Tales from the Darkside: "Trick or Treat" (The Pilot)

Tale from the Darkside remains one of the best remembered horror anthologies of all time. Most episodes were morality plays or cautionary tales in which some individual or individuals got what was coming to them. Tales from the Darkside aired in syndication and proved to be rather popular in its time. It ultimately ran for four seasons. It was forty years ago today, on October 29 1983, that the show's pilot episode first aired. Fittingly enough given when it debuted, it was a Halloween tale called "Trick or Treat."

In "Trick or Treat," Gideon Hackles (Barnard Hughes) is a local storekeeper and the richest man in town. Almost everyone in town and the surrounding rural area is in debt to him. He also happens to be an absolute miser and an absolutely spiteful one at that. Every Halloween he gives trick-or-treaters the chance to find their parents' IOUs. If an individual child finds their parents' IOU, their debts are entirely cancelled. Unfortunately, no child has ever found an IOU, as Mr. Hackles has his house rigged with animatronic ghosts and goblins of the sort one would find in a carnival fright house or a haunted house attraction with which he scares the kids away. As might be expected, in the end Mr. Hackles gets a rather Hellish comeuppance for his spitefulness and greed.

Tales from the Darkside grew out of the movie Creepshow (1982), directed by George Romero and Stephen King. Creepshow was a portmanteau movie featuring four tales of horror, not unlike the British classic Dead of Night (1945) or such Amicus portmanteau horror movies as Dr. Terror's House of Horrors (1965) and The House That Dripped Blood (1970). Creepshow drew inspiration from such EC Comics horror titles as Tales from the Crypt and Vault of Horror, which also offered up morality plays in a horror setting.

Creepshow proved moderately successful at the box office. It occurred to George Romero and the producers of Creepshow that the movie could provide the basis for a horror anthology television series. Unfortunately, Warner Bros.who distributed Creepshow, owned certain intellectual properties in relation to the movie. George Romero then created Tales from the Darkside. The comic book trappings of Creepshow were jettisoned for Tales from the Darkside, but like the movie it drew inspiration from EC Comics. As mentioned above, like EC Comics and Creepshow before it, Tales from the Darkside featured morality plays in which some character got their comeuppance.

In this way the pilot episode, "Trick or Treat," was truly representative of the series that was to come. Barnard Jones brought the greedy, spiteful, and downright sadistic Gideon Hackles to life, and made for a memorable episode. The episode's effects are also impressive for the era, when the use of CGI was virtually unknown. The fact that the debut of "Trick or Treat" coincided with Halloween and the pilot had a Halloween theme probably helped it draw in more viewers than it would have had otherwise. The success of "Trick or Treat" in syndication led Tribune Entertainment to go forward with Tales from the Darkside. The regular series debuted on September 30 1984 and ran for four seasons. The show's continued success would result in the theatrical release Tales from the Darkside: The Movie (1990), a portmanteau horror film featuring three tales of terror. It was released two years after Tales from the Darkside had ended its run.

"Trick or Treat" would not be the only episode of Tales from the Darkside set at Halloween. The show's second Halloween episode, "Halloween Candy," aired in its second season. In "Halloween Candy," another grumpy old man gets his comeuppance when refusing to give a trick-or-treater candy. The third and final Halloween episode of Tales from the Darkside was "The Cutty Black Sow," which dealt with a demon from Celtic lore that steals the souls of all who die on Halloween.

Tales from the Darkside was released on VHS and later on DVD. Sadly, it is not available on streaming, but Tales from the Darkside is still remembered and maintains a cult following to this day. It was on the strength of that pilot, "Trick or Treat," which would turn out to be one of the show's best episodes, that Tales from the Darkside came into being as a series.