This is a series of short films set on Halloween, all from 2013. They were made for ShockTillYouDrop.com, a website that no longer existed by the time I watched this series in April 2020. (The reason I watched it then instead of October was that one of the shorts, which I had seen before, was released by Crypt TV sometime after it appeared in this series, and it was in April 2020 that I happened to be reorganizing my Crypt TV reviews. When I discovered the short had been part of this series, I decided to watch the whole series of nine shorts.)
tek's rating: meh and a quarter
Festival of the Dead (5:18)
I can't find any links (such as IMDb) for this, which is just as well. It was okay, I guess, but I didn't really understand it. A teenage girl goes out for what is apparently her last night of trick-or-treating. When she gets home, she finds her jack-o-lantern has been smashed, but three people dressed as skeletons offer her a new one, and she goes out with them to... do stuff. Like dance around a jack-o-lantern. And that's about it. I never really got the impression of a "festival of the dead" happening. Or anything.
tek's rating: meh
Trick (2:10)
Horrors of Halloween
This didn't have much of a plot or anything interesting about it, beyond "Teddy Bears Picnic" playing. The visual is a rotating look at a room decorated for Halloween, and there's a woman sitting in a chair... and it's hard to tell if she's laughing in enjoyment or screaming in terror. But then I guess she gets murdered. All the spinning makes it hard to get a handle on what's really going on, and IMO doesn't leave much of a chance to even be scared by the scariness. Or whatever.
tek's rating:
Bits & Pieces
Horrors of Halloween; Jenn Wexler
This is the first short (aside from the one I'd seen on Crypt TV) that I actually found entertaining. A man hands out cookies to trick-or-treaters, and they all really love them. His next door neighbor also has cookies, but none of the kids are interested. So she breaks into the man's house to search for his secret recipe... and while the end was pretty predictable, it was still a decently disturbing and somewhat amusing little film.
tek's rating: ¾
Scary Mask (2:14)
Facebook; Halloween Short Films; Horrors of Halloween; IMDb; Vimeo; YouTube
This 2013 short film was presented by Crypt TV in 2017.
A guy is enjoying a Halloween party to which he was not invited. When another guest shows up... well, it quickly becomes apparent what the twist is going to be, but I thought it was pretty cool and amusing, with a sort of Twilight Zone vibe.
tek's rating: meh and three quarters
Witches Brew (2:15)
13th Floor; Horrors of Halloween; IMDb
At a Halloween party, the hostess tells the assembled children a story about a witch, and has them close their eyes while she passes around the witch's body parts for them to feel. One boy isn't impressed, because he's played this game before... or has he?
The Afterparty (3:20)
Horrors of Halloween
A man at an office Halloween party is freaking out, because he'd given some drugs to a woman and now she seems to be dead. So he's phoned a friend to ask for help, but his friend seems oddly calm (or perhaps mildly annoyed) about the whole situation. And the way the film ends... is not what I was expecting at all, but I found it rather chilling.
tek's rating: meh and a quarter
Halloween Is Coming (1:34)
This is just a bunch of Halloweenish visuals with some Halloweenish background music. It's not bad for setting the Halloween mood, but mood-setting is all it does.
I have no idea how to rate this film
The Trick Is the Treat (3:18)
Aphasia Films; Horrors of Halloween; IMDb
There are some decent background visuals... a lot of plastic jack-o-lanterns, and images of sweets, and um, some flashing lights or whatever (so if you're sensitive to that kind of thing, be warned). All this while a pair of narrators recite the names of different... sweets... well, most of them are pretty standard candy and things you might expect to get while trick-or-treating, thought some of them are weird, more trick than treat, I guess. Anyway, the whole thing is vaguely enjoyable as a sort of kid-friendly psychedelic trip, but there's no story to it at all. So it's sort of a mood-setter, like the previous film, except that this one has dialogue. Sort of. Oh, and the primary narrator is Angus Scrimm. That name doesn't mean anything to me, but apparently it does to people who are bigger horror fans than I am. But at least I thought he had a good voice for the film.
tek's rating: ½
Selfie (3:45)
Horrors of Halloween
This reminds me of another short I saw probably not too long ago (though it could be several months), possibly on Crypt TV (or possibly not), but I forget what it was called. Anyway, it's not important. In this film, a woman is watching Halloween on Halloween night, but she seems bored by it, and starts playing a game on her phone that turns photos into simple jigsaw puzzles. She takes a selfie to turn into a puzzle, and we see something frightening in the image, behind her, but she doesn't even look at it before puzzle-ifying it. So of course we have to wait for her to finish putting the puzzle together on her phone. And then there's a pretty decent jump scare.