As a horror fan, and more particularly as a horror film reviewer, I try my best to sit down to every new movie that I see with a wide-open mind.  We all know how it is; your average horror flick has a better-than-average chance at being an absolute train-wreck of a suck-fest; however, it could be that rare and wondrous surprise and be fantastic.  Just because most fall closer to the former doesn’t make me jump to conclusions; I still hold out hope for those jewels in the dirt, and enjoy even that majority that falls in the middle of those two extremes.  In our genre, you have to be that kind of open-minded; let’s face it, for every Exorcist there’s about twenty-five Troll 2s; you gotta be able to find the good in just about everything to be able to stay on the horror flick bandwagon.

I only bring up this kind of dogged hopefulness to illustrate a point; for all the flicks I’ve sat through, good and bad, it’s amazing to me the number of decent films that get bad raps for the weirdest of reasons.  There’ve been more than a few movies that I’ve heard just relentlessly bashed by the mainstream critics and even other fans, but when I’ve seen it for myself (with that same open mentality I mentioned), I’ve found a pretty decent movie.  I’ve often pondered the reasons for this dissention; it can’t all just be preference, as my tastes aren’t that drastically different from most of my peers; what’s the deal?

A perfect example of this is the 1982 film Halloween III: Season of the Witch.  Now here’s a flick that’s got hate piled up for days; I can’t tell ya how many folks I’ve heard berate and malign this little offering into the mix, but before I get into the why’s and what’s of all that, lemme give a quick rundown of the flick for those who may have never seen it.

A man is brought into a hospital a week before Halloween, frantic and irrational, spouting that “they’re going to kill us all!” while clutching a child’s mask.  Attending physician Dr. Dan Challis assumes the old man is hysterical, and orders a sedative so the patient can get some rest.  Having had a rough night dealing with his ex-wife, Challis himself retires to the doctor’s lounge to catch a little shuteye, but is interrupted by the screams of the duty nurse; the old man has been savagely murdered, and his killer is fleeing the building.  Challis gives chase, but can only watch in horror as the man reaches his car, douses himself with gasoline, and blows himself up in a ball of fire.  Later, Challis meets the daughter of the man, Ellie Grimbridge, who asks him if there was anything that her father said before he died.

Having been disturbed by the warning he had at first interpreted as ramblings, Challis tells her of her father’s cryptic message.  Ellie had been concerned about her father, a shopkeeper, and had been doing a little snooping around to find out about his movements prior to his death.  Finding that the last place he’d been was picking up an order of Halloween masks from the Silver Shamrock Novelty Company, she’s determined to travel to Santa Mira, the small town the factory calls home, to get some answers.  Challis, by now intrigued by the mystery (and Ellie), decides to go with her.  Once in the little burg, the pair notes the strangeness of the inhabitants; odd stares and stoic silence follow them around their driving tour of the city.  They decide to pose as a married couple, there to pick up an order of their own, to mask their true intentions.  As they dig around the strange little town, they uncover more and more strange facts, both about the Halloween masks themselves and the owner of the company, the jovial but enigmatic Donal Cochran.  As All Hallow’s Eve approaches, Challis and Ellie uncover a plot both ancient and evil, one that mixes three-thousand-year-old pagan magic with modern technology to fulfill a cleansing sacrifice of our greatest commodity…our children.  But their discovery does not go unnoticed by the progenitors of this dark plan, who don’t take kindly to being interfered with…

Right out of the gate, it’s obvious that this film has nothing at all to do with the previous two Halloween films; no Michael Myers, Dr. Loomis, or Haddonfield.  I know that was a big shock (and disappointment) to me way back when I first saw it thirty years or so ago, and I’m aware that a hell of a lot of other horror fans felt the same way.  Still, watching the film quite a few times since then, it’s just as obvious that it’s a love letter to what had gone before; Tommy Lee Wallace channels his old mentor with direction that provides that cold, sinister feeling, and Dean Cundy’s well-done, shadowy cinematography keeps things familiar, with the added benefit of a really taut, unique, and compelling story by author Nigel Kneale (which, to complete the circle, was doctored a bit by Carpenter himself).  Peppered amongst this creepy plot, the whole film is full of subtle (and some not-so-subtle) nods to the earlier Halloween flicks; even an uncredited Jamie Lee Curtis is a voice on the other end of a phone!

Halloween III fits easily into a kind of  “Carpenter Universe”, with it’s overall vibe and characterizations seeming to belong to the same world as the more familiar Haddonfield and Antonio Bay.   Genre favorite Tom Atkins performs admirably in his role as Challis, pulling off the determined but vulnerable hero with ease; Stacey Nelkin comes across convincingly as Ellie, her emotion credible without being over the top, and finally Dan O’Herlihy is perfect in his role as Cochran, shining and affable, yet his expressive techniques perfectly display a man hiding something dark beneath a jovial surface.  The special effects are minimal (another Carpenter trademark), but that only serves to make their brutality that much more effective and suitably satisfying.

This is a good flick, people!  It’s got a very original story, fantastic atmosphere, and excellent performances.  It’s one of the very few flicks of this era that went for the sheer pseudo-gothic creep factor instead of the body count; definitely a breath of fresh air in the Age of the Slasher.  From my conversations with other fans, it seems that the resounding gripe that everyone has is that the famed antagonist from the previous two Halloween films wasn’t in this one (which he was, actually, but not in the way they wanted).  The fact of the matter was that Carpenter’s idea was to use the title as sort of a heading, with a new “Halloween” film each year, but each featuring some different spooky story; obviously, he wasn’t banking on how much of a cult figure his creation would become, and overestimated the broad-mindedness of his target audience.  I’m not saying that in a derogatory way (like I said, I too was disappointed in the Shape’s absence from the film back in the day), but to my now (hopefully) more mature and learned eyes, it’s clear that the sad fact is that a pretty damned good movie was crippled by an erroneous marketing decision.

If this film had simply been titled “Season of the Witch”, I believe we would all have viewed it in a different way, and it would today hold a much higher place in our strata of horror films.

Check it out, peeps; if you’ve never seen it, put Michael Myers out of your mind, and settle back to enjoy a genuinely creepy, original film.  If you have seen it and are one of those that hated it originally, give it another shot; if you can take it for what it is and not what most of us wished it was back then, I don’t think you’ll be sorry.

I’m certainly not.

–Mouse

 

 

I also included this last little bit of nostalgia for you Fellow Fans, just to make yourselves crazy!  Enjoy!

–M