Planning on having a Halloween themed night at your home full of scary movies and wicked treats? Most of these nights probably have a movie list comprising of Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the Thirteeth. How about refreshing that list and including something new, and something that is actually about Halloween.

Before anyone cries foul over my statement that TRICK ‘R TREAT is the single best Halloween-themed movie ever made, allow me to back up the statement. While 1978′s Halloween is a masterful, amazing thriller that truly has no equal in the horror genre, TRICK ‘R TREAT is something wonderfully different. It’s a movie that is Halloween.

Whereas Carpenter’s classic is set during the holiday and it plays heavily into the plot, the film could arguably be set on any other night and be just as frightening. TRICK ‘R TREAT hinges completely on All Hallow’s Eve, taking every spooky childhood memory its viewers have about the holiday and mashing them into a gleeful, creepy anthology of tales that are somehow both genuinely chilling and nostalgically beautiful.

Writer and director Michael Dougherty has crafted a film that transformed me into a five-year-old child in a Dracula cape and plastic fangs, riveted in stunned horror as his vision played out before me. Somehow, it succeeds in being both terrifying and charming.

TRICK ‘R TREAT‘s story unfolds unlike a traditional anthology picture, with all of the movie’s separate plots taking place together. We’re not subjected to title cards or stunted intermissions between tales, but a seamless mix of Halloween hijinx and horrors. In its five overlapping stories, a couple discovers what happens when they blow out a jack o’ lantern before midnight, a bullying child learns to check his candy before eating it, a young woman is stalked by a hooded stranger at a harvest festival, a group of pranksters uncover the ghoulish truth about a local urban legend, and an elderly Scrooge is visited by a pint-sized hellion who is far more interested in tricks than treats.

TRICK ‘R TREAT definitely deserves to be part of your Halloween movie night!