Trick ‘R Treat Director Scrapped a Halloween Twist Because It Was “A Trope at That Point”

Have you heard the tale of the Halloween School Bus Massacre? Legend has it that on October 31st, 1977, parents paid a school bus driver to take their eight “troubled and disturbed” children to an abandoned rock quarry outside the town of Warren Valley, Ohio, to do the unthinkable: murder. The quarry became a grave for the eight would-be trick-or-treaters as the bus — and the costumed children still on board — went over a cliff and sank so deep that it was never seen again. According to legend, it’s tradition to leave eight jack-o-lanterns by the side of the lake as an offering to the eight lost souls who died on All Hallows’ Eve… or fall victim to the undead children haunting their watery grave.

Of course, it’s set up for a scary trick that pranksters Macy (Britt McKillip), Schrader (Jean-Luc Bilodeau), Chip (Alberto Ghisi) and Sara (Isabelle Deluce) pull on Samhain faithful Rhonda (Samm Todd) in 2007’s Trick ‘r Treat, writer and director Michael Dougherty’s cult classic Halloween anthology. But as it turns out, the urban legend is true: Rhonda, who abides by the rules of Halloween, is the only survivor when the victims of the School Bus Massacre rise again and prey on the bullies. But the story almost ended with a different twist.

“The one variation was that the rock quarry story initially just tookplace in a cemetery, and the kids were playing ghost in the graveyardor something like that. The original ending was that you found out thatthe group of kids lured the one girl to the cemetery to play ghost inthe graveyard only to find out that they lured her there because she wasactually dead, and she forgot that she was dead,” Dougherty told Collider after a recent screening of Trick ‘r Treat. “It’s not a terribletwist, but this is coming on the heels of The Sixth Sense and TheOthers, and so I realized the twist of, ‘Surprise! You’re really dead,’was sort of a trope at that point.”

More than 15 years after Trick ‘r Treat unleashed Sam, the pumpkin-headed demon spirit of Halloween, a sequel is in “active development” at Legendary Pictures.

“I will say this, because we said it last year at the Beyond Festscreening, the sequel is in active development with Legendary,”Dougherty told Collider of Trick ‘r Treat Part 2. “I’ll go so far as to say that we have several drafts of a script. I brought back the same storyboard artist I mentioned before,Simeon Wilkins, so we have a stack of storyboards and a good fat stackof concept art done by Breehn Burns as well. So it’s inching along.”

Trick ‘r Treat is streaming on Max.