Chick Tract Review: The Trick

Jack Chick sez: Shows Halloween’s origin and real purpose.

Jack Chick hates a lot of things. But for some reason, the topic of Halloween really seems to get up his ass with cleats on. Our man Jack has devoted several of his Chick tracts to exposing Halloween as a vast Satanic conspiracy concocted by druids and pagans to sacrifice small children and boost the sales of tiny Snickers bars.

In The Trick, we open with a coven of witches hatching their evil scheme to sacrifice children to the devil by poisoning Halloween candy. However, it turns out that this year’s Halloween drive has a dual purpose. Membership is down in Club Satan. Apparently role playing games and rock music just aren’t bringing in the numbers like they used to, so the witches are also going to put curses on the treats to gain recruits.

On Halloween night, little Johnny Dexter and his friends, Jerry and Susie, go out trick or treating without realizing they are on a collision course with the kind of horrific tragedy that could only be pulled out of the ass of a fundamentalist Christian like Chick. Their neighbor Brenda, who is in league with the forces of evil, gives them all some tainted treats. Johnny dies from eating the poisoned candy, while Jerry ends up in the hospital with cuts in his mouth. Susie also gets sick from eating one of the cursed treats, but manages to recover. And then, irony of ironies, Sister Charity (who masterminded the whole messy caper) has a heart attack and dies while watching the tragedy unfold on the news. And she finds herself in Hell, where the devil taunts her by laughing like Z.Z. Top.

You’re probably thinking to yourself at this point, “Thank God this whole sordid tale is over.” Well, if so, you’re a dumbass because Jack Chick is just warming up! Remember little Jerry and Susie, who survived the wicked Halloween treats? Well, they’ve gone from sweet and obedient to unmanageable little monsters who no longer want to go to Sunday School. (In other words, normal children.) Their parents are at wit’s end, trying to figure out how to handle their wicked little hellspawn. And Brenda, whom nobody suspects is an undercover agent of Beelzebub, is trying to convince them that it’s all just a harmless phase that all kids go through.

But Brenda’s plans are undone by the arrival of Becky, a former witch who now serves Jesus. Yes, like Alex Trebek in Dark Dungeons, Becky has turned her back on the dark conspiracy of witchcraft and Satanism and now travels the nation, fighting her evil former cohorts with the power of… well, God and the Bible and stuff. Upon meeting Becky, Brenda immediately smells an evangelical rat. And once Becky starts letting loose with the TRUTH behind Halloween, Brenda’s suspicions are confirmed.

Becky spins a horrific tale of ancient druids and child sacrifice that Chick claims is straight from the pages of The Two Babylons, a pamphlet written by Scottish theologian Alexander Hislop in 1853. However, I suspect most of Chick’s information actually came from repeated viewings of Halloween III: Season of the Witch. We learn that the druids were part of an ancient protection racket who would go door to door and demand children and virgins from families in exchange for protecting them from the forces of evil. Any families that didn’t cough up would end up with a Star of David inscribed on their door, because apparently the Jews were in on it too. And then, someone would die!

Brenda tries to defuse Becky’s devil stories by laughing them off as superstition. At first, the parents of the tainted demon kids fall for Brenda’s line of reasoning and dismiss Becky’s allegations. But then, Becky explains to them that the only reason her stories sound asinine and unbelievable is because IT’S ALL A PART OF SATAN’S PLAN TO TRICK PEOPLE INTO NOT BELIEVING IN HIM! And then, while the parents are scrambling to find the socks that just got blown the hell off their feet, Becky brings it on home and tells them that only the power of Jesus will snap those little misbehaving carpet apes into shape. As Becky leads them in prayer, Brenda vents her frustration by swearing in some goddamn moon man language.

So Becky leads the children to Christ and, a month later, Susie and Jerry are back to being well-behaved little Stepford zombies. Plus, they’re free from Satan’s grip and their names are written in Heaven. So they’ve got that going for them.

And that’s it. Once again, Mr. Chick ends things a tad anticlimactically, but that’s okay. I’m sure we can all imagine what eventually happens to Brenda. I’ll give you a clue. It involves angels. And lakes of fire. And tossing. Haw, haw, haw!