The Tape Nobody Asked For
If you ever wanted to feel like you accidentally ate a handful of expired candy corn and washed it down with rusty tap water, All Hallows’ Eve is your movie. It opens with a babysitter finding an unmarked VHS tape in the kids’ candy bag—because nothing says “family Halloween fun” like a bootleg snuff film on magnetic tape. From there, Damien Leone—writer, editor, and director—invites us to sit through three shorts stitched together like the cinematic equivalent of a Frankenstein monster built out of roadkill and latex glue.
Art the Clown is our host, and he’s got the charisma of a used scalpel. He doesn’t talk, he doesn’t smile, but he does manage to give off that distinct “guy-who-gets-banned-from-Walmart” energy. He’s the kind of killer who would probably put mayonnaise on a Pop-Tart and call it performance art.
The 9th Circle: Satan’s Waiting Room
The first segment, The 9th Circle, feels like a community theater production of Rosemary’s Baby directed by someone who just discovered fog machines. A woman gets abducted by Art, chained up, and paraded through a satanic dungeon where witches perform a fetus-ectomy for the Devil’s amusement. It’s grim, chaotic, and about as coherent as a Craigslist post written in Latin.
Leone throws everything at the wall—horned demons, chains, entrails—and hopes something sticks. What actually sticks is the smell of bad lighting and student-film energy. The makeup effects are decent, but it’s like watching a Halloween Horror Nights attraction designed by people who’ve never actually met a functioning human being. It’s not scary—it’s sweaty.
Something in the Dark: E.T. Phones in a Restraining Order
Next up is Something in the Dark, where an alien crashes near a lonely woman’s countryside home. It’s atmospheric for about seven seconds, then devolves into a series of flashlight flickers and panicked phone calls. The alien looks like a melted garden gnome, and the woman reacts with the dramatic range of someone who just realized she left the oven on.
You can tell Leone wanted to make Signs but ended up with Shaky Cam and Sadness. It’s supposed to be about isolation and fear, but instead it feels like an ad for better home security systems. By the time the alien drags her away, you’re half-hoping it’ll take her agent too.
Terrifier: When Bathrooms Attack
Then comes Terrifier, the short that would later spawn a franchise. Here, a costume designer meets Art again—this time at a gas station that looks like it was decorated by a serial killer who loves fluorescent lighting. Art smears feces on the walls, murders a guy with a hacksaw, and proceeds to terrorize our protagonist like a deranged mime on meth.
To Leone’s credit, this segment is the only one that moves with purpose. Unfortunately, that purpose is “make you regret your lunch.” The violence is excessive, not in the clever Evil Dead II kind of way, but in the “please don’t show this to my therapist” kind of way. By the time Art amputates the heroine’s limbs and scribbles misogynistic slurs on her body, you’re left wondering if the movie hates women, men, or just the concept of joy itself.
The Babysitter Blues
Between the segments, our babysitter Sarah watches the tape and slowly loses her mind—because who wouldn’t? The phone rings, voices cry for help, and Art crawls out of the TV like an off-brand Samara from The Ring. When he finally kills the kids, it’s supposed to be shocking. Instead, it feels like a mercy killing—for the audience.
Katie Maguire tries to anchor the film with real emotion, but she’s fighting a losing battle. It’s like trying to do Shakespeare in a haunted Spirit Halloween. Every line feels like a placeholder for something better that never arrived.
Art the Clown: The Joke That Keeps on Killing
Let’s talk about Art. Mike Giannelli plays him with silent-film flair—think Charlie Chaplin if he’d been possessed by Pennywise after a divorce. He’s unsettling in concept, but Leone never gives him dimension. He’s a collection of facial expressions and gore gags stapled together with irony. When the film later spun him into the Terrifier series, it was less an evolution and more a relapse.
Art isn’t terrifying—he’s just there, like mold in your shower or your ex’s Netflix password. He kills because the script says so, not because there’s any real motive. He’s a clown, yes—but he’s not funny, and that’s the most unforgivable sin of all.
Technical Nightmares
Cinematography-wise, All Hallows’ Eve looks like it was shot through a dirty fish tank. The lighting varies between “too dark to see” and “retina-searing neon.” The editing—done by Leone himself—feels like a dare. Scenes don’t flow so much as crash into each other, leaving the audience in a dazed stupor that might actually be preferable to understanding what’s happening.
The score sounds like it was composed by a teenager who just discovered GarageBand and insomnia. Every cue is either too loud, too long, or too confused about what emotion it’s supposed to trigger. Fear? Disgust? Gas station anxiety?
A Blood-Soaked Love Letter to… What, Exactly?
At its core, All Hallows’ Eve wants to be a throwback to the glory days of 1980s VHS horror. It wants to be Creepshowfor the degenerate crowd, Trick ‘r Treat for those who flunked out of film school. But nostalgia isn’t enough when your writing feels like it was scribbled in fake blood and your pacing is more uneven than a Walmart parking lot.
The anthology format should’ve been an advantage—a playground for twisted imagination. Instead, it feels like three unfinished term papers stapled together and handed in at midnight. Each story ends abruptly, with the kind of finality that screams, “We ran out of budget.”
Final Trick, No Treat
When the credits roll, you’re left staring at the screen, asking yourself, Was that supposed to be scary? Or maybe you’re just trying to remember what happiness felt like. Either way, All Hallows’ Eve leaves you emptier than a pumpkin on November 1st.
If there’s any redeeming quality, it’s that this film gave birth to the Terrifier franchise—which, for all its own faults, at least found a tone somewhere between grindhouse lunacy and practical-effects brilliance. But this? This is the awkward first date before the messy marriage. It’s the warm-up act that forgets the lyrics and sets the stage on fire—by accident.
Verdict
All Hallows’ Eve isn’t so much a movie as it is a dare. It’s grim, joyless, and stitched together with enough fake blood to make a butcher weep. Watching it feels like getting tetanus from a haunted VCR.
If you’re a horror completist or a masochist with nostalgia for grainy tapes and bad lighting, maybe it’ll scratch that itch. Everyone else? Smash the VHS, like Sarah should’ve done in the first five minutes, and go rewatch Trick ‘r Treat. At least that one had candy, not clowns.
