Year: 1982
Director: Tommy Lee Wallace
Stars: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin, Dan O’Herlihy
Mostly I remember a mixture of confusion and delight.
The first time I saw Halloween III: Season of the Witch I went in completely cold. I’d seen and liked both John Carpenter’s Halloween and Rick Rosenthal’s muscular extension Halloween II – and both have become all-timers for me – and at that point the series already had up-teen sequels and the Rob Zombie reboots for me to discover. I forged ahead with curiosity. Memory is foggy now, but I even think I was introduced to it first by a third party. How would Michael Myers return and what would he do next?
Ultimately, of course, I’d have to wait until the next instalment to discover the answer to that (while horror hounds who lived through the ’80s had to wait another half-decade). Halloween III: Season of the Witch gambled on the franchise name enduring a sharp change of direction. The intent was to create an anthology brand, something that would be reconstituted in a different form every year – think American Horror Story, V/H/S or the original imagining of TV Patriot Act apologia 24 – but the American public had gotten Michael Myers under their collective skins. So had the world. The series’ opening two-hander had established him. He was Universal’s answer to Paramount’s Jason Voorhees. Friday the 13th was working gangbusters sticking to a firmly established pattern. How dare Halloween change up.
So yeah, watching the opening of Season of the Witch threw me for a loop. I loved – and still love – the antiquated credit sequence in which a jackal lantern is crudely carved in digital form on a screen (pre-empting the movie’s pre-occupation with received images). The new score and font were suitably eerie. Each bleep from Carpenter and co-composer Alan Howarth felt like a creep forward from within the television. But I was keenly aware that names like Jamie Lee Curtis and Donald Pleasance were missing from the roster. Dean Cundey’s gorgeous nighttime cinematography had that familiar indelible atmosphere (he may be my favourite of the unmistakable DPs), but what was happening before me? What was this new mystery and why was The Fog star Tom Atkins stomping around the place?
Atkins feels like a quintessential – maybe the quintessential – John Carpenter leading man. He’s a stout, unwavering presence; square jaw, sharp moustache and a barrel-chest. The kind of fists-like-hams, no-nonsense, exceedingly heterosexual Man’s Man that frequently appealed to Carpenter. The kinda guy who’ll ignore suspicious noises in the next room because he’s half-way motorboating a lady in bed goddammit.
Atkins’ Daniel Challis is a straight-talkin’ doctor brought into a web of conspiratorial intrigue by Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin), the daughter of one of his patients who was brought in burned to a crisp under suspicious circumstances. Ellie leads Dan on a snooping expedition to the small Northern Californian town of Santa Mira, under the pretext that the town’s main employer – Silver Shamrock Novelties – may be connected to her father’s death-by-immolation as dramatised in the film’s spooky opening.
Thus we’re led into Season of the Witch‘s loopy conceit; that Silver Shamrock CEO Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herilhy) is planning to loose all kinds of merry hell upon America come Halloween by selling novelty masks that turn their wearers into snake-and-insect-ridden corpses… all through the power of a stolen tablet from England’s Stonehenge monument. Because obviously, right? We’re not in Haddonfield anymore, that’s for damned sure.
But, for me, any disappointment that the series’ slasher roots had been abandoned was itself abandoned in favour of joy at this nutty Twilight Zone-adjacent curveball. Season of the Witch exchanged taut suspense and blood-letting for a strain of gonzo paranoia presented with a gallingly straight face. Halloween III prefigures the surveillance state queasiness of They Live, not to mention our own perma-monitored present. Not long after arriving in Santa Mira, Dan is accosted by a drunk who warns him of Cochran’s omnipresent cameras (he, too, is swiftly despatched by some emotionless goons, who of course turn out to be droids created by The Company). Later on we’re made privy to listening devices earwigging on Dan’s investigative phone calls, and then there’s the method of triggering Cochran’s transformative masks; a coded signal hidden within earwormy TV ads that play incessantly on the countdown to Halloween. Season of the Witch is preoccupied with ways that electronics were (and are) making insidious inroads into our lives and homes. This 15 years before the internet overwhelmed us, seemingly overnight.
Much as I enjoy Atkins’ bullheaded approach portraying Dan, he’s arguably upstaged by the giddy joy of Dan O’Herlihy, who makes Cochran a cheeky, arrogant villain, forever twirling the ends of an invisible moustache. He’s as much a scamp here as in the other main role I’d seen him in previously, that of the ‘late’ Andrew Packard in Twin Peaks‘ wobbly second season. There’s always a little joy seeing a familiar face from David Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal TV show. That it’s more than just a walk-on, robotic role (no pun intended) is all the better.
There’s a delightful goofiness to Tommy Lee Wallace and co-writer Nigel Keale’s script. An endearing movie-logic naivety that we’re asked into a pact with. The general idea that Cochran’s novelty company is an awe-inspiring countrywide brand, akin to a Nike or Disney. ‘Sticky toilet paper’, ‘the soft chainsaw’, ‘the dead-dwarf gag’?? The way super-fan Buddy Kupfer (Ralph Strait) talks about Silver Shamrock gives it the vibe of Willa Wonka’s Chocolate Factory. When Cochran’s factory is eventually revealed, it’s midway between a budget Bond lair and a sad regional TV station. Season of the Witch normalises a level of lunacy, shrugging it off in a manner that feels appealingly kitsch. The roughshod ways in which Cochran ‘hides’ his conspiracy in plain sight actually reads as prideful – even reckless – flaunting. He’s rubbing it in the faces of those doomed to try – and fail – to stop him.
Because Season of the Witch plays like a sci-fi short story from an old serialised publication that’s somehow spilled onto a movie set. It comes not with a victory for the good guys, but with a sting in the tail. I’m still not sure that the fate/reveal about Ellie makes much sense. But in it’s final moment it whole-heartedly embraces the kind of canny cliffhanger ending that one associates with closing an anthology collection on a chilly autumn night. This is the kind of story you tell as the nights draw in. This vibe – more than the ubiquitous masks – is what makes Season of the Witch feel like a perfect Halloween movie (if not a perfect Halloween movie).
Season of the Witch isn’t the movie many people wanted or expected. It’s miles better than that. Five years later audiences would be ‘treated’ to Michael Myers’ return. It was even built into the name. Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers. As if to reassure the doubtful and get those box office receipts secured. And it’s a dull-as-ditch-water entry in the series. Much as I enjoy some of the Michael Myers movies that followed (5 is appreciably silly), re-watching this entry makes me wish that Carpenter and co. had stuck to their guns and continued the anthology angle. What further tales of the unexpected have we been denied? Where’s the good timeline? There’s been an appreciable level of reappraisal for Season of the Witch, but it still doesn’t feel like enough. It’s such an affable oddity. And, in this household, a Halloween staple.
The Lost Highway Hotel 