PopHorror Let's Get Scared
I’ve stated in a previous article that Michael Myers was and is my favorite villain. He’s the perfect silent killer with no reason for the way he is, which is the scariest part of all and what has carried him through…wait, how many sequels is it now? But one fateful Halloween season, I learned that wasn’t the way it was meant to be with a little movie called Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Fun fact: Halloween was never meant to be a franchise based around Michael Myers. While watching a documentary on the movie years ago, I learned that John Carpenter originally meant to make an anthology series. The Babysitter Murders which morphed into Halloween was meant to be a different story based on the holiday with each movie.
You can see the first hint of that with the amount of time between the first movie and its sequel. Halloween came out in 1978, Halloween II came out three years later in 1981. Slashers were growing in popularity and everyone loved Michael (happy late birthday to our boy who was born October 19th, 1957). So, out popped his first sequel.
Next came Halloween III: Season of the Witch. The story of the seediest-looking lead character that tries to save Halloween by stopping a corrupt Halloween mask company from killing kids with masks containing a microchip made from a part of Stonehenge. I’m gonna let that sink in a minute.
In the midst of Michael Myers fever comes a Halloween movie about an Irish mask company with a Celtic ritual and a stolen piece of Stonehenge…because nothing says Halloween like a fucking shamrock.
“Eight more days ’til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween.Eight more days ’til Halloween, Silver Shamrock!”
I’ll admit that I hated this movie for the first decade after I’d seen it. An avid Michael fan I didn’t understand why they would do this atrocity…TO ME! I’m being dramatic but I wasn’t happy. It wasn’t until I got older and learned John Carpenter’s original plans for the movie that I began to look at it differently.
Oh, the movie still sucks but that’s not what I mean. It wasn’t an affront to the Halloween franchise. Halloween 4 and beyond were the abominations and they got worse and more mutated as the sequels went on.
Halloween III: Season of the Witch was written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace and starred Tom Atkins (The Fog) and Stacey Nelkin (CHiPs). There was not a single witch involved in this movie and the premise is silly. Silver Shamrock makes Halloween masks for children, not a single one a Michael Myers mask despite airing the original Halloween inside the movie for the big Silver Shamrock event, and on Halloween an earworm of a commercial will set off a massive murder for all who wear the masks, turning their heads into a mass of bugs.
Just writing that synopsis gave me a headache. I still don’t like the movie, like at all, but I appreciate and respect Tommy Lee Wallace for attempting to remove this installment from its predecessors into a more anthology style. I hope that this new movie will bring the charm back of the first two that was lost in H4 and beyond.
Do I recommend Halloween III: Season of the Witch? Only because I am a completionist and I feel if I don’t watch it, then the series isn’t complete. I’d choose watching Tom Atkins whoring around with hitchhikers in The Fog over Season of the Witch any day.
(All images courtesy of IMDB)
