Tales Of Halloween

Pumpkin Patch

Tales Of Halloween
Directed by Darren Lynn Bousman, Axelle Carolyn, 
Adam Gierasch, Andrew Kasch, Neil Marshall, 
Lucky McKee, Mike Mendez, Dave Parker, 
Ryan Schifrin, John Skipp and Paul Solet
USA 2015 
Arrow Films DVD Region 2

Well then... I finally got around to watching the elusive Tales For Halloween in time for this year’s Halloween posts. I say elusive because I bought this one a couple of years before the pandemic at FrightFest for a fiver but, every October when I try and watch it, it seems to have buried itself under a pile of movies and I never seem to be able to lay hands on it but, this year it managed to turn up when a pile of physical media overturned itself on top of me and so I put it to one side for the right time. 

And I have to say... for a portmanteau film, which are often hit and miss anyway, this one is pretty good. You have ten short movies by ten different directors (some of them very famous genre directors like Lucky McKee and Neil Marshall) and they all seem to take place on the same night, although in different towns.* You can tell it’s the same night because, on many of them, George Romero’s Night Of The Living Dead is playing on TV (although, in one of the clips, it seems to be Carnival Of Souls). 

And, contrary to what you would expect form a string of shorts put together, even the ones that are maybe not quite as good as the others are still quite watchable and immensely entertaining. So ten, not bad, movies. And to boot you have a radio DJ linking some (but not all, she’s definitely underused in this movie) of the segments played by none other than Adrienne Barbeau, delivering her full on, smoky radio voice, as she did when she played radio DJ Stevie Wayne in John Carpenter’s The Fog (reviewed here). So more or less an homage but, presumably not named as such due to copyright reasons, I would guess. 

Standouts for me would be Neil Marshall’s segment Bad Seed, where a carved pumpkin comes to life and starts eating people, because it’s really silly and, considering I don’t like slasher movies so much (unless they’re Italian), the Friday 31st segment directed by Mike Mendez, which features a cute, stop motion looking alien (it’s probably really CGI) looking for a trick or treat. 

Also, another nice thing is the use of various famous directors amongst the actors in the odd cameo. So along with people like Barbara Crampton and Lin Shaye you have the likes of Stuart Gordon, Mick Garris and John Landis coming along for the ride. Which is nice and perhaps shows what a close knit community the horror community is (the great Dr. Rebekah McKendry is also in this). 

Added to this, among a whole list of composers scoring the shorts, we have title music done by the great Lalo Schifrin. Now, as far as I’m concerned it’s not one of his best but I did notice that one of the directors is also a Schifrin so, I have to wonder if the title music was pulled in as a favour to someone. But I also loved a musical moment in the segment The Weak And The Wicked where a pocket watch brings us to a flashback of a memory in the same style as a Sergio Leone western... and the music suddenly gets all Morricone in tone. So, yeah, some nice things to be found in this selection, to be sure. 

And that’s me finally done with Tales From Halloween. A short review perhaps but a definite recommendation from me if you want something fun and frivolous to watch during this years ‘Halloween festivities’. I believe some people are still doing this stuff and certainly my local Tesco, with it’s gazillions of novelty horror items put out for the kids in October, seems to indicate that it’s still a thing. 

*Nope. Tag line on the poster says “One Night. One Town. Ten Chilling Stories.” so, I guess that didn’t quite come across to me because, well, all the stories should be overlapping with each other then, right?