Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud promises “not Treat…Trick! Trick!” to the children in his presence after they ask their traditional question, but Ray Bradbury’s The Halloween Tree, both in its novel and animated film form, offers plenty of each.

By 1972, Bradbury was already well on his way to becoming the Grand Master of Science Fiction that the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America would officially name him in 1988. Books like The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 along with dozens of short stories had already proved him deserving of the title. Though he only wrote a few novels and stories that could truly be classified as horror, those few are legendary and most revolve around what he often named his favorite holiday—Halloween.

With the seminal dark fantasy masterpiece Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the latter career work A Graveyard for Lunatics: Another Tale of Two Cities (1990) on either side, The Halloween Tree is the middle installment in a loose Halloween trilogy by the author. Though he had written several other pieces dealing with childhood and growing up in a small town, this is his only novel that is aimed directly at children as its primary audience. Be that as it may, it is enchanting for readers of all ages. It is also well worth mentioning that the illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini, a frequent collaborator of Bradbury’s, are astounding.

In 1993, the Hanna-Barbera company produced an animated special based on the novel for the ABC network written and narrated by Bradbury himself with Leonard Nimoy voicing the mysterious Mr. Moundshroud. So often when it comes to books and the movies based on them, one is clearly superior. In this case, both are so wonderful for different reasons that neither feels extraneous. The basics of the plot remain more or less the same in both, but the details and execution in each make both vital. Because they share most of the same plot points, let us explore both at the same time, reveling in the magic of each.

The Halloween Tree is a fast-paced, simple fairy tale that would be delightful in the hands of many wonderful writers, but Bradbury was a master of his craft. What makes it truly outstanding is his inimitable sense of style and unforgettable surrealistic imagery. Each word and phrase chosen and placed with such deliberate precision that it feels effortless to the reader, even the young at whom the novel is directed. It is enough to enthrall the imagination of anyone and maybe spark a pang of envy in those who toil at smithing words and stringing phrases together—do any of us stand a chance of ever being that good? And to make what is essentially a history lesson so riveting, so enchanting, and so artistic is a feat that borders on miraculous.

The story begins in “a small town by a small river and a small lake in a small northern part of a Midwest state” where we are introduced to our main characters getting ready for Halloween. In the novel it is a group of eight boys all dressed in various costumes. The film streamlines this down to the four key characters: Tom Skelton the skeleton, Ralph the mummy, Wally the gargoyle, and turns Henry-Hank from the novel into Jenny dressed in a witch’s costume and riding a bike with broom attached. Presiding over the novel and film is the shadowy specter of Death—both in personification and in the imminent dread that one of their own, a mere child, will die that night. This is the boy Joe “Pip” Pipkin, “the greatest boy who ever lived.” In the novel he steps out to meet his friends when they come trick or treating at his door. He is ghostly pale and clearly ill. In the film, he is seen being rushed to the hospital in an ambulance as the children arrive. In both, he directs them to a house on the edge of the town past the ravine that had also appeared in another form in Bradbury’s nostalgic novel Dandelion Wine.

The setting is so beautifully laid in both book and film and no one reads Bradbury’s prose quite like Bradbury himself. Casting him as narrator of the cartoon is as inspired as Jean Shepherd speaking his own words in Bob Clark’s A Christmas Story. The setting described in each evokes a similar time and place. In another link to that other holiday, The Halloween Tree deliberately draws comparisons to the greatest work of Christmas lore, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which is also at its heart a ghost story. The Marley knocker on Moundshroud’s door is the first and most direct allusion to that classic.

After using the “Marley knocker” on the door of the haunted house at the edge of town, we meet Death personified in who will be our guide through the story, Carapace Clavicle Moundshroud. He is a dark-caped, gaunt, and mysterious figure throughout; fearful, but also becomes something of a friend along the way—perhaps like Death itself as we travel further along the road of life. Moundshroud shows the children the Halloween Tree of the title, decorated with its carved and candled pumpkins—a dark reflection of an ornamented and lit Christmas tree. When Pipkin appears and takes a pumpkin from the tree he disappears into “the Undiscovered Country,” another reference to death. Moundshroud promises “all the deep dark wild long history of Halloween waiting to swallow us whole!” Our history lesson is about to begin. He and the children assemble a giant kite from old circus posters of beasts and fly off into the dark night and darker recesses of time.

The first stop is ancient Egypt and Ralph in his mummy costume takes his moment. We learn ancient stories of Osiris, God of the Day, killed each night by his brother Darkness. In the novel, Moundshroud tells a story of early man fearing that the sun may not return the next day or after it has been hidden for the winter. As they watch the sun set from atop the great pyramid, he proclaims “there it goes…The heart, soul, and flesh of Halloween. The Sun! There Osiris is murdered again. There sinks Mithras, the Persian fire. There falls Phoebus Apollo all Grecian light. Sun and flame.” He teaches the first lessons of the night, that the history of Halloween is a history of pondering death, and that the real ghosts are memories.

We then fly to a new setting, the British Isles, and the sequence most different between book and film. In the book, the Druid god of the dead, Samhain, appears as a giant reaper swinging his scythe over the field that is the earth and turning all who died in the previous year into beasts of all kinds, punishing them for their sins. It is one of the most frightening moments in the book, but it is also Bradbury’s imagery at its most striking. We see the Druid priests making sacrifices and pleading for the souls of the dead. This gives way to Roman soldiers killing the Druids and setting up their own temples to their gods, which in turn literally melt away to the rise of the Christian faith. “Gods following gods…New alters…new incense, new names…”

Book and film then realign at the October Broom Festival as both explore the next common costume of the season: the witch. Moundshroud postulates that these were the ones who “had their wits about them,” the most intelligent and knowledgeable of their time hunted, tortured and killed. All of Europe under a cloud of witch’s smoke during this long, dark sleep of the Dark Ages. Moundshroud then leads them to Paris and the unfinished cathedral of Notre Dame to unlock the mystery of Wally’s costume: the gargoyles and monsters placed atop cathedrals. “All the old gods, all the old dreams, all the old nightmares, all the old ideas with nothing to do, out of work, we gave them work. We called them here!” Tom observes.

We then follow Pip to one last stop, the stop that seems to be Bradbury’s favorite of them all. We see a thousand candles in a cemetery in Mexico at a celebration of El Dia de los Muertos, the Day of the Dead. Moundshroud motions them into a dugout canoe and they swiftly make their way over still waters. Bradbury saves some of his loveliest prose for this moment:

“And the faster the boat moved, the more guitar notes sounded and the more candles were lit high among the mounds on the stony hills. A dozen, a hundred, a thousand candles flared until it looked as if the great Andromeda star cluster had fallen out of the sky and tilted itself to rest here in the middle of almost-midnight Mexico.”

The children declare it to be better than any Halloween they have ever experienced. But again, the specter of the death of a child arises as a funeral procession led by a woman bearing bowls of burning coals across her shoulders and a man balancing a small coffin on his head goes by.

Moundshroud leads the children into the catacombs for one final lesson. Among the mummies of the underground crypt, they find Pipkin once again. Here is the moment where the film shines even brighter than the novel. Fearing that he will lose his dear friend to death’s grip, Tom offers a year from the end of his life to save him. The others do the same. In the book Moundshroud makes the suggestion, but there is greater power in Tom striking the bargain.

We are then whisked back to Moundshroud’s mansion and a chance to retrace the lessons we have learned. As has been the point all along, the celebration of Halloween has gone by many names over the centuries: The Feast of Samhain, The Time of the Dead Ones, All Souls, All Saints, The Day of the Dead, All Hallows Eve, but at their core, they are all the same. Summer to winter, day to night, life to death and learning how to come to grips with them all. “If we face death eyeball to eyeball it loses its power over us. It can’t scare us anymore,” Tom says.

It is the great lesson that humanity continues to grapple with through the ages. It is in our Halloween celebrations. It is in our customs of life and death. It is in our ghost stories and horror films. Will we ever stop being afraid of the dark? Perhaps not. But at least we have these things to teach us how to face what lurks there.