Entity on by killing one criminal in front of another. The plan backfires spectacularly, inadvertently passing the curse onto an innocent bystander named Lewis Fregoli.
The film then shifts gears, introducing Skye Riley, a singer and performer making a triumphant return to the spotlight with a comeback tour after a tumultuous past. During a candid interview on the Drew Barrymore Show, Skye opens up about her struggles with addiction and the devastating loss of her boyfriend in a car accident. Her sobriety journey, however, faces a severe setback when she seeks pain relief from her old high school friend, the unwitting Lewis Fregoli. In a chilling turn of events, Lewis takes his own life while Skye watches, passing the Smile Entity onto her.
Unaware of her new cursed existence Skye gets on with rehearsing for her tour, but she begins to notice that strange things are happening. People are smiling at her in an unnatural way and she becomes the target of anonymous attacks and aggressions. When text messages begin to arrive from an unknown number, Skye decides to get some answers.
Highlights.
Let’s not beat about the bush. I found Smile 2 difficult to finish and was struggling at about the hour-and-a-half mark to stay awake. That being said it’s worth watching because everyone needs to see the 3-minute scene of the ‘smilers’ chasing Skye through her apartment. This was possibly the creepiest thing I’ve seen on a screen. The buildup, the synchronicity of the movement of the actors and their positioning, the camera work, and the lighting. I have rewatched it several times and it doesn’t get old. If you are only interested in watching this, fast forward to the 123-minute mark and get ready to be impressed.
Drawbacks.
Where do I start?
My primary concern with Smile 2 is its striking resemblance to its predecessor. The narrative follows a familiar pattern: an attractive woman fleeing a supernatural force, grappling with hallucinations, experiencing a mental health decline, and culminating in the revelation someone close to Skye was the Smiling Entity after all. This repetitive structure diminishes the film’s impact.
While the introduction of a new method for shedding the entity initially offered a glimmer of hope this concept wasn’t fully realized. It just served to add names to the line of people that the entity has infected in the past.
Furthermore, the film’s pacing suffers from excessive focus on Skye’s musical career. Scenes showcasing her stage rehearsals and music videos, while intended to establish her identity as a performer, feel unnecessary and detract from the narrative momentum. Yes, we understand she’s a performer, you told us, you don’t need to prove it. These scenes appear to artificially inflate the film’s runtime, suggesting a lack of confidence in the core story.
The Final Take.
Ultimately, Smile 2 fails to expand upon the established lore of the franchise. The film’s conclusion feels contrived, with a blatant setup for a third installment. Hopefully, if a ‘Smile 3’ is inevitable, the creative team will bring fresh ideas and avoid simply retreading familiar ground.
(2 / 5)
Both Cthulhu’s granted for that one scene.
We’re back again with Goosebumps The Vanishing, episode two. A story too big for one episode, apparently.
Or, maybe this is just a nod to the fact that Stay Out Of The Basement was a two-part episode in the original 1995 show. Either way, after seeing this episode, we could have kept it to one.
The story
We begin this second episode with Anthony investigating the parasitic plant taking over his body. Rather than, I don’t know, going to the hospital, he’s decided to phone a colleague and send her some samples from the bulb he pulls out of his arm with a handheld garden trowel.
Meanwhile, Devin is having his own worries. He’s haunted by what he saw in the sewers. So, he gets CJ to go with him to investigate. What they find is more of the tendrils of the plant that dragged him down through the manhole last episode.
I sure would have liked to see more about that.
Instead, we see Devin pivot to flirting with a newly single Frankie. Because teenage hormones I guess.
Meanwhile, Trey is having a terrible day. First, his girlfriend leaves him. Then, Anthony breaks his car window.
Needing a way to deal with his frustration, Trey decides to break into the Brewers’ basement. There, he starts wrecking up the place. Until he meets the plant creature and has an unfortunate accident.
What worked
The big difference between this episode and the last is the increased gross-out factor. This episode had some straight-up cringy moments. From the tendrils waiving from Anthony’s arm to the whole goat he brings home to feed his new pet, this episode was skin-crawling gross in the best way possible.
The series is called Goosebumps, after all.
What didn’t work
Unfortunately, that’s where my praise ends. This episode, unlike the last, just wasn’t that great.
To start with, there was a lot of unnecessary drama between characters who are not in danger of being eaten by a plant from the inside out.
I especially disliked the focus on the Frankie/Trey/Devin love triangle.
Now, I don’t hate it. This part of the story adds extra emotional depth to the show. We can see why Trey would be especially incensed by his girlfriend falling for the son of the neighbor he’s feuding with. But it would be more enjoyable if it wasn’t so cliche and dramatic.
I hate the way Trey tried to gaslight Frankie. It makes me dislike him when he should be a sympathetic character. I hate how whiny Devin is every time he talks to Frankie. And I hated the impassioned speech Frankie gives after Devin asks her why she was with Trey.
Listen, I understand what we’re going for here. Devin and Cece are not struggling financially. They’re doing alright, and their new friends here in Gravesend are not. We kind of got that without Frankie claiming that her socioeconomic status is why she’s dating a bully and gaslighter. It felt out of place. It felt like pandering. It certainly didn’t feel like something an eighteen-year-old would say. I hated it.
Finally, there was a moment near the end of the episode that irritated me. I don’t want to give too much detail because I wouldn’t dare ruin an R.L. Stine cliffhanger. But, well, it doesn’t make a lot of sense.
I get that we’re watching a show about a carnivorous plant that is going to wreak havoc on this family and neighborhood. I understand the suspension of disbelief. Some might even say I am a little too generous with it. So I can buy into a teenager being absorbed by a plant and turned into a monstrous version of himself.
I can’t buy into what happens at the end of this episode. It doesn’t make sense with the rules established. It certainly doesn’t make any sort of scientific or logical sense. It is a lazy moment meant to further the storyline but threatens the structural integrity of the season.
All in all, this wasn’t the best episode of Goosebumps. But it’s only the second episode. Honestly, the season has plenty of time to go either way.
(2.5 / 5)
So, this is a convoluted post, not going to lie. Because it’s Thriller Nite. And we have to kick it off with a link to Michael Jackson in homage, because he’s the bomb and Vincent Price is the master… (If the following video doesn’t load properly, you can get there from this link.)
The movie monsters always approach so slowly.
Their stiff joints arcing in jerky, erratic movements
While the camera pans to a wide-eyed scream.
It takes forever for them to catch their victims.
Their stiff joints arcing in jerky, erratic movements
As they awkwardly shamble towards their quarry –
It takes forever for them to catch their victims.
And yet no one ever seems to get away.
As they awkwardly shamble towards their quarry –
Scenes shift, plot thickens, minutes tick by endlessly…
And yet no one ever seems to get away.
Seriously, how long does it take to make a break for it?
Scenes shift, plot thickens, minutes tick by endlessly…
While the camera pans to a wide-eyed scream.
Seriously, how long does it take to make a break for it?
The movie monsters always approach so slowly.
So my father used to enjoy telling the story of Thriller Nite and how he’d scare his little sister, my aunt. One time they were watching the old Universal Studios Monsters version of The Mummy, and he pursued her at a snail’s pace down the hallway in Boris Karloff fashion. Both of them had drastically different versions of this tale, but essentially it was a true Thriller Nite moment. And the inspiration for this poem.
For more fun music video mayhem, check out She Wolf here on Haunted MTL. And feel free to check out more of Jennifer Weigel’s work here on Haunted MTL or here on her website.
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