Hack-O-Lantern (also known as Death Mask and Halloween Night) is a 1988 American Direct to Video Slasher Movie directed by Jag Mundhra.
A lad's grandpa is secretly a Satanic cult leader. He begins to manipulate the kid to join the cult. Years later, Grandpa's corruption plan is coming to fruition. To make sure all goes according to his design, Grandpa puts on a devil costume and kills anybody who hinders his scheme.
This film contains examples of:
- Big Bad: Grandpa Drindle's corrupting of Tommy drives the plot.
- Chewing the Scenery: Try to count the number of times Grandpa Drindle isn't doing this.
- The Corrupter: Grandpa's Evil Plan has the end goal of making his son/grandson into a worthy successor to his evil.
- The End... Or Is It?: Tommy is redeemed and Grandpa is killed, but the latter manages to corrupt Tommy's brother into taking his place.
- Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Tommy's grandfather is simply "Grandpa."
- Greater-Scope Villain: Grandpa serves Satan.
- Gory Deadly Overkill Title of Fatal Death
- Heel–Face Turn: Tommy switches sides and goes against Grandpa once he realizes what his true intentions are.
- Hollywood Satanism: The main antagonists are every Satanism stereotype imaginable, in that they are dark wizards who will murder anybody who gets in their way of corrupting the children. They also try to do the "Devil Horn" symbol, but due to errors in the filmmaking process, end up doing "I Love You" in American Sign Language.
- Horror Doesn't Settle for Simple Tuesday: Halloween.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: After killing his son-in-law, Grandpa burns his body in a car to fake a car crash.
- Making Love in All the Wrong Places: Hack-O-Lantern features a cop having sex with a girl right on top of a freshly dug grave. The girl even mistakes a corpse's stuck-out hand for the cop's. And then not long after, the girl shows her friend exactly where she had sex at.
- Ms. Fanservice: Nora, a punk girl who always wears very short shorts and gets a full frontal scene.
- A Sultry Belly Dancer with a snake shows up as one of the entertainers (alongside a stripper and a standup comic) at a Halloween party later on in the film.
- Parental Incest: Grandpa forced himself on his daughter, a rape which produced Tommy.
- Pun-Based Title: "Hack"+"Jack-O-Lantern."
- Shout-Out: Tommy has a poster for Dead End Drive-In on his wall.
- The Sociopath: Grandpa Drindle, who leads a Satanic cult, raped his daughter, and is corrupting the boy borne of that rape to become his successor.
- Villain Protagonist: Tommy may be our main character, but he's willingly going along with Grandpa's plan to make him a Satanic cult leader. Until he realizes what he's being dragged into and quits, that is.
- Well-Intentioned Extremist: Tommy's mom is driven to madness by having to protect her kids so much for so long, and kills a couple of perceived threats to her children, along with taking Grandpa down.
