Michael Dougherty's Trick 'r Treat has become a mild cause célèbre among horror geeks because, like so many horror movies with any kind of a pulse, its studio had no idea what to do with it. Several years after completion and after circulating at a few promotional screenings, it makes its debut on DVD, bypassing a real theatrical release. A throwback to horror anthology pieces like Creepshow and Cat's Eye as well as the classic EC Comics stories that inspired them, Trick 'r Treat pieces together roughly four interconnected horror vignettes over a single Halloween night, with frights ranging from supernatural to disturbingly human.

Anthology films are uneven more or less by design; this one has the advantage of a single guiding voice in Dougherty, a Bryan Singer collaborator who helped script the director's smart comics adaptations X2 and Superman Returns. Without a collection of famous filmmakers ruminating on a single theme, Trick 'r Treat stays relatively uniform for a collection of shorts; every segment has some merit and nothing falls completely flat. They're bound by Dougherty's obvious love of Halloween, and, as such, arranged around familiar little rituals in the corner of the holiday: a group of girls doll themselves up in the now-traditional slutty-whatever costumes as a more hesitant Anna Paquin dons a more demure Red Riding Hood get-up; a group of kids take a detour from trick-or-treating by attempting to freak each other out with urban-legend scary stories; a couple bickers lightly over taking down their haunted-house decorations.

Dougherty's writing of these scenarios doesn't reach wicked Twilight Zone heights -- the resolutions don't twist so much as bend -- but he turns the mild withholding required by these story into an advantage, often eschewing dialogue and exposition in favor of visual storytelling. The film has an admirable number of nearly talk-free stretches, like the vaguely Evil Dead-ish finale where cranky old man Brian Cox battles a mysterious little humanoid -- he looks a bit like little, terrifying Tomas from The Orphanage -- who shuffles through the background of other segments, which are time-scrambled playfully, if a little pointlessly.

While it's fun to spot major players from one story pop up to support another, Trick 'r Treat winds up fitting together almost too smoothly; it lacks duds but also has few clear highlights, and so it proceeds as 80 minutes of consistently fleeting enjoyment. The best anthologies, lacking a traditional narrative center, are driven by the excitement of continual beginnings and endings, freed from a traditional three-act structure. Dougherty lays his characters out quicker, wanting to create a through-line out of his devotion to this little world of Halloween, but he doesn't have enough directorial personality to pull it off: cut together and overlapping, the stories feel like a quartet enjoyable sideshows without a main stage. The gruesomeness is tongue-in-cheek but not quite witty; there are flinches and chuckles, but no huge laughs or scares.

Regardless, it's depressing that the comparably festive Trick 'r Treat wasn't considered fit for theatrical release by Warner Brothers, while other studios celebrate Halloween with toothless remakes and rusty torture devices. Other horror pictures might have shocks, or jumps, or brand-name villains, but Trick 'r Treat has genuine holiday spirit.