Trick or Treats (1982)

Orson Welles' long time friend and cinematographer Gary Graver was a man of many talents as he wrote, directed, and edited the Halloween set horror flick Trick or Treats (1982)! The film opens with Joan (Carrie Snodgrass) having her husband Malcolm (Peter Jason) committed to a mental asylum because of his strange behavior. The film then jumps ahead a few years as Joan and her new husband Richard (David Carradine) are living happily with Christopher (Chris Graver) the adolescent son of Joan and Malcolm. On Halloween night, they enlist the services of local teen Linda (Jacqueline Giroux) to watched Christopher so they can go out to a Halloween party. Unfortunately, Malcolm has decided that this will also be the night he finally escapes from the mental asylum in order to enact revenge on those who had him committed—namely his wife Joan and her new husband. As you may have guessed by this point in time, the film is a barely disguised riff on John Carpenter's Halloween (1978), with an escaped mental patient coming home to wreak havoc on the spookiest night of the year, and the film more or less owns that label. It doesn't attempt to break any new ground and just leans into the well worn tropes of the genre. Like Carpenter's film, this one also features nudity in the early going, with Jacqueline Giroux baring her breasts behind a flimsy plastic shower curtain just six minutes into the flick! If you're looking for some Halloween chills, thrills, and spills, Trick or Treats has plenty of the latter!