The film that closed the 2015 London FrightFest Film Festival, “Tales Of Halloween” is a scarily good time. A playfully macabre anthology, it offers us ten subtly interwoven tales that take place over the course of one Halloween night in a nondescript suburban American town.

If you prefer your horror visceral, dark and nasty then this might seem a little lightweight for you but if you’re looking for spooky good fun with some gruesomely ironic twists then this collection is well worth your time. It’s horror fit for a camp fire scare (provided you’re cool with copious amounts of blood and swearing around your camp fire that is), set in a deceptively cosy world where old black and white horror movies play on every TV in the background. Brimming with sinister imagination and demonic invention, splatter’s what matters in this cheerfully gory fight fest.

Involving an array of talent both in front of and behind the camera, including Neil Marshall, Darren Lynn Bousman, Booboo Stewart, Adrienne Barbeau, Barry Bostwick and even John Landis and Joe Dante, none of the ten tales ever outstay their welcome, delivering shocks and chuckles in equal measure across its trim 92 minute running time. Kicking off with the tale of the wonderfully imagined Halloween boogeyman ‘Sweet Tooth’, the film brings us deliciously ironic and ghoulish cautionary tales, unexpected serial killers, both vengeful and playful demons, ghosts, goblins and even an alien invasion but arguably saves the best for last in the crazy finale of ‘Bad Seed’.

“Tales Of Halloween” is a fine volume of vile vignettes: a collection of cinematic creepypasta fit to delight even the most demanding of cackling crypt creepers.

8/10