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Michael Dougherty really loves October 31.
“Some of my earliest memories were Halloween,” Dougherty said during a Variety-moderated production masterclass in partnership with genre festival FilmQuest in Provo, Utah.
“Carving a pumpkin with my dad, going out trick-or-treating. That, combined with my love of horror movies and the occult, made me go down the Halloween rabbit hole and learn that it really is a strange, mystical holiday. It’s not just about putting on costumes and getting candy.”
During college, Dougherty landed on the idea for Sam, the costumed child who would become his mascot and a figurehead for Halloween. Sam would later end up being an integral part of the director’s 2007 anthology film “Trick ’r Treat.”
“In my mind, the spirit of Halloween would look like a child,” Dougherty said. “So that would allow it to roam door-to-door, knocking, seeing if you were obeying the rules and traditions of Halloween. It should be a costume that’s timeless, so there’s the scarecrow mask and the orange pajamas. But I love the idea that he’s mischievous and silent.”
Sam captivated Dougherty, who sought to bring him to life in a short film called “Season’s Greetings.”
“I made it as my senior thesis film when I was at NYU,” he said. “For most of 1995 into 1996, I drew this animated short by hand. Computers were just coming onto the scene, but I chose to suffer for my art and do it with pencil and paper and actually shoot it on 16mm film.”
This year marks the 30th anniversary of “Season’s Greetings,” and to celebrate, Dougherty did a 4K restoration of the short, which ended up becoming a sizable project on its own.
“I had some old 16mm film prints sitting in a closet, and I transferred them to digital right after I got out of NYU,” he said. “But the transfer even back then wasn’t that great. I thought, ‘Well, the 30th anniversary is coming up. Why not scan it at 4K?’ So I found this really great company in Hollywood called Origins Archival, and they painstakingly went in and scanned every single frame from the original 16 mm print. Then again, just choosing to suffer for my art, we went through every single frame and got rid of every piece of dust, dirt, scratch, stabilized it and they created this beautiful 4K DCP and it’s never looked or sounded better. I even took it back to my original composer and sound designer, Evan Chen, and he created a 5.1 track for it.”
Dougherty has faced difficulties in getting another “Trick ’r Treat” film made, as he said he has a great script but the modest budget is too frightening for a lot of people in the industry.
“It’s not low budget, but it would cost about what the first movie cost with inflation, which is roughly $20 million,” he said. “That number tends to scare a lot of accountants for whatever reason.”
That said, he’s been able to keep Sam’s spirit alive and well through other mediums, including a just-released graphic novel called “Trick ‘r Treat: Witching Hours,” as well as commissioning a series of Sam short films to be released on the character’s official Instagram page.
“I went around and found a bunch of other weirdos and misfits whose work I’ve admired over the years on Instagram and YouTube,” Dougherty said of the project. “I asked, ‘Hey, do you want to make some cool Sam stuff?’ It’s been a ton of fun.”
Despite having a winning Hollywood track record that includes films such as “Krampus” and “Godzilla: King of the Monsters,” Dougherty’s recent work on “Season’s Greetings” reminded him of the early joy of creativity.
“I wasn’t just restoring the film, I was restoring a piece of my soul in the process,” he said. “It really did bring back memories. I wasn’t happy until they gave me every single frame of the scan, and I sat there for 10 hours a day sometimes. I was going in and removing the dust and scratches, or even reanimating portions of it and recovering portions of it. That drive really brought back memories of what it felt like to do it strictly for the passion, strictly for the art and not do it for a paycheck.”
