Tales of Halloween Review (Film, 2015) #31DaysofHorror
Nothing is as it seems on Halloween night in this town.
Tales of Halloween is an anthology horror film with 10 segments all set in the same town on Halloween night. To say the concept is ambitious is an understatement. The framing device is a radio broadcast (performed by Adrienne Barbeau, a wonderful piece of casting) describing all the dangers of Halloween in this town. The segments, each with its own director and writer, are all their own unique horror shorts in various styles and tones. The connecting threads are Halloween, the town, and a few characters popping up in multiple stories.
The great thing about anthology horror films is you’re bound to like at least one of the stories. The bad thing about anthology horror films is you might only like one of the stories. While I personally prefer an anthology film with longer segments, I can’t fault Tales of Halloween for fitting 10 shorts into a 90 minute film. Each segment is so wildly different in style and tone that, even when I just did not enjoy a short, I was never bored.
Overall, Tales of Halloween falls into a weird fiction style. There’s nothing natural about what happens in these stories. Many are low concept, playing with feeling, mode, and allusion to craft images over a direct narrative. That’s not a bad thing in this context because the framing device blatantly says strange and inexplicable things happen on Halloween night. If you like a more realistic horror rather than supernatural horror or even totally unexplained phenomena, Tales of Halloween might be a hard one to get through.
From the casting to setting to the creature design, “The Weak and the Wicked” is one of the best horror shorts I’ve seen.
For my tastes in horror, there’s a five segment stretch in the middle that contained all my favorite shorts. “The Weak and the Wicked” from director Paul Solet and writer Molly Millions is a tale of revenge. Three bullies who have tormented one child their entire lives are finally faced with something more evil than them. This short makes a really effective use of horror tropes, combining the harbinger of something bad with the survivor/victim character and the bad characters who get their comeuppance with the typical slasher villain.
“Grim Grinning Ghost” from writer/director Axelle Carolyn is a campfire ghost story told with great style. A woman leaving a Halloween party becomes convinced that the ghost from her mother’s story is following her home. This short has a laser sharp focus on a simple story and it is executed to perfection.
“Ding Dong” from writer/director Lucky McKee is the most experimental short in the film. I think it’s best described as a supernatural memory play. A husband tries to console his wife on Halloween because she cannot conceive her own child. The wife is actually a witch who abuses her husband for his failure to impregnate her. The following Halloween, she forces him to roleplay as Hansel from “Hansel and Gretel” while she pretends to be the witch in the candy house for every trick or treater. This is the segment furthest removed from Halloween iconography—the trick or treating and costumes are window dressing on a much stranger story—but it’s also the short with the most depth and nuance in its attempt to explain why everything goes horribly wrong on Halloween night in this town. It’s an experience.
“This Means War” from writers/directors Andrew Kash and John Skipp is an entirely different beast. A man who has run a traditional haunted house for 20 years is pushed to the breaking point by his new neighbor who sets up an extreme haunted house with blood and hard rock music right across the street. This is one of the sillier segments in Tales of Halloween, but it also has some surprisingly strong messaging about accepting people for who they are and the dangers of gate-keeping in communities.
“Friday the 31st” from writer/director Mike Mendez and writer David Parker is a loving tribute to all the B-movies. A serial killer preying on young people partying on Halloween night is confronted by an alien invasion that disrupts his plans. This segment also features phenomenal stop motion animation (from an adorable little alien to the actors also performing pixilation) and 70s splatter film levels of gore.
Typically in an anthology review, this is where I’d say a few words about what I consider bad segments in the film. That’s not possible with Tales of Halloween. I may not like a few of the segments at all, but that’s purely a matter of personal preference, not the quality of filmmaking. I like weird fiction and psychological horror. I’m not the biggest fan of gore films or stories set up just to punish bad people (at least not on a short scale with minimal context). I also know that I thought of horror fans I know who would like each segment I didn’t in this film.
If you can handle a heavy dose of the unknown in your horror, you should give Tales of Halloween a try. The shorts are long enough to tell full stories but not so long that you feel trapped by any segment you might not like. It’s the perfect film to toss up at a party or to get you in the mood for the best holiday there is.
Tales of Halloween is currently streaming on Netflix.
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