I Was at the ‘Trick ’r Treat’ Test Screening That Scored a 12 Out of 100. I Called It an “Instant Cult Classic.”

I first met Michael Dougherty at a test screening of Trick ’r Treat in Winnetka, California. I owned Bloody Disgusting at the time, and I came out of that theater telling anybody who would listen how fucking good this movie was. What I didn’t know was that Dougherty would go home, spread the audience response cards across his living room floor and try to figure out how the hell the movie I’d just seen could have scored, by his recollection, a 12 out of 100. Wtf.

We’d been excited about Trick ’r Treat since before there was a movie to see. Dougherty’s artwork was phenomenal. You could see a little Tim Burton in it, but those characters were very much his own. And here was Warner Bros., a major studio, getting behind a new Halloween horror anthology. They flew us to Vancouver to watch some of it being filmed. There was even a theatrical release date, October 5, 2007. I thought everybody was going to get to see this thing that fall.

I went back and read my review from Winnetka. I did call it an “instant cult classic,” and I called Sam an “instant horror icon.” What I’d forgotten was that I wrote about the people sitting around me. During that last stretch with Sam and Brian Cox, they were “screaming, laughing, jumping, chattering and hooting.”

“They were laughing and applauding,” Dougherty recalled during a FilmQuest Q&A moderated by Variety’s William Earl. In his coverage of the Q&A for GeekTyrant, Joey Paur quotes Dougherty on what happened after we all went home. Dougherty used to hand out response cards at test screenings when he was in college, so when he saw how badly Trick ’r Treat had scored, he asked to see the cards himself. He later learned that recruiters had looked for people whose last two horror movies were along the lines of Saw and Hostel.

“Okay, guys, this is not the audience for Trick ’r Treat. I promise you.”