Michael Dougherty talks Trick R Treat

Trick 'r Treat's long road to a release ends today with the arrival of the Trick 'r Treat DVD/Blu-Ray. Originally shot in 2006, with a scheduled release date of October 5, 2007, which was eventually un-scheduled. When the film had its West Coast premiere at the 2008 ScreamFest (read our review here), the cast attending were seeing for the first time. At long last, Warner Bros. is releasing the movie, but not in theaters.

Last night, Trick 'r Treat screened at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles, CA, and writer/director Michael Dougherty was on hand to discuss his fantastic horror anthology that weaves together 4 different horror stories over one Halloween night in Ohio. While it's no surprise that Trick 'r Treat was inspired by  Creepshow and Halloween (Dougherty said "the whole movie is like me giving John Carpenter a hand job"), Dougherty explained he had another, more unusual influence as well.

A Christmas Story was a big influence, actually. Because A Christmas Story - I remember seeing it as a kid, and it's like that feeling you got when watching Gremlins, and it's oviously a kid's movie, but I couldn't believe we were watching it, I couldn't believe we were getting away with watching it because it actually showed kids for what they were - little assholes. And so I wanted to make a film like that. It's a movie that you pull off the shelf one month out of the year. That's all the goal was. It was never meant for more or less.

Trick 'r Treat started its life as a animated short called Season's Greetings that Dougherty made while he was in college, which was also screened at ScreamFest last year and will be available on the DVD and Blu-Ray disc (however, commentary, a featurette and deleted scenes will only be on the Blu-Ray disc, much to Dougherty's dismay), but also because Dougherty claims to be "obsessed with Halloween." Dougherty says Halloween "begins for me on October 1st at 12:01am, and it goes all month long." That translated into a spec script that producer Bryan Singer helped shepherd to Warner Bros. and Legenary Pictures, who each contributed $6 million to the film's budget. With a quality film made with such modest backing, why didn't Warners want to release the movie into theaters?

That's the big question. It's funny, everybody always asks me that question, nobody ever asks Warner Bros. Yeah, I don't know. It's not a remake, it's not a sequel, it's a weird movie. I think they just got scared of it. There was a lot of support, but there was definitely some resistance to it. "We just want to know...about this bus full of kids?" So there was resistance and I just think there was skepticism, and, don't forget, a horror anthology film hadn't been around for a really long time, it's not a simple cast of twenty somethings being killed by a masked killer one by one or a remake of, you know, teenagers getting killed by a masked killer one by one. So they just looked at it like this ugly baby, like: "I don't know what to do with it." I never really got, honestly never got a straight answer. Legendary Pictures was fantastic.

Dougherty and company at the 2008 ScreamFest Q&A in the blurriest photo we could get.

So will there be a sequel? "There'll be a remake," joked Dougherty. He continued:

I would love to do one. It just depends on how this one does. Obviously, we have financial concerns, but the idea originally was "yeah, ok, let's create a franchise, let's make a Halloween movie every year, each time it's four different stories, set in a different time or place, like New York in the 1960's or the 1800's out West, because Halloween, as a holiday, is celebrated differently everywhere. That was the idea, to bring in different writers and directors. I would love to do a graphic novel, at the very least.

Currently, there is a graphic novel, one based on the movie. And it may be a while before a sequel gets made, if at all. Dougherty is working on another project that has "monsters in it," though he refused to say more. We have a feeling it's the adaptation of the comic book Dead @ 17 mentioned earlier this year. In the comic, a girl is brought back from the dead to fight demons.

Dougherty has more projects he'd like to work on, including an idea he also mentioned at ScreamFest for TV show that's "Sex and The City meets Howling" called Bitches. "It's four women living in New York City, and they're werewolves," Dougherty explained. "We had a poster made up and everything. The poster was this big, red full moon and then below the Bitches title it said: 'It's that time of the month.'"

It seems like a viable idea that could sell in the current, vampire-laden TV landscape. But then again, Trick 'r Treat seemed like a perfectly viable (not to mention respectable) start of a hugely successful horror franchise, complete with a new horror icon in the character of Sam, the movie's vengeful spirit of Halloween, that could translate into merchandise galore with graphic novels, Sam figures, and more.

Of course, there's still a chance that could happen. That is, if Trick 'r Treat sells enough DVDs and Blu-Ray Discs that Warner Bros. finally wakes up from their coma to realize what they've been missing out on for all these years.