WATCH

dir by alexander thomas and nikki carmela

written by nikki carmela and alexander thomas

produced by harrison slater

A Halloween prank. A girl who shouldn’t exist. Trick or Treat is a five-minute single-room horror film co-directed with Nikki — proof that a good idea and a tight space are all you really need.

Made before The Glass Devil and cut from the same cloth — under five hundred dollars, one location, no room for waste — Trick or Treat is where the constraint became a style. Two girls decide to play a prank on another girl on Halloween night. It’s mean-spirited in the way that only feels harmless until it isn’t. The joke is on them. The girl they’ve chosen to torment turns out to be something they weren’t prepared for, and the film pivots on that reversal with a dark glee that keeps the horror from ever getting too comfortable and the comedy from ever getting too safe.

Nikki and I wanted to make something that made you laugh right up until it made you not laugh anymore. That line is the whole film. Getting the tonal balance right in five minutes, in one room, with almost no money — that’s the challenge I find most interesting. Anyone can make horror feel heavy. Making it feel fun and then pulling the rug out is harder.

Five minutes is a discipline. You don’t have time to waste a single scene on setup that doesn’t also pay off, a single line that doesn’t also do two jobs. The single room enforces the same logic spatially — there’s nowhere for the characters to run, and nowhere for the filmmakers to hide. What you see is exactly what we had.

Behind The Scenes

One room, one evening, five hundred dollars — the same parameters we’d return to on The Glass Devil, and for the same reason: limitations force invention. The single location meant every inch of the frame had to be considered; there was no cutting away to something more interesting. The cast had to hold the tonal balance of the whole film in real time, playing the comedy straight enough that the horror could land when it needed to. Co-directing with Nikki meant the two of us were making fast decisions together constantly, which is exactly the kind of filmmaking that either breaks a collaboration or sharpens it. This one sharpened it.