The legend of Trick ‘r Treat has only grown and grown in the years since its original release in 2007, with Michael Dougherty’s seasonal anthology becoming something of a holiday horror classic. Sam is of course at the center of the property as a true Halloween icon, with various toys, costumes and decorations filling up stores like Spirit Halloween every October.

But while the world of Trick ‘r Treat has been expanded upon with various comics, we’ve still never gotten the sequel we’ve been waiting over 15 years for. It’s become an annual tradition to get an update on the status of the project each and every October, with Dougherty revealing at Beyond Fest just last year that Trick ‘r Treat 2 was in “very active development” at the time.

It’s now one year later. And we’re less than a week away from Halloween. Like Santa Claus in the wee morning hours of Christmas, Dougherty has popped back up with another update.

Collider brings us our annual update this morning, straight from Michael Dougherty’s mouth to the ears of Collider’s Perri Nemiroff during a post-screening Q&A over the weekend.

“I will say this, because we said it last year at the Beyond Fest screening, the sequel is in active development with Legendary,” Dougherty again confirms.

He continues, “I’ll go so far as to say that we have several drafts of a script. I brought back the same storyboard artist I mentioned before, Simeon Wilkins, so we have a stack of storyboards and a good fat stack of concept art done by Breehn Burns as well. So it’s inching along,”

“I’m hoping to talk to Legendary,” Dougherty adds. “They’ve been wonderful, like great collaborators. But so much of it is timing, and as you know, we just got out of a strike, so the next step, fingers crossed, would be looking at budget, of course, schedule, and all the rest. But we have a really, really great script for a sequel. And I brought in my co-writer from Krampus to do it with me. So Zach Shields and Todd Casey also helped me write Trick ‘r Treat Part 2.”

Trick ‘r Treat features five interwoven stories that occur on Halloween…

“An everyday high school principal has a secret life as a serial killer; a college virgin might have just met the guy for her; a group of teenagers pull a mean prank; a woman who loathes the night has to contend with her holiday-obsessed husband; and a mean old man meets his match with the demonic, supernatural trick-or-treater whose name is Sam.”