Give Me Something… Comfortable to Eat: Thoughts on Trick ’r Treat (2009) and Snow Day (2000)

 

This piece contains spoilers for both Trick ’r Treat and the movie Snow Day. It also contains some discussion of depictions of fatphobia and ableism.

Michael Dougherty’s Trick ’r Treat (2009) is a horror-comedy that I have some mixed feelings about. I’ve watched it a few times now—more times than I’ve watched movies I actually like more—so there is clearly something about it that appeals to me. On the other hand, though, I just don’t feel very positively about it. It’s not that I think it’s a bad film because, rewatching it to do this little seasonally-appropriate write-up, I can’t help but notice shots or lines or performances that I like. The horror visuals have held up extraordinarily well also, thanks to good use of practical effects that have a real presence in the movie’s world. That stuff is balanced against some really awkward dialogue in spots and some other issues I’ll get into below, and yet I don’t think the sum total or average of the elements that make up Trick ’r Treat is subpar or anything like that. I personally do prefer the spiritual successor/sequel Krampus (2015), which balances even more tonal modes (comedy, horror, familial warmth and seasonal cheer) in ways that don’t always work, but the end-result does have the distinction of being one of only a handful of films to win me over totally with only its opening moments. If you asked me whether I would prefer to watch Krampus or Trick ’r Treat, I would probably say Krampus. Jennifer’s Body or Trick ’r Treat? Jennifer’s Body. Ditto The Dead Don’t Die. Basically, there are a lot of horror movies (horror-comedies, even) that I actively, consciously prefer to this movie, and yet I keep watching it. I second-guessed this most recent viewing and considered stopping after just the opening segment, but there’s something about Trick ’r Treat that just goes down smooth (or something). Since I keep coming back to it over and over again, I decided to take some time to formally work through my feelings and to try to pinpoint exactly what about Trick ’r Treat does or doesn’t work for me.

First, we have to look at the narrative twists which play such a prominent role in the film. The movie is an anthology affair, though with some intermixing of the stories and some cutting back in forth that makes each tale feel less singular and more like a part of a larger narrative unfolding over the total runtime. This is probably a smart design choice since the common wisdom is that people don’t read short fiction, and I imagine the audience response to a film made up essentially of short stories would have been similarly lukewarm. As it is, everything feels connected a bit more thoroughly, despite each segment having its own particular cast and plot for the most part, thanks to those brief crossovers that create continuity and a sense of a shared world. There is a connection, also, via the way that each story has to have a least one or more major twists along the way.

The twists in Trick ’r Treat are both part of its charm and a very real flaw. Once it becomes clear that no situation in the movie can be taken at face value and that there will always be a twist, some of the tension is removed from the film. There’s an artificiality that creeps in once you recognize the pattern. The movie feels less “real” and more crafted—The nuts and bolts of storytelling become more evident. Aside from the overall pattern of the film’s dependence on twists in general, I also just don’t think some of the specific twists are very good because of their execution. While every aspect of a movie is ultimately crafted to impact the audience, an immersive viewing experience shouldn’t feel that way. There are certain twists in Trick ’r Treat that feel too artificial, where characters do things too clearly for the audience’s benefit and in order to make the twist possible.

In the “Principal” segment, for example, it’s meant to be unclear to the audience whether apparent serial killer Steven Wilkins (Dylan Baker) plans to kill his own son at the end as well. When Steven goes into the house after finally dealing with the corpses buried in his backyard, his annoyingly loud son greets him, and the two head for the basement. Along the way, Steven grabs a knife, seemingly without his son’s knowledge, and conceals the weapon behind his back. We’re shown multiple times that he has the knife concealed so that tension builds going into the final moments of the segment, but this gesture is ultimately pointless. It’s not something Steven actually needs to do since his son is well aware of his serial killing, and the two of them are actually going down to the basement to carve a victim’s head into a jack-o-lantern. At the risk of backseat directing, they could have just had Steven speak somewhat ambiguously to his son as the two go into the basement and then have him pick up the knife from the table down there, keeping the moment where he stabs something unclear until the final reveal as it currently exists in the movie. You’d still get the thrill of being unsure of Steven’s intentions without such a big, stinky, obvious (in retrospect) red herring in the form of an action that makes no logical sense within the film.

A similar moment occurs in “Surprise Party,” where Laurie (Anna Paquin) finally meets a man to take to the werewolf “party” in the woods on her way there. The man in black (Steven Wilkins again), who we’ve seen bite and kill a young woman already, eventually bites Laurie, the scene ending before we see what happens next. At the party, a body wrapped in Laurie’s red cloak falls from a tree, startling the women and prompting a tense investigation that reveals, of course, that the body isn’t Laurie’s. Laurie herself then enters the clearing, walking on the ground, after the reveal. But why? Why would Laurie wrap the body in the cloak? And why would she apparently scale a tree to drop it onto the partygoers and then take some time for them to investigate it before walking in herself?

I don’t think nitpicks like these are constructive film criticism in and of themselves, but they’re important here since I think they get at why I don’t ultimately like Trick ’r Treat very much. They reveal what should be the invisible hand of the creative team behind the film too clearly. There are films that thrive with a certain level of explicit craft, like, perhaps, the work of Wes Anderson, but it doesn’t work for Trick ’r Treat since it’s inconsistent, arguably unintentional, and undermines the horror by calling attention to the fact that everything is fake. It’s all a play for the audience’s benefit rather than something natural-feeling. Of course, the predictability of the twists as a narrative staple and the obvious constructedness of certain ones can also be comfortable and fun, as you can see the pattern and attempt to guess the surprises in advance. If you can play along with the movie—accept that it’s obviously trying to mislead you and just go with the flow and try to outthink it—then it can be a fun time. Emphasis on “fun.” Trick ’r Treat is too fun, intentionally or not, to really be scary, though whether you find the sometimes-naked attempts to produce a shocking twist compelling or annoying will depend on your subjective taste.

Something I do personally like about Trick ’r Treat is how mean it is. Some of this meanness is timeless and good. I appreciate the film’s willingness to kill innocent or near-innocent (or at least repentant) characters, for example. Charlie (Brett Kelly), in “Principal,” is out smashing jack-o-lanterns and violates the honor system when he takes more than one piece of candy at Steven Wilkins’ house, but none of these are actions that deserve death. It’s an over-the-top and gross death for a child, but as an especially gnarly beat early in a horror film, it sets a nice tone for what follows. In the “Halloween School Bus Massacre” story, all of the kids who torment Rhonda (Samm Todd) are killed by the zombie children after their elaborate hoax leads them into the grasp of real monsters. They all die squishily offscreen when Rhonda abandons them to their fate, including the nervous Chip (Alberto Ghisi) and the repentant Schrader (Jean-Luc Bilodeau). Similarly, the “Sam” segment starring the old man Kreeg (Brian Cox) seems to end on an appropriate enough note with a brutalized Mr. Kreeg, who’s maybe something of a Halloween Scrooge figure, having learned to get into the spirit of the season, but then the zombie children show up at the very last moment to kill him for drowning them on the school bus all of those years before. Everybody who’s committed a sin—even something as simple as trying to take the Halloween decorations down too early—dies a bloody, mean death.

Where the meanness doesn’t hold up so well is in Trick ’r Treat’s use of fatphobic imagery involving Charlie and ableist language and imagery involving Rhonda and the zombie children from the bus. Charlie’s fatness is meant to accentuate his delinquent characteristics and make his death even more gross. A fat, dull- and insolent-looking kid dies by eating a poisoned piece of candy and then grotesquely vomiting a liquid stream of chocolate and blood. His limp, soft body sagging in Steven’s arms as he struggles to dispose of it is meant to elicit feelings of both nausea and humor. Meanwhile, watching the deleted/additional scenes actually reveals that the film’s treatment of Rhonda and the zombie children was originally worse, as the bully Macy (Britt McKillip) gets some additional jabs in against Rhonda, while also foreshadowing the viciousness of the undead children, when she says that “retards” have super strength like apes. We are ultimately meant to sympathize with Rhonda, but the zombie children’s strangeness and their violence, which are closely associated with their ambiguous special needs, are meant to be threatening. The horrific associations of fatness and being differently-abled are still very much present in media today, though the latter especially tends to be more subtextual than explicit as we’ve become somewhat more sensitive to issues of ableism as a society. The way that it’s casually present in Trick ’r Treat definitely dates the film pretty obviously and also makes it a harder sell as a universally comfortable or fun viewing experience.

It’s also only fair to note that the movie is produced by Bryan Singer, a Hollywood mainstay with some repeated and severe allegations of sexual misconduct that have been brought against him over the years. I used to enjoy his work, but seeing his name and the name of his production company in the credits for Trick ’r Treat just makes me uneasy and adds to that feeling of the movie having just not aged well in some particularly noticeable ways.

To return to the appeal of Trick ’r Treat, however, I think another aspect of the film that makes it so infinitely watchable is the holiday atmosphere it’s steeped in. After all, this isn’t just a horror movie or a horror movie that happens to be set on Halloween—It’s a horror movie specifically about Halloween. The stories the film tells and its setting just make for a seasonal experience that’s perhaps surprisingly easy to vibe with given the subject matter. Maybe the “tricks” the film plays in the form of its repeated twists can even be justified and appreciated from this Halloween-y angle. As much as this is a horror movie where bad things repeatedly happen to people, the setting is kind of dreamy. Trick ’r Treat has this idealized Halloween setting, with close-set houses in a residential neighborhood where the sidewalks are shadowed by the trees that are shedding their leaves. There’s the little main street area we see a couple of times where the parade and adult partying are centered, where there are all these local businesses.

Trick ’r Treat has this small-town Americana quality, sort of Mayberry-esque even if it is playing host to at least one serial killer, a pack of werewolves, zombie children originally murdered at their parents’ behest, and an immortal god-child who violently enforces the spirit of the season. As I said before, it’s idealized to an extent. It showcases the kind of Halloween experience I never got as a kid. We lived out in the country, so our family had to drive from house to house to make the few stops we did make. It was never this adventurous, celebratory sort of sensory overload like movies and TV, including Trick ’r Treat, portray it as. For me, this film captures the vibes of a Halloween I never had. Maybe for other people it’s more of a nostalgic portrait if they did grow up in a neighborhood or town like Warren Valley.

This vibe-y portrayal of Halloween also feels comprehensive thanks to the range of ages and experiences it portrays. While Trick ’r Treat tells specific stories, you can also see how it captures some of the broader, archetypal Halloween experiences while doing so: You’ve got younger kids out to get candy in earnest, slightly older kids more focused on causing mischief and pulling pranks, older young folks out looking to hook up, couples falling out after a night out, adults with kids, adults without kids, old men who are just sick of the whole thing and want to be left alone. What makes Trick ’r Treat comfortable to watch may be just how all-encompassing its vision is. Each of its main stories and the little beats in between that can kind of fall through the cracks all contribute to the feeling of completeness of its portrait of a very specific holiday experience. More so than the exact plot beats or horror scenarios, I think this atmosphere or feeling or vibe is what actually makes Trick ’r Treat a good watch around Halloween. It’s just such a celebration of the season as an overall package.

Although, in the interest of being completely fair, it is an incredibly white, straight, middle-class vision of the holiday, just like our cultural stew vision of Halloween is incredibly white, straight, and middle-class. Maybe that makes it more archetypal, however? It’s less real than it is a realization of an incredibly specific myth of the ideal Halloween. Despite being someone to whom that myth has been somewhat of a reality, I still wouldn’t say that I like Trick ’r Treat as a film, perhaps even because of its dreaminess. It’s comfort food and can be pleasant or even just easy to watch, but it’s not challenging or exciting. While interrogating my feelings about it, however, I came to an interesting realization—that there is another film that I think does very similar things and that I have similar feelings about: Chris Koch’s Snow Day (2000). Even though I did genuinely want to work through my feelings about Trick ’r Treat in a structured way, it was this breakthrough connection that actually motivated me to write this piece.

            Snow Day, like Trick ’r Treat, is what I would consider a comfortable or cozy film (and it’s also incredibly white, straight, and middle-class, incidentally). I hadn’t watched it much recently, but I remember it looming a bit larger in my mind when I was younger. I believe I did watch it on an actual snow day at least once, years and years ago. While it doesn’t attempt to capture the spirit of a specific holiday, Snow Day is still similar to Trick ’r Treat in that way since it does try to capture the feeling of a specific experience—the snow day of the title. The movie has something like that same comprehensive approach as well. It starts with a scientific explanation for the existence of snow, which suggests a broad view, and while the actual story focuses on the members of a specific family (the Brandstons) on a snow day, it still has that range of experiences that Trick ’r Treat showcases: You have the busy parent forced to stay home with a rowdy kid, the parent/adult with a job that doesn’t get cancelled due to snow, the extremely young kid just having an animalistic good time, the slightly older kid who has the awareness to know that a snow day is fleeting (and wouldn’t it be great if you got two instead?), and the lovestruck teens trying to make some romance happen in their precious free time even though they could just be enjoying the snow. Like Trick ’r Treat, Snow Day is made up of very specific stories and scenarios, like Chevy Chase’s weatherman trying to prove that he’s the best and smartest weatherman in town (and not that young hotshot Duke boy at the competing station), but there’s also a comprehensive quality when you take a step or two back.

            While Snow Day is less of an explicit anthology than Trick ’r Treat, it does kind of work as one. Each character has a narrative for the day, and while there is overlap, you could probably reasonably divide them up into short stories. There’s Jean Smart’s girlboss working mom of the Brandston family and her attempts to both watch her rambunctious young son and work from home who ultimately learns to just enjoy the day; there’s the dad and his quest to one-up the competition who has taken credit for being the first to predict the massive snowstorm, which he does eventually do when he publicly flummoxes his opponent with the simple question of where snow comes from; there’s the slim, but still present, story of the school principal’s terrible day, from morning to evening, where he can’t take a step without being pelted with snowballs by unseen young assailants. Each of the plot threads in the movie can be isolated and summarized this way, revealing a certain structural similarity with Trick ’r Treat.

            It is worth considering if Snow Day is actually any good on its own, however. Revisiting comedies I used to enjoy has been a mixed experience for me: Blake Edwards’ Pink Panther films from the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s are themselves a mixed bag, but some of them are great (especially the first one). Meanwhile, the 2006 wrestling comedy Nacho Libre, starring Jack Black during that period where it seemed like he reached maximum pop cultural saturation, was a pretty big disappointment, with far too much of the humor just being focused on weird-looking people and “funny” accents or voices, though the theme song, “Hombre Religioso,” is great and excellently deployed at the film’s climax. The 1999 Dudley Do-Right movie, starring Brendan Fraser, fared better. It’s a significantly smaller film than I remember but still has some good jokes (also: Alfred Molina as Snidely Whiplash doing what may be a little bit of a Peter-Sellers-as-Inspector-Clouseau impression).

Snow Day fits into these impressions somewhere north of the average (whatever that may be). The film’s big weakness is probably its total, straight-faced commitment to the thesis that a snow day actually is kind of a miracle that can change your life. Of course, this is both a movie for children and a film set pre-9/11 and right on the very edge of the 2000s. As such, there are elements here that feel very 90s or even 80s, including the very strange weatherman versus weatherman plotline (featuring Chevy Chase specifically) and a cool, radical snowmobile chase set to rock music. The score of the film can be blatantly “funny” at times, but the actual humor still kind of works for me. There are some “Well THAT just happened!”-adjacent bits, I feel, but it was kind of surprising how considered some of Snow Day’s humor can be. Or maybe once-insipid comedic sensibilities now seem fresh compared with what is currently trendy. To me, Snow Day is not as stupid as it could have been, and there are some good moments, like the absurdity of the youngest member of the Brandston family filling his shoe full of ice cubes from the fridge while making growling/truck noises while the others discuss how he can’t be left on his own or the bully character really leaning into what might have been a one-off joke about his acts of violence as a business (The Chuck Wheeler House of Pain) when he says “Say ‘Hi’ to Craig. He’ll be hurtin’ you today!” mid-snowmobile chase. The actor who plays the principal the kids torment (Damian Young as Principal Ken Weaver) also has a certain uncanny valley-adjacent Jim Carrey-like quality to his performance, which is either intentional or a happy accident since when you think you see Iggy Pop in a minor role later in the film it makes you do even more of a double-take. (It actually is Iggy Pop, though.)  

            The best part of Snow Day is probably the plow, however. One of the main antagonists of the film is “Snowplow Man” (Chris Elliott), who drives an incredibly macabre-looking plow alongside his pet bird (that also may be his wife). The vehicle is very the-truck-from-Jeepers-Creepers, and its tactile presence in the film is probably the most deranged element that leads to some of the funniest, surreal bits. There are multiple shots of this huge, menacing vehicle bearing down on a bunch of kids playing in the snow, for example. It’s not quite horror, but the truck, with a weathered sexy broad and “Darling Clementine” emblazoned on the front of its plow, smoke billowing in a steady plume from its exhaust, snow and frost perennially caked to its dark gray exterior, is practically the film’s equivalent of a monster and probably could have served that role well enough if Snow Day was dramatically reworked into a horror film. 

There are certain elements of Snow Day, like this specific shot of a kid's screaming mouth and braces superimposed over the plow's chain-bound wheels rolling through the snow in grim near-monochrome, that could easily be retooled as more straightforwardly horrific.

There’s a particularly great moment early on where one of the kids hits Snowplow Man in the head with a snowball, causing the vehicle to plow right into someone’s parked car and come to a stop. Weirdly, the plow seems to turn off then—the smoke gone, the lights out. The local kids tentatively gather around, approaching what is essentially the carcass. The way this moment is framed, visually and tonally, it really does make the plow seem like a living thing. Everything screams “Is it dead?” Of course, soon enough, we see the lights come back on, and the plow roars to life as the kids scream and scatter. The way Snowplow Man jerks in his seat shortly thereafter, it almost looks like the plow is driving him and that he’s just along for the ride. That the kids later gang up on Snowplow Man and physically drag and restrain him before stealing his plow to undo his day’s work and get themselves a second snow day also feels a bit wild. I’m not saying Snow Day is some kind of masterpiece, but it is kind of a weird and even confident movie in ways that I don’t think it would be if it were made today.

            Also of note: a rousing speech by a stop-motion animated action figure and a kind of surreal moment where we transition seamlessly from a little girl wishing for snow to it snowing in her room. I think the visual effects, as well as the aging visual fidelity overall (on a sleek new HD TV versus the bulbous old SD behemoth we used to have in the living room), both contribute to that tactile quality I mentioned before. Snow Day just coheres visually in a way that I like a lot. Trick ’r Treat is similar. The visual effects are employed well, and the practical elements have real weight to them, be they a murderous and ambulatory severed hand or a grim snowplow with a kid chained to the front. Both are aging, but they’re aging like cheese or something else that’s supposed to age. The passage of time is evident, but it’s satisfying rather than purely putrefying.

The plow and is destructive potential feel like a tangible part of the film, especially in scenes like the one pictured here where a kid's sled slides in front of the vehicle and is crushed. It's a grim and grimy presence contrasted against the playful children and their colorful jackets. Again, there is a horror film somewhere inside Snow Day.

            As for problematic content, Snow Day is still a bit similar to Trick ’r Treat. There may be some ableism in the film in the form of certain language used (like “nimrod” or “feeb”), though that may not qualify to some, but there are no depictions of differently-abled kids that give that element a strong presence in the film or language as explicit as that found in Trick ‘r Treat. The fatphobia is also milder since there is no gross-out murder this time around, but the token fat kid friend is still a comic relief character often associated with food in some way (even if the others are just squirting ketchup on him so that he can lay in the road and distract Snowplow Man) and who has “funny” fart sound effects added to certain moments of duress, like when Snowplow Man is struggling to drag the kid across the ground by his legs, a moment not entirely dissimilar to the bit where Steven Wilkens is dealing with Charlie’s corpse in Trick ’r Treat. Of course, it’s the fat kid who gets chased by the plow with his pants down and who is too simple-minded to write the word “help” in the right direction on a condensation-covered plow window when he’s captured. It isn’t as extreme as the depiction of fatness in Trick ’r Treat (where the cherry on top of that particular character’s design was a too-tight t-shirt for extra leering emphasis), but Snow Day’s handling of fatness just goes to show how intrinsic fatphobic depictions are to film and especially to “comedy.” As I said earlier, Nacho Libre has a lot of this stuff—about a whole movie’s worth, in fact—and the obvious, even mechanical or unthinking, ways in which these films deploy fatness for comedy (gross-out or otherwise) is one of their least attractive features that spoils somewhat their otherwise comfortable depictions of special days.

            The snow day in Snow Day is, again, like Trick ’r Treat’s vision of Halloween, idealized and maybe nostalgic. It’s such a full day, especially, in a way that probably makes once-kids remember that feeling of infinite possibility they’d experience upon waking up and finding out school was cancelled that begins with just the quality of light from the sun and snow in the window of your bedroom. As a sort of aside, I think it’s awful that we’re actively planning to take that experience away from children now. COVID-19-enforced work-and-school-from-home has demonstrated the potential efficacy of learning from home, so now we have places looking to make that their snow day alternative to regular school, rather than letting kids experience something that really is special and specific to that age group. As an adult, snow is a nuisance. You’ve got to shovel it and maybe drive in it (worry about skidding into a signpost on top of it). Or the kids are stuck at home and suddenly you’re responsible for them for a period of time you hadn’t anticipated. Snow days are made for kids. I remember that feeling of leaving a church around Thanksgiving in the evening and seeing those tantalizing flakes start to fall for the first time that season. I remember one day we actually got all the way to school and then immediately had to get back on the buses to go home since a light sprinkling had turned into a mighty storm that had whited out the roads. We kids were absolutely ecstatic and ungovernable, of course. Snow Day’s kids experience some over-the-top scenarios, but the spirit of infinite possibility and ungovernable energy is true to life, just like Trick ’r Treat’s zombies, werewolves, serial killers, and childlike seasonal cheer enforcer entities are fantastical but the seasonal cheer they bring is real.

            I saw some discussion on Twitter the other week about the concept of “comfy” or “cozy” horror. Someone (or some people) floated the idea, and, of course, there was immediate pushback. The most thoughtful response that I saw was that such a thing already exists—but it’s not about tea with ghosts or knit hats on pumpkins or whatever. The argument, I believe, was that comfortable horror already exists in the form of unchallenging genre fare like slasher films. Friday the Thirteenth is comfy, though not in the way the original poster on Twitter might have intended, because it’s predictable in a lot of ways but still entertaining. It’s easy to digest. At this point, the Paranormal Activity and SAW franchises could probably qualify as well, depending on your tolerance for found footage and gore. For me at least, I think a comfortable horror movie probably isn’t very effective at being a horror movie (or maybe at being a movie in general). That it’s comfortable and easy to watch suggests there’s not a lot of substance there, but there are days where you don’t necessarily want to be challenged, where maybe you just want to soak in some vibes. That’s the realm of Trick ’r Treat (or, I guess, Snow Day)—not a masterpiece, not especially frightening (or funny, in the case of Snow Day), but ultimately just comfortable.