Peck's Perfectly Impeccable Pieces

Governor KEN PECK, 40s, champions the effort to eliminate Halloween in his state and nationwide. All things Halloween—costumes, movies, books, and so forth—are burned in bonfires. ROGER LANGCHESTER and his family are amongst the first victims when their house is raided by the Halloween Police, a special task force charged with punishing those who refuse to follow Peck’s laws prohibiting the celebration of the supernatural in general and Halloween in particular. DONNY and WENDY LANGCHESTER, Roger’s son and wife, escape the raid by the Halloween Police. Roger is taken into custody, where he undergoes interrogation and a “mind wipe.” He is assigned a new identity (Rick Long) and is recruited into the police force, unaware of his former identity. Donny and Wendy escape to ELLA LANGCHESTER'S house, Roger’s mother, who is a retired witch. When she hears about the raid and kidnapping, Ella devises a plan to save both her son and Halloween. Despite being reluctant to get involved, Ella realizes that if she does nothing, Ken Peck will succeed in banning Halloween, eliminating candy from children’s diets, and replacing it with his own “healthy treats”—Peck’s Perfectly Impeccable Pieces—an all-natural chewing gum substitute made from awful tasting tree bark. Roger joins the Halloween Police in making raids on his hometown. They discover that some people are still celebrating Halloween behind locked doors. A few still have Halloween “paraphernalia” such as costumes, pumpkins, and strings of Halloween lights stored in their basements or attics, leftover from before the law went into effect. The Halloween Police—the majority of who are involuntary recruits of the force who underwent the Governor’s mind wipe—arrest whole families and even elderly people for violating Peck’s law. The children are separated from their parents and undergo reconditioning, a sort of aversion therapy which involves watching the same Halloween classic repeatedly and consuming an endless supply of Halloween candy. While Ella enlists a group of witches and friendly monsters to save Halloween, Wendy strikes out to save Roger. She joins the Halloween Police, and when she gets her husband alone, tries to convince him of his true identity. Even after being shown his wallet, driver’s license, and other forms of identification, the mind wiped Roger refuses to believe her, instead claiming that all of the information is a clever fake. He turns Wendy over to the Halloween Police. A magical indestructible Halloween Amulet—a device revered by the witches because it holds all of the good memories of Halloween—is recovered from the ashes of one of the bonfires by Martin Jekyll, one of Peck’s most loyal recruits. He turns the amulet over to Peck, thereby confirming the Governor’s conspiracy theory that real witches are loose in the little town. Elated, Peck attempts to use the amulet to spy on the witches and prevent them from foiling his plan. Donny, while searching for his mother, finds Roger instead. The two fight, and in the process, Roger begins to remember his son and his past life. Reunited, they infiltrate the interrogation room of Halloween Police headquarters where they find Wendy about to undergo a mind wipe courtesy of Governor Peck himself. Roger and Donny are joined by Ella and a posse of witches and other miscellaneous monsters. Peck orders the interrogation robot, REPROGRAMMER, to “kill them all” but the robot refuses, citing the Laws of Robots, which prevents a robot from killing a human being. Desperate, Peck makes his escape. However, once alone on a dark street, a young trick-or-treater points out that Peck has a third eye in the middle of his forehead. It is a magical amulet like the first. The witches can now use the Halloween Amulet to track Peck’s every action and movement. His plan to eliminate Halloween is thwarted. Alarmed, Peck runs off into the night, haunted and afraid.