Halloween III - Season of the Witch (1982)

 

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Screenplay: Tommy Lee Wallace

Cast: Tom Atkins as Daniel Challis); Stacey Nelkin as Ellie Grimbridge); Dan O'Herlihy as Conal Cochran); Michael Currie (as Rafferty); Ralph Strait (as Buddy Kupfer)

A Night of a Thousand Horror (Movies)

After Halloween II (1981) was meant to close the story of Michael Myers – someone who could only die, like Jason Voorhees has, from production hell and copyright issues than by a final girl’s hands - John Carpenter and the late Debra Hill decided to turn the franchise into something doomed from the start as an idea, but one I glad existed in a single attempt. They decided to turn the franchise into a series of episodic films based around the Halloween season with different stories and, ironically, this is what American Horror Story as a TV series would be doing with such success decades later, making each series not even themed around a holiday like Halloween, but entire series based on one setting and premise with their own narratives. That series immediately started this plan from the second series onwards however, not after two films like the ill-fated Season of the Witch did. Season of the Witch, whilst it has given a boost in name recognition, should not have been part of the Halloween franchise if you were a producer of this project - it has had last laugh in its critical reappraisal within the last decade, but being part of the franchise was immediately a hindrance, as audiences were not surprisingly confused why Myers was not in it, and the jarring context of it being a Halloween film when it is completely alien in tone and ideas. Whilst it has Carpenter's guiding hands over it, directed and with the screenplay credited to Tommy Lee Wallace with the tough task to adapt this, the film becomes one of the weirder turns for a horror franchise sequel to ever had. It is one of the best in production quality - Carpenter's score here with Alan Howarth is arguably one of his best, and Dean Cundey's incredible cinematography painted onto the scenes adds more to the proceedings in atmosphere, but its connection to the franchise is just the in-joke of the original Halloween (1978) playing on TV in scenes. That would have made it a galling experience, in the midst of the slasher boom as well, when most would presume that this was even in the same genre.

Barring this, I adore Season of the Witch as a grim, unsettling take on Halloween as a seasonal holiday both in its symbology and as someone who adores the holiday like many do. The premise is simple and works as a strange and compelling short story chiller - after a patient is murdered in his hospital of work, Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins) is pulled into a conspiracy with the victim’s daughter Ellie Grimbridge (Stacey Nelkin) that involves a novelty and toy manufacture’s series of Halloween masks and the sinister intentions behind them. As someone who loves even the tacky decorations and sweets of the season - the plastic skeletons, the novelty foods and biscuits etc - Season of the Witch leads to a nasty point, based on a single extended monologue explaining the truly horrifying intentions behind a set of masks being sold, referencing the history of the likes of Samhain but perversely turned into an evil act of ritual sacrifice that is seen as right to do for the sake of humanity. Even if the satire about consumerism is broad, it eventually leads to one having to think carefully about what Halloween means, at a time in the year said to be when the border between the living and the dead is at its thinnest, and how its macabre imagery is so codified against this nasty reality check shown in the film.

A large factor to why this works is the subconscious influence of legendary British screenwriter Nigel Kneale. Kneale, famous for the Quatermass franchise, and famous British television horror and sci-fi stories, was brought in for the original story of Season of the Witch. This however lead to a disappointing fallout to take place, Kneale objecting incredibly to the level of violence that the film had², and Tommy Lee Wallace to adding a lot of his own touches to the final work². This is not surprising considering the final work is surprisingly brutal in this area, with someone even pulling another's head clean off with their bare hands with a giant blood squirt at one point, a level of violence rarely found in any of the non-Rob Zombie versions for the whole franchise, and if anything could make this film divisive for certain viewers, it is that some of the more eccentric touches I have grown to love and helped its legacy, alongside likely being the kind which made it an odd sell in the day, were not from  Kneale.

Despite taking his name off the final script, his fingerprints are still visible from his original work. Having now seen a lot of his work, the world of Silver Shamrock, a novelty mask and toy factory who have their own tiny rural town, evokes the sinister rural town of Quatermass II (1955 for the TV mini-series, 1957 for the Hammer feature film version) and how its nebulous nature, everyone within part of a conspiracy, are visible to any stranger who keeps their eyes open about their surroundings. Kneale is also someone who is able to deal with occult and supernatural ideas with far greater nuance even if he was to rationalise them through science and sci-fi concepts like aliens, to the point that, even if left a mere fragment now in the final film, the far better use of Samhain and pagan references in Season of the Witch over any of the other Halloween films is likely influenced by his ability to rationalise even the strangest of ideas with real weight, even if rewritten in the hands of another going for a more pulpy premise. A sense of the ludicrous has to be appreciated with the final work, but for me this thankfully became in a positive, such as involving a piece of Stonehenge being stolen, which automatically evokes Spinal Tap nowadays whenever I think “Stonehenge” in any context, or how Daniel and Ellie, even without the significant age difference, in little time manage to end up romantically linked as abruptly as you can because they could not get an additional room in a motel.

The other significant factor, which is a trope very common in British horror storytelling, is the importance of objects having magical properties, not merely being connected to an evil other but in them as cursed and maleficent, objects which can be used as part of something else but, as much constructions with their own histories and character to them. (I.e. a certain whistle found on a beach in a famous MR James short story; for an American example with a wider scope the Necronomicon in HP Lovecraft's fiction and how merely reading the book is inherently a dangerous act for the reader from its history). The three masks in the centre of the film - a witch, a skull, a Jack O'Lantern - are objects that are revealed as eventual catalysts to a horrifying mass outbreak of death, with many children who will immediately die as a result of those whose parents bought them, their constant appearance throughout the film invoking a greater sense of character and threat from their apparent innocuous nature. Even the Silver Shamrock theme on television,  which has become an ear worm for many viewers of the film, has a mantra like nature close to a magical incantation in how catchy it is (and especially with how a television sweepstake for the company will be the spark for the tragedy to start in connection with the masks directly). That this all involves Stonehenge will baffle some, as mentioned, but another factor to my love of the film that has grown on this viewing is that Season of the Witch is also a strange, strange sequel for any franchise to have regardless of it having any connection to the first two films or not from all these factors.

It is also a strange film just by itself, a baffling little oddity to throw at a mainstream horror audience. I like the weird in cinema but I also find upon revisiting this film that weird horror films are actually a lot of effecting and creepy for me, their irrational content leading a sense of unpredictability and greater threat. The clockwork robot minions of the main evil figure, Conal Cochran (Dan O'Herlihy), could come off as silly, but they add to the creepiness of the final work, particularly playing into the fear one can have for nameless thugs, played by actors without masks but with their identical haircuts and suits have a menace particularly in how brutal their methods of killing people are. And of course the final scene is one of the best for any horror film to end on, the sting in the tale that cements its qualities. In the middle of a franchise of slasher movies, its position now is a curiosity in terms of how the project was allowed to exist in the first place, a curveball that you would rarely find in most franchises from then on. This has added to my love for the film, now that it should have been an entirely different project for Carpenter and Hill that merely existed amongst their regular collaborators. We should have just skipped forwards to Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) in the late eighties but we thankfully got this; it belies other sequels in the history of horror franchises for how idiosyncratic it was, and alongside its virtues, its grown just from that context’s aura.

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1) Nigel Kneale and ‘Halloween III’, written by Andy Murray and published for We Are Cult on October 31st 2019.