Halloween III: Season of the Witch
(
1982
)
There has emerged in recent years a theory of film criticism that argues that fans are entitled douchebags that are impossible to please, so you might as well not try. You see it crop up all over the place, from the characters in Scream (2022) bitterly voicing the screenwriters’ complaints about having to constantly satisfy the expectations of fans of the film series they are writing for but did not create, to TV shows like She-Hulk that seem bizarrely focused on what “losers on the internet” have to say about it. This line of reasoning is most prominent in discussions around the latest batch of Star Wars films, which ranged from painfully mediocre to outright awful and were correctly identified by most fans as such. Paid shills and fans with no taste whatsoever rushed to the defense of these bloated messes (whose average budget was nearly 300 million dollars not counting advertising) and denounced Star Wars fans as impossible to satisfy. This is ironic because if the latest trilogy of Star Wars proves anything at all, it’s that even the biggest piles of cinematic excrement will attract passionate defenders if they are marketed aggressively enough. Seriously, there are people out there who think Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) was not embarrassingly bad (You know who you are).
In addition to modern cinema, this “blame the fans” school of film criticism has also been applied retroactively to older movies like the oddball second sequel to Halloween (1978). You see, Michael Myers was supposed to be perma-killed at the end of Halloween II (1981) freeing up the next installment to tackle whatever topic the filmmakers wanted providing it was related to the holiday of Halloween. This approach might have worked if this was the first sequel to Halloween (1978) but the existence of a second sequel with the same characters complicated the matter. Fans are going to expect Son of Frankenstein (1939) to be about the traditional monster and mad scientist, even if both monster and scientist were destroyed in Bride of Frankenstein (1935) if only because the last two entries in the series have been about just that, and it would be weird to switch things up in the third entry. It’s not the fan’s fault that they were expecting a continuation of the same story covered in the first few movies. This is clearly a bit of marketing incompetence, placing an overvalued emphasis on brand recognition. In that sense, you could describe Halloween 3 as ahead of its time. All said, it probably would have been better if the film had just titled itself something unrelated to the first two movies like, I don’t know, Season of the Witch. Sure, there may have been some confusion with Season of the Witch (1973), but it’s not like that film was ever popular.
Of course, the biggest problem with how Halloween 3 was received had nothing to do with the absence of Michael Meyers and Laurie Strode. No, the biggest problem with Halloween III: Season of the Witch is that the premise is corny and even downright silly at times. This is, after all, a film about an insane pagan toymaker with an army of robots powered by clockwork and caramel, who wants to transform all the kids in America into bugs by giving them masks containing a fragment of Stonehenge and broadcasting a pagan ritual over the television. One could be forgiven for being a little disappointed with the proceedings when you walked into the theater expecting something like The Prowler (1981) or The Burning (1981).
The idea of spring-boarding a whole series of autumnal horror films from Halloween (1978) is actually a pretty good idea in concept. Yet, even if we just ignore the existence of Halloween II (1981) and all the expectations that its presence brings with it, there are still understandable reasons why Season of the Witch was so poorly received. This is a film from 1982, a year when gritty, gore-soaked slashers were dominating the genre. Audiences wanted brutal violence; they craved non-supernatural killers with mundane weapons. The endless torrent of franchise horror flicks and independent wannabes had not yet sated their boundless appetite for tits and blood. In such a climate, even a faultless film that was as downright silly as this one would have drawn their rancor.
This is by far the most absurd plotline a serious horror film has asked me to swallow since The Tingler (1959)! Even child-friendly horror movies like The Gate (1987) and Ghoulies (1985) are more firmly grounded in reality than this. This sounds more like the premise for a Twilight Zone episode than a serious horror movie from the early 80s. However, I’m the kind of guy that can get behind a stupid premise if it is sufficiently earnest in its execution. I’m just not arrogant enough to suggest the rest of the world is missing out because they cannot grasp the self-evident charms of Bloody Pit of Horror (1965) and The Brain from Planet Arous (1957). For those like me there is quite a bit of fun to be had with Halloween III, just don’t believe the hype that it is a classic unjustly maligned by an entitled fanbase. Much more realistic is that it’s a pleasantly stupid movie that was criticized for not being the sequel it purported itself to be.
The film begins with a man fleeing from the aforementioned caramel-powered robots, though it will be sometime before the film makes that clear. At this point, they could be zombies, mind-controlled slaves, or any other manner of unthinking and unfeeling henchmen. Indeed, most of those would make more sense to be the underlings of a latter-day pagan but Halloween III is not a film that is especially concerned about such matters, so I will embrace the spirit of things and cast such worries to the wind. In any event, the man escapes his pursuers by the slimmest of margins, being grievously injured in the process.
We will learn, in short order that the man is Harry Grimbridge the proprietor of a toyshop. When brought to the Hospital, Grimbridge is plainly distressed and can only let out a single utterance of warning: “They’re coming.” Grimbridges’ doctor, and the film’s protagonist, Dr. Dan Challis, is a veteran emergency room doctor and inclined to write off his patient’s warning as the delirious ramblings of a sick man. What’s more concerning for the good doctor is the fact that another one of those suited creeps from the film’s opening breaks into the hospital in the middle of the night, murders Grimbridge, and then immolates himself in the parking lot.
His suspicions are further perked when Grimbridge’s daughter Ellie turns up after her father’s death to start asking questions about what happened to him. The police are fine with writing off the man’s death as the result of a lunatic attack, even if they can’t find any human remains in the pile of soot where the killer immolated himself, but Ellie insists that things were odd before the murder even happened. Her father had completely vanished after he went to pick up an order of Halloween masks from The Silver Shamrock factory in Santa Mira California (a nod to Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), though I can’t see why as there’s no trace of Siegel’s Pod People anywhere in this film save for the robots and that is a huge stretch). Dan agrees that something is up and agrees to accompany her to Santa Mira.
I suspect the reason Dan is so keen to help Ellie is less chivalrous desire to help a young woman in need and more carnal desire to help a young woman out of her clothes, as the two sleep together at the earliest possible convivence with a minimum of flirtation beforehand. I can’t say I begrudge the man his urges, he’s certainly not getting any from his bitter ex-wife who is constantly pissed at him to the point that she berates him for having to stay at work late to talk to the police after the Grimbridge murder-suicide incident.
When the pair get to Santa Mira, they find it a quiet little California town with a population of Irish pagans who mostly work in the Silver Shamrock under the guidance of Conal Cochran. Dan and Ellie pose as a husband-and-wife team that co-own a toyshop and are looking to pick up a few more of the high-quality Silver Shamrock masks before Halloween. They quickly discover that Cochran and his bunch are up to something in the mask factory, but before they can warn anyone Cochran and his robotic henchmen capture them and lock them up.
The notion of a widespread community of Irish pagans may be the most absurd plot point in this entire film. It would be even more absurd than finding a group of modern-day Swedes that still worshiped Odin and Thor, as at least the Swedes are not renowned for their devotion to another religion. How catholic were the Irish in the middle of the last century, well to put things in perspective my grandfather, a lifelong Republican, a small business owner, and a bitter enemy of the income tax, cheerfully voted for JFK because he was catholic. If his brother Bobby Kennedy was not assassinated before his campaign, I’m sure that grandpa would have voted for him too and for the same reasons, higher taxes be damned. I can think of precious few groups less likely to be practicing pagans than Irish-Americas.
Still, credit where credit is due, Conal Cochran’s plan for a Halloween sacrifice has got to be one of the most unique plots in the history of film. I certainly didn’t expect that the Silver Shamrock masks were all outfitted with microchips and fragments of Stonehenge that would turn their wearers into bugs and snakes upon receiving a remote signal broadcasted through TV waves! It’s a plan for a twisted demonic, pagan sacrifice on a scale that is practically unmatched. Cochran and his bunch in Santa Mira are certainly more ambitious than the latter-day pagans on Summerisle.
The true gem here, beyond the ludicrous premise and its earnest implementation though, is John Carpenter’s score. The creepy synthetic music is a perfect fit for the film’s techno-pagan premise, and its presence here serves to create a tenuous tie to the original Halloween (1978). I heard recently that Carpenter, now a full-time musician is fascinated by video games and longs to compose a score for one. I hope that somebody in the industry has the good sense to take him up on it!