With Halloween approaching, the most common phrase we’ll all be hearing will be “Trick or Treat”. We often forget about the “trick” part of the phrase, which is a (generally idle) threat to any Halloween Grinches out there that failure to deliver a treat will result in some pranks on them.
Often coinciding with Halloween is an unofficial holiday known as “Mischief Night.” On this night, kids will play pranks all over their neighborhoods, including toilet papering yards and egging cars. There have even been a couple recent horror movies named after Mischief Night. Pranks are tied in with Halloween almost as much as candy and horror movies, and so many horror movies have involved pranks. Sounds like a great idea for a list!
Here are 10 horror movies that involved pranks gone wrong!
1) The Burning
What better location for some pranks than summer camp? With a bunch of adolescent boys running around, there’s sure to be plenty of fooling around. Of course, it’s all fun and games until some kids set the camp janitor on fire! Of course, ol’ Cropsey isn’t just going to sit back and do nothing after a prank involving a skull with candles inside it causes him to catch fire. Those kids on the raft sure learned that the hard way.
2) April Fool’s Day
This entry is a bit unfair because of the ending, but you can’t have a “pranks in horror movies” list and not include the movie that took the whole prank idea all the way to the end. Some kids head to their friend’s private island, where there are not only pranks but also kills! The ending is the ultimate prank on the audience, but also kind of a cop-out. Still one of the more entertaining 80s slashers!
3) Hell Night
A tried and true formula: You have to spend the night in the local haunted house. For the pledges of Alpha Sigma Rho, that’s their goal if they want in the fraternity! Sounds easy enough, right? Well, unfortunately for them, the frat members have rigged Garth Manor with all kinds of scares and pranks. Also, there are two deformed brothers killing everyone who goes in there. Bummer! Fun fact: This was the last movie produced by Compass International Pictures, which also produced Halloween.
4) Terror Train
If Jamie Lee Curtis circa 1980 lured me into a room and started to seduce me, I’d probably have been suckered into a prank too. That’s what happens to the nerdy Kenny in Terror Train. Of course, the whole thing is a big prank. There’s actually a corpse in the bed, and poor Kenny winds up in a mental hospital. In classic slasher fashion, Kenny comes back during a New Year’s train ride, and he’s not there to see David Copperfield’s act.
5) The House on Sorority Row
Seeing a theme here? Slashers in the 80’s were big on pranks gone wrong. In this movie, some crazy sorority girls are up to some graduation week shenanigans. What better way to celebrate their commencement than by forcing their house mother to retrieve her cane from the pool at gunpoint? Unfortunately for Mrs. Slater, the gun is loaded, and she winds up dead at the bottom of the pool. Oh well, the party must go on, even if everyone gets killed during it.
6) Urban Legend
In this cheesetastic 90’s slasher, a group of college students find themselves being terrorized by a serial killer basing his kills off of urban legends. This movie had a great cast, including Brad Dourif, Robert Englund, Jared Leto, and Joshua Jackson, who is this slasher’s resident “practical joker.” In the movie’s more memorable scene, his character fools a whole classroom into thinking his stomach exploded from eating Pop Rocks with soda. What a trickster.
7) The Toxic Avenger
Poor Melvin, the little nerd just gets picked on so badly. He even suffers what is easily the most ridiculous prank on our list, being tricked into wearing a pink tutu and kissing a sheep. Yikes. To add insult to injury, he is chased out a window and falls into a vat of toxic waste. Things work out all right for Melvin, though. The toxic waste transforms him into The Toxic Avenger, so it’s not all bad!
8) Joy Ride
Paul Walker didn’t just drive Toyota Supras and race Vin Diesel; he also drove a Chrysler Newport with Steve Zahn. The trouble starts when they put a CB radio in the car and start catfishing a truck driver, pretending to be “Candy Cane.” The trucker, known only as his handle “Rusty Nails,” gets fooled into meeting with a nonexistent woman, but he clearly can’t take a joke. In a movie reminiscent of Spielberg’s Duel, he terrorizes the two pranksters and prevented plenty of people from messing around with CB radios. Fun Fact #2: This was written by Star Wars VII‘s J.J. Abrams.
9) Slaughter High
This movie features some of the more brutal pranks on this list, and the final one is like a Rube Goldberg device. Marty is tricked into getting naked by a pretty classmate and then is exposed to a group of students who tease him, poke him with a javelin, shock him, and then dunk him in a toilet! Oh, but they’re not finished. Later, they give Marty a joint laced with poison and rig his chemistry experiment to explode when he runs away to vomit. When the group’s prank works, Marty starts a fire, then bumps a shelf, which then causes a jug of acid to fall and break, disfiguring Marty. Crazy! Once again, Marty returns to take revenge on those jerks. Fun Fact #3: Harry Manfredini, who scored many of the Friday the 13th movies, also scored this film.
10) Carrie
We all knew that weird, quiet girl in school. Even if she was a bit odd, dousing her in pig’s blood in front of the entire school on prom night is just going way too far. You can’t blame her for losing it after that. Carrie is one of the greatest horror movies ever made, and the sequence of the pig’s blood prank, followed by her vengeful wrath, is one of the most memorable in horror history.