Trick 'r Treat — Halloween is good for your mental health

In this special BONUS Halloween episode, let’s explore Trick ‘r Treat (2007), and the importance of Halloween for your mental health.

Mental Health is Horrifying is hosted by Candis Green, Registered Psychotherapist and owner of Many Moons Therapy.

Instagram: @mentalhealthishorrifying

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Show Notes:

Want to work together? I offer 1:1 psychotherapy (Ontario) and specialize in grief and trauma.

This month in the Final Girls Club, check out Your Hallowed Halloween Kit. I created this kit as a way to help you slow down and appreciate this most sacred time in the wheel of the year, with Halloween rituals designed to support your mental health. From tarot spreads, dreamwork exercises, and an activity to help you find your monster movie soulmate as a portrait of your own psychic terrain – each ritual is informed by depth psychology and is designed to help you connect with your own depths, be intentional with the magic around you, and harness Halloween’s true meaning, legends, and traditions as a pathway back to yourself.

As a special treat for my hallowed listeners, save $5 when using code TRICKRTREAT.

Each month, Apple Podcasts selects podcasts to include as part of its curated feature section. And this month, Mental Health is Horrifying is featured under Spooky Stories. Thank you so much to Apple Podcasts for this feature, and for elevating spookiness as an art form. Check out my feature on the Apple Podcasts app under the Browse tab, and be sure to check out all the other deliciously spooky podcasts included in the section. 

Send me some Ghoul Mail!

I love hearing from you spooky ghouls! Want a chance to have your story read on a future episode of Mental Health is Horrifying? If you’d like to share what horror movies mean to you, how they have helped you with your mental health, or about a particular horror movie that you have thoughts and feelings about, send me some Ghoul Mail.

Podcast artwork by Chloe Hurst at Contempomint.

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Sources:

Halloween: Origins, Meaning & Traditions

History Extra podcast: Work-life balance: how our ancestors fought for free time

Trick 'R Treat: Sam's Halloween Rules Explained by By Padraig Cotter

Transcript

Each month, Apple Podcasts selects podcasts to include as part of its curated feature section. And this month, Mental Health is Horrifying is featured under Spooky Stories. Thank you so much to Apple Podcasts for this feature, and for elevating spookiness as an art form. Check out my feature on the Apple Podcasts app under the Browse tab, and be sure to check out all the other deliciously spooky podcasts included in the section. 

Welcome ghouls to today’s BONUS Halloween episode of Mental Health is Horrifying. I’m your Horror Barbie host of darkness — Candis Green— Psychotherapist and all around spooky bitch podcasting from my bat-filled cave in Toronto, Canada. 

I take Halloween very seriously. Do you take Halloween very seriously? Well I hope you do, or else a tiny trick or treating demon may come after you. His name is Sam, and he has become a beloved figure for Halloween lovers everywhere, protecting the sanctity of this very important occasion and punishing anyone who dares disrespect it. 

Any why would he do this, you ask? Well, Sam knows how important Halloween is. It’s not merely a night of frolic as Winifred Sanderson proposed. It’s not merely a night to dress up as a taco and do jello shots while dancing to Disturbia by Rihanna – it’s also a very important holiday that evolved out of the sacred celebration of Samhain, and it’s very important for your mental health. 

Okay — so let’s get right into it. Let’s check out Trick ‘r Treat and its exploration of the importance of Halloween for your mental health. 

Movie synopsis:

Trick ‘r Treat takes place on Halloween night in the fictional town of Warren Valley, Ohio. The plots follows a series of intersecting stories on the night of Halloween, and at the centre is our beloved Sam – a tiny, murderous trick or treater dressed in an orange footie pajama costume with a bag for a head who goes around enforcing the rules of Halloween… with blood.  

The first offender includes a woman who blows out her jack o lantern and starts putting away her Halloween decorations before midnight – HOW COULD YOU – so Sam murders her. Then there is the school principal who catches a kid disrespecting Halloween by vandalizing jack o lanterns (seriously people, show jack o lanterns some respect) and stealing candy, so the principal lectures him on the importance of respecting Halloween rules and traditions – and you think good! He’s on the side of Halloween! – but then he poisons him and decapitates him and makes his head into a jack o lantern with the help of his young son who seems to have… done this before. 

But Sam is never too far away! He is attempting to murder the crotchety neighbour next door. We’ll get to him later. 

In another part of town, a group of trick or treaters decide to visit the site of the infamous Halloween school bus massacre, where – and this one is really upsetting – the parents of 8 special needs children bribed the school bus driver to dispose of them on Halloween, as they wore their sweet little costumes, so he drove the bus off a cliff, into a quarry never to be heard from again. What a fun place to visit on Halloween! 

Anyways, they disrespect this location by playing a ghoulish prank on one of the girls, Rhonda – scaring her half to death – and kicking a jack o lantern into the quarry. Again – be nice to jack o lanterns! At this point of immense disrespect, the ghosts of the deceased children emerge and begin murdering/eating the disrespectful kids, save Rhonda, a Halloween traditionalist. As her frenemies die, she notices Sam and they exchange a nod, like damn right you disrespectful kids…

In another part of town, a group of 20-something girls shop for sexy Halloween costumes and search for dates for the night. One of the girls, Laurie, is attacked by a masked vampire (who is revealed to be the murderous school principal). Injured and frightened, she brings him to b the Halloween bonfire party with her friends, which seems weird until all the girls begin transforming into werewolves into one of the most amazing scenes in cinematic history and then eat him, and other males. 

Sam watches, approvingly.

Remember the crotchety neighbour? Well he is crotchety in the way that he HATES Halloween. He tries to scare trick or treaters away, he has NO decorations in his house, and he groans at silly Halloween stuff on TV. Weird stuff starts happening inside his house and when he goes upstairs to investigate, he finds one of the rooms positively scrawled with Halloween greetings, jack-o-lanterns a-flame. See THESE are the decorations he needed.

Sam appears and begins attacking the old man, who is revealed to be the bush driver who murdered the kids during the Halloween school bus massacre. As a scuffle ensues, the old man accidentally gives Sam a piece of candy, satisfying the Halloween custom of trick or treating, so Sam decides to spare him shockingly. 

Don’t worry though, after Sam spares him and leaves, the old man opens the door to some trick or treaters, but it’s the ghost children from the bus, and they kill him a lot.

THE END.

Movie background info:

Trick ‘r Treat began as an animated short, created by writer and director Michael Dougherty in 1996 (what a great year). If that name sounds familiar, it’s because he also directed Christmas horror comedy Krampus, which I did an episode on.

Trick ‘r Treat evolved into a feature length film, and after being shown at a number of film festivals, and being released to home media, it eventually had its first public screening in 2007. And people LOOOOVED it. And I think this sort of little movie that could, that began premiering at genre film festivals, and became available slowly to audiences as physical media contributes to Trick ‘r Treat’s appeal and now cult favourite status. Sort of like the holiday of Halloween itself, right? 

Its stars are a mixture of new and familiar faces, including Anna Paquin as one of the werewolf ladies who eats that vampire guy and it’s totally awesome, and Dylan Baker as the evil school principal who has played other creepy roles including Colin Sweeny, the eccentric serial killer in The Good Wife series. 

Trick ‘r Treat has become instant Halloween classic, with audiences loving its reverence for Halloween legends, traditions, and straight up vibes throughout the film. It is now considered a must-watch Halloween classic for horror fans.

Who is Sam?

So who is Sam and what gives him the right?

Well, Sam is a demonic little angel who goes around on Halloween night enforcing the rules of the holiday. His rules are pretty simple and mostly focus on respecting Halloween, and making it a fun and safe holiday for children and adults alike. Screen Rant has a great list of Sam’s rules and they are as follows –

Sam's Trick 'R Treat Rules
Rule 1 | Always wear a costume
Rule 2 | Always pass out treats to trick-or-treaters
Rule 3 | NEVER blow out a Jack O'Lantern or take down your decorations before midnight
Rule 4 | Always check your candy
Rule 5 | NEVER hurt the innocent

The last rule is perhaps the most important – always respect the dead. Because in large part, this is what Halloween is all about. 

Sam is the embodiment of Samhain, so he gets to protect it. Afterall, he is named after the ancient Celtic celebration that the holiday evolved from. 

So let’s learn a bit about the history, legends, and traditions of Halloween, and why it's Sam’s mission to protect this sacred celebration.

Halloween history, legends, and traditions:

Halloween has its roots in the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, a pagan celebration to welcome the harvest at the end of summer. 

For the Celts, Samhain marked the beginning of the year, as their religion followed earthly cycles, and the harvest season – one of bounty and abundance – marked the beginning of the Pagan wheel of the year. The celebration also welcomed the dark half of the year.

Samhain was considered the most important celebration of the four quarterly fire festivals. Not only was it celebrated after the hard work of the harvest was complete, but it was also the time that they believed that the barriers between the physical world and the spirit world break down.

Because the veil was thin at this time, the Celts prepared offerings that were left outside villages and fields for fairies and ancestors. (The celts take fairies very seriously)

Ancestors would cross over during this time as well, and Celts would dress as animals and monsters so that fairies were not tempted to kidnap them. Trick-or-treating is said to have evolved from this tradition. In Ireland, mumming was the practice of putting on costumes, going door-to-door and singing songs to the dead. Cakes were given as payment.

Halloween pranks (the “trick” part) also have a tradition in Samhain. In the ancient celebration, tricks were typically blamed on fairies.

To welcome the ancestors, the tradition of a “dumb supper” was performed, now typically referred to as a silent supper, in which food was consumed by celebrants but only after inviting ancestors to join in, giving the families a chance to interact with the spirits until they left following dinner. 

Children would play games to entertain the dead, while adults would update the dead on the past year’s news. That night, doors and windows might be left open for the dead to come in and eat cakes that had been left for them.

With the rise of Christianity, in the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honour saints. Soon after, All Saints Day came to incorporate some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before All Saints Day was known as All Hallows Eve, and later, Halloween, where people carved turnips (later pumpkins) to ward off evil visiting ghosts, while leaving out offerings of food and drink to welcome friendly visiting spirits like ancestors. 

As you can see, Samhain was a celebration that emphasized the importance of earthly cycles, harvest, spirituality, and reverence for the dead. These sound like pretty important things to honour, don’t they? 

But in our modern world, a lot of this has gotten lost! We are very disconnected from earthly cycles, and many of us have no connection to things like food sources, farming, or agriculture, so why would we pause to appreciate how the earth feeds us, and in such abundance at this time of year when you can basically get anything you want at the grocery store year round?

We no longer abide by the natural rhythms of the earth, or look to the sun and the moon to regulate our activities. The Industrial Revolution, which took place from the 18th to 19th centuries, was a period of major economic, technological, and social change. One of the key drivers of this revolution was the development of new machinery and manufacturing processes that revolutionized the way goods were produced – and clocks played a crucial role in the Industrial Revolution, as they helped to regulate and coordinate the movements of workers and machines – and the workers who would eventually be expected to function as machines. Before the Industrial Revolution, work was typically organized around natural rhythms, such as daylight and the changing seasons. Who would have thought that we could blame so much of this on the invention of the clock?

And the part about death? Honouring the dead on Samhain and inviting the dead back in? Well, that’s just something that we’d really rather look away from isn’t it? 

But there are so many reasons why being connected to the spirit of Halloween, the ancient celebration of Samhain, and its reverence for seasons and the dead is beneficial for our mental health.

Halloween and Mental Health: 

If we go back to the origins of Halloween — Samhain — we can appreciate the reasons why this celebration was considered the most important — and even mandatory — for the Celts. 

Samhain is the time of harvest and when the natural world subsequently going into hibernation, and since Paganism is an earth-based religion, this mirrors our own natural cycles of life and death. It’s not a coincidence that at this time of the year, we become so acutely aware of death. For this reason, having an appreciation and reverence for Halloween, is incredibly important for our mental health.

For one, Halloween is a safe way to explore our relationship to death. Our society is positively death-phobic, which means that we try to ignore the realities of death and dying as much as possible. In the West, we moved from the influence of the Victorians which embraced death or at least had a healthy curiosity about it via rituals and an exploration of the occult, to the rise of science, as modern medicine began introducing interventions that could actually extend and save lives. Over time, more and more families called in doctors and science in place of priests and religion in search of a fix. And with this shift came a focus on combating death, and even beating it. We are now a culture positively obsessed with not dying. It’s hard for us to look at or even be with our dead too. While many cultures care for the bodies of their dead following their passing, or take time to be with the physical aspect of death, in the West we tend to rush this process – hurrying away the body as quickly as possible, not allowing much time for the reality or emotion to set in, which can leave the process of death for family and loved ones as one that is harsh, stark, and almost cloaked in shame.

From anti-aging treatments, to a youth-obsessed beauty culture, to self help and wellness madness like cryo chambers and elixirs — all this distract us from the reality that we’re all going to die. Recent horror movie The Substance actually explores this so well and I highly recommend it. Just maybe bring a barf bag with you. 

But Halloween — Halloween is this time when death is so acutely in our face. And to be fair, death is a hard thing to wrap your head around and be with, and it’s okay to laugh and have fun with it! So we wear costumes, we watch scary movies like Trick ‘r Treat that confront death head on, but in a way that is a little bit funny and light-hearted so that it’s accessible. We host parties, and have seances, and go on haunted walks, and read ghost stories, and this way of encountering the dead makes the whole death thing a little less scary, even for a little while.

When we’re not being silly, we can be with our own feelings about the dead too. Halloween, for many, is a celebration of the dead to this day and it’s a time to celebrate our departed, to grieve openly, invite them back into our homes and loves, and continue our relationship with them. Halloween is a potent time to connect with the dead. You can host your own silent supper, or do psychic dreamwork to find your departed loved ones in your dreams. 

In Trick ‘r Treat, Halloween is an opportunity to remember those kids who died on Halloween is that horrible massacre. Halloween is a time to prevent the second death – which is when the dead are forgotten by the living. Sam could not abide this forgetting, this turning away from the tragedy that befell these kids. Sam asks us to remember – remember the dead, remember what this holiday all means. It’s like, wear your sexy Octopus costume AND remember the dead. You can do both okay. As we like to say in therapy – both and. 

*transition*

As Halloween has evolved over the years, it has also come to mark a celebration of childhood. More than any other holiday, Halloween celebrates the innocence of childhood and offers the kid inside all of us a night to remember that feeling. Do you remember? Do you remember dressing up as the silliest thing you could think of, or if you live in Canada like me, planning your Halloween costume so that it could fit over a winter coat? And being allowed to go out at night! In the dark! To go house to house – to strangers houses! – to ACCEPT CANDY FROM STRANGERS! – because on this one night, the world was magical and safe, and the whole world wanted to celebrate the glory of your childhood and your wookie costume.

Do you remember the Halloween specials on TV? When all they would play were works of art celebrating this most sacred night of the year. The Sabrina the Teenage Witch Halloween Special, AMC’s fear fest, the Disney Channel’s Halloween line up, the Simpson’s Treehouse of Horror, and episodes of Scooby Doo, It’s the Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown, and the entire Friday the 13th franchise for a straight 24 hours. 

Do you remember ordering in pizza because your mom was too busy handing out candy to make dinner? Do you remember the pride you felt when you saw a line up outside your front door because everyone knew your house was the best one to trick or treat at? Do you remember what your house looked like bathed in orange lights?

This is the feeling. You can find that feeling again every Halloween when you connect with its true spirit; its true meaning and legends, its sincerity. 

Just… don’t take it too far. Sam takes it a little too far. 

And now, a short word from our sponsors.

Your Hallowed Hallowen Kit Ad:

It’s me! I’m our sponsors.

Hey Final Girls – I created Your Hallowed Halloween Kit as a way to help you slow down and appreciate this most sacred time in the wheel of the year, with Halloween rituals designed to support your mental health. From tarot spreads, dreamwork exercises, and an activity to help you find your monster movie soulmate as a portrait of your own psychic terrain – each ritual is informed by depth psychology and is designed to help you connect with your own depths, be intentional with the magic around you, and harness Halloween’s true meaning, legends, and traditions as a pathway back to yourself.

Get Your Hallowed Halloween Kit by visiting manymoonstherapy.com/finalgirlsclub and as a special treat for my hallowed listeners, save $5 when using code TRICKRTREAT.

Conclusion:

I still sometimes feel like Halloween doesn’t get the respect it deserves. For one, we refer to it as a holiday but it’s given holiday status by the government the way that no-work holidays like Christmas and Easter are. I mean, I do think it’s a good thing that kids go to school on Halloween so they can dress up and have fun with their classmates, but it’s just interesting to note that as a society, we don’t view Halloween the same way as these more “serious” Christian holidays.

Even in subtler ways, Halloween is not viewed as important or a serious holiday. Like – my condo building allows twinkle lights on balconies only for Christmas and not for Hallowen! Like, they asked me to take mine down when I put them up for Halloween! I thought about filing a complaint with the human rights tribunal or whatever against my human rights to observe my religion or whatever, but it seemed like a big undertaking. So I just put up a million lights inside – sort of like that room that Sam scrawls Halloween sayings all over and puts jack o lanterns inside.

Most of all, for me Halloween is a time of year where I don’t feel like a complete weirdo. All of a sudden, the whole world embraces all the spooky scary stuff that I love so much and celebrates it openly. Suddenly, it’s okay to talk about ghosts, to tell spooky stories, and explore the things that scare me without shame. It silences those voices inside my head that told me my whole life to tone it down, to stop being so weird, that horror movies are gross or wrong, that taking books about Satan out from the public library at age 10 is concerning, and that witches and magic aren’t real. 

At this one magical, spooky time of the year, I am accepted and celebrated. And that’s pretty healing if you ask me. 

Outro:

And that my ghouls is the story of Trick ‘r Treat. Make sure to respect Halloween this year, or else you might just get a visit from a tiny murderous demon with a weird rotting pumpkin head, okay?!

Mental Health is Horrifying is entirely researched, written, edited, and produced by me, Candis Green, Registered (and spooky) Psychotherapist, with artwork by the ghoulishly talented Chloe Hurst. If you like this podcast, please consider rating and reviewing on your preferred listening platform. It really helps the show to reach all the other spooky ghouls out there and I will be eternally grateful – and an eternity is a very long time for a vampire, okay? 

If you live in Ontario and are interested in psychotherapy with me, I offer therapy for Final Girls and specialize in grief and trauma. My work incorporates talk therapy with tarot and dreamwork, as deeper pathways in the human psyche. I offer other services too around tarot, horror, and dreamwork including through my group program, the Final Girls Club – including this month’s feature, Your Hallowed Halloween Kit. You can follow me on Instagram at @mentalhealthishorrifying and you can also learn more about me and my services through my website manymoonstherapy.com.

OR you can also howl at the moon and I will hear your call.

Happy Halloween!