Synapse FilmsUnlike Michael Dougherty’s Trick ‘r Treat, the 1986 Trick or Treat doesn’t have any actual trick-or-treating in it. Still, it’s a perfect Halloween movie, one best enjoyed on a breezy fall evening with a bowl of candy at your side. Released 40 years ago today, it’s great fun in the way only an ‘80s horror movie can be, but this camp cult classic from director Charles Martin Smith (who would go on to helm Air Bud) has its roots in a far more sinister real-life phenomenon. Trick or Treat is a relic of the Satanic Panic, which gripped America in the 1980s and early ‘90s when a not-insubstantial portion of the population believed that Satanic cults based in schools and daycares were secretly abusing children in the name of their Dark Lord. They weren’t. But while no proof ever emerged, dozens of people went to prison on charges related to the Satanic Panic, and more lives were ruined as hysteria shuttered daycares across the nation.Heavy-metal music was a popular scapegoat for Satanic Panic crusaders, who saw the occult imagery used by bands like Black Sabbath and Slayer as recruiting tools for the Satanic agenda. This idea is at the center of Trick or Treat, which centers on a metalhead teenager named Eddie “Ragman” Weinbauer (Marc Price). After learning that his favorite metal musician, the flamboyantly sinister Sammi Curr (Tony Fields), has died in a hotel fire, Eddie accidentally resurrects his fallen idol by playing a mysterious record called Songs in the Key of Death. Mayhem and hair metal are unleashed, and teenagers in Halloween costumes get vaporized by lightning bolts from Sammi’s guitar.Specifically, Eddie invokes Sammi’s evil undead spirit by playing sections of the record backward, a reference to a technique called backmasking that sent Satanic Panic believers into a frenzy. Basically, when you’re recording a song, you can include snippets of backward audio alongside the regular, forward-facing music, creating messages that require you to reverse the direction a vinyl record spins on your turntable to understand them (it’s terrible for the needle; experiment sparingly). Albums by Pink Floyd and Frank Zappa did it back in the 1960s, and by the ‘80s, evangelical groups were convinced that metal bands were brainwashing kids with subliminal calls to disobey their parents and worship the Devil.Glamorous evil is unleashed in Trick or Treat. | De Laurentiis Entertainment GroupThis all came to a head in 1990, when the parents of two teenagers who died by suicide sued Judas Priest, alleging that subliminal messages in the band’s music had driven their children to end their own lives. It was a desperate attempt to make sense of an incomprehensible situation, and a judge dismissed the case after a trial where frontman Rob Halford was called to testify that what the prosecution alleged were pro-suicide messages was actually just the sound of Halford breathing.That trial took place four years after the release of Trick or Treat, but Judas Priest was also part of the so-called “Filthy Fifteen,” musicians singled out at a 1985 Senate hearing led by Tipper Gore, wife of then-senator Al Gore, for their “objectionable” lyrical content. Alongside drug references and sexually explicit lyrics (Prince’s “Darling Nikki” was one of Gore’s preferred targets), references to the occult were considered a no-no by Gore and her Parents Music Resource Council, showing just how embedded the Satanic Panic had become.One could say that Trick or Treat validates these fears by depicting a scenario where the Satanic connection to rock ‘n’ roll is, in fact, very real, but that would be taking the movie far more seriously than it takes itself. Trick or Treat has fun with its very of-the-moment premise, casting KISS frontman Gene Simmons as the radio DJ who gifts Eddie the cursed vinyl and Ozzy Osbourne in a tongue-in-cheek cameo as a TV preacher railing about the dangers of rock music. Like the Satanic Panic, however, the movie has since faded into cultural obscurity, rarely discussed and remembered. Maybe it’s time to change that. Trick or Treat is available on Blu-ray from Synapse Films.