Sam is animated again. Sam: The Soul of Halloween went live on October 1 with a website, a YouTube channel, a teaser and a 63-second cartoon called Hello October, all built around the sack-masked trick-or-treater Michael Dougherty first drew as a film student at NYU in 1996.
The hub marks thirty years of Sam, who began in the four-minute animated short Season’s Greetings and later became the connective tissue of Trick ‘r Treat. Dougherty is treating the anniversary as a return to how the character started rather than a victory lap.
“Trick ‘r Treat obviously became a huge part of Sam’s story, and I remain incredibly proud of that film. But Trick ‘r Treat wasn’t the first chapter in Sam’s story, and it won’t be the last,” Dougherty said in the launch announcement. “It really started with this weird little hand-drawn animated short I made as a film student. And for the 30th anniversary, it felt like the perfect time to go back to those roots — handmade, independent and artist-driven — and see where Sam might wander next.”
The October teaser went up on the project’s own YouTube channel.
Season’s Greetings Is Playing in Theaters All Month
The 1996 short has been restored in 4K and booked into at least thirteen festivals and independent theaters through October, among them Screamfest in Los Angeles, the Brooklyn Horror Film Festival, the Music Box Theatre in Chicago, the Texas Theatre in Dallas, the Frida Cinema in Santa Ana, Revue Cinema in Toronto, Telluride Horror Show, Vancouver Horror Show, Knoxville Horror Fest, FilmQuest, Gardena Cinema, Sleepy Hollow Cinema and the Myers House in North Carolina. More dates are still being added.
The First New Short Runs 63 Seconds
Hello October is directed by Dougherty, with Breehn Burns as animation director, Burns and Ye Aung animating, character design by Rory Dise and Aung, and backgrounds by Aung. It is scored to “Dead Hearts,” from the 2009 self-titled album by Dead Man’s Bones.
That is a deeper cut than it looks. Dead Man’s Bones is Ryan Gosling and Zach Shields, and Shields co-wrote Krampus with Dougherty in 2015. The song is a reunion hiding in a one-minute cartoon’s credits.
Sixteen Artists Are Credited on the Launch
The announcement names sixteen collaborating artists, including Steven Rhodes, Christopher Shy, Michael Ballif, Sam Furst, Richard Garcia, Cyrus Haley, Moss Lawton, Austin Pardun, Alexander Ray, Ryan Sawyer, Trent Shy and Christopher Waltemate. Shirts, posters, pins and stickers are part of it, and Dougherty has said more collaborations are coming.
“What surprised me most was how alive Sam and his debut film still felt thirty years later,” Dougherty said. “It started feeling less like looking backward and more like opening a door into a new chapter.”
A sequel to Trick ‘r Treat has been talked about for most of Sam’s second decade and still does not exist. What arrived instead is a minute of new animation, a restored student film on a thirteen-venue theatrical run, and an open door for other artists to draw him. For a character built entirely on keeping the rules of the holiday, a handmade October suits him better than a release date nobody can name.
