“Sam was born in a hand-drawn four-minute animated short film that I made back in the day, and by working with Trent Shy and the other filmmakers and the other animators, I'm kind of bringing Sam back home,” says Mike Dougherty, the writer/director of the Halloween classic Trick ‘r Treat, and the creator of the Soul of Halloween, Sam.
Earlier this month, Dougherty announced he created a creative hub for new projects featuring Sam, the strange little pumpkin sack-headed trick-or-treater who makes sure we all follow the rules of the season… or else. One of the first shorts is Sam’s Harvest, a stop-motion animated story from Trent Shy, and FANGORIA had an exclusive chat with the duo about making the short.
“What I wanted to do with these new Sam shorts, and what I feel like Trent's work embodies, is that old-school Halloween special feel,” says Dougherty. “If we took all the shorts that we're creating this month and pieced them together into one 20- to 30-minute Halloween special, I want it to feel like a demented or more demented Pee-wee's Playhouse or Halloween special sort of pulled together, sewn together by Sam himself, and that's where Trent's work comes in.”
Dougherty stumbled across Shy’s work on Instagram during the quarantine era of the COVID-19 pandemic, because one of Trent’s shorts was directly inspired by Trick ‘r Treat. “When you reached out, I was like, ‘Oh, holy shit. This is awesome,’” Shy says. Dougherty says he found Shy’s work shortly after joining the app and was in awe of his “amazing, horrifying, grotesque” creations. Once Dougherty decided to create a series of Sam shorts, Shy was one of the first people he contacted.
They spent the first month of their collaboration trading ideas and prepping for the amount of work that goes into stop-motion. “Everything you see — every leaf, every tree, every piece of this entire film was handmade, so it's a crazy long process,” Shy explains. “Especially with AI now and stuff, I really wanted this one to just be like a spit in the face of AI,” he says. “So I mean, there is not one green screen; even the backgrounds, every single thing was actually there on film in camera.”
Shy wanted to tell a roughly minute-long story, because one minute of stop-motion animation takes months of work. “At some point I thought we'd just have this horde of pumpkins going around, and the smart side of my brain was like, ‘That's way too much work. You're going to animate 10 characters at the same time? Don't do that,” he explains, “but I think there’s always a way.” He continues:
“Any thoughts you have, any idea you have, there’s a way to do it with stop-motion. It's why I got into stop-motion: anything is possible. You want space, you want aliens, you want the end of the world? Anything that maybe would, to look good, be like a hundred million dollars, I'm doing it.”
Shy got into stop-motion after seeing other animators' process, and he hopes his work can inspire others the same way. “I think especially in today's age, I think seeing something handmade, seeing real art, seeing soul that's put into the art, the blood, sweat, and tears are in there, and you can feel it when you watch it […] to be entertained and inspired is a big deal for me.”
Once production on the film really started running, Shy tells me he worked 14-15 hours a day because he got “obsessed” with the project. “I can't do anything else. I don't want to do anything else,” he says. His dedication delighted Dougherty, who would wake up to find short clips or photos of Sam being built from clay and aluminum foil.
Every photo showed Shy shooting 12 photos per second, including moments with 10 pumpkins on wires, windows breaking in the house, five pieces of glass from each window on wires, and the door breaking on a wire. Not to mention the necessary animation that wasn’t initially accounted for. “There's a scene where they're going across the street, and I'm like, ‘Well, these leaves need to blow up because they're moving so fast,’ and so I just start animating these leaves going up in the air,” Shy explains. “I think that's what I love about it; just punishing myself almost, seeing how far I can take something.
“Those would bring a huge smile to my face, and then I started getting these little clips of the actual animation, or Trent would create time lapses of himself animating the figures and whatnot, and it was just instant daily joy for weeks,” Dougherty says. “There's a very sort of childlike quality to Claymation and stop-motion, and actually seeing the fingerprints and the indentations, as you said, it just makes it human; there's a soul to it.” All the more perfect for SAM: The Soul of Halloween.
“I hope it not only entertains people, but it opens up people's eyes as to how versatile horror films can be, that yes, they can be animated, they can be Claymation,” Dougherty says. “You can mix horror and humor together. And so far, I'd say it's working, and we're having a lot of fun doing it.”
By letting other creatives tell stories with Sam, Dougherty is essentially handing his baby off to others to play with and make their own. While this could easily be a nightmare scenario, Dougherty has loved every second of it.
“I'm really enjoying letting other people take Sam by the hand and run off with him and make cool weird shit,” he tells FANGORIA. “He's been under my purview for so long, and there've been other guest directors in the past […] But largely, he's been mostly mine, so this is the first time I've let a whole variety of directors really take the reins.”
Dougherty has proven he has a knack for telling whether someone is a kindred spirit, but in the worst-case scenario, he admits he has a little secret to determining the truth.
“Sam tells me,” he confesses. “He whispers in my ear whether he approves of a particular collaborator or not.” You heard it here first, folks. Sam is always paying attention.
