Trick or Trailers: Halloween III Season of the Witch (1982)

I forget when opinion eventually started to shift on Halloween III: Season of the Witch, going from it being seen as the bottom of the barrel to a highpoint of the series, but I do know that it's been this way for so long that younger fans, while knowing that it wasn't a hit, can't fully appreciate just how vehemently this movie was rejected. 

A lot of movies bomb but this was something else altogether. This wasn't like, say, Cats where people laugh at what a turkey it is and move on. Or a dud like The Fog remake that is quickly shrugged off as a nothing movie. No, when I was in junior high, it was like "Fuck this movie." You didn't even have to see it yourself. You were just told it was the worst movie ever and everyone would immediately back that up, even if they hadn't seen it for themselves. The hate for III was so hardcore that there was no dissension. It sucked and we all knew it. 

If there had been an internet back then, oh man. 

Now, of course, it's a different story. Now it's actually weird if someone doesn't like III, which just blows my mind. In the '80s, you couldn't have imagined anyone saying anything even vaguely favorable about Season of the Witch. If anyone had said in '84 or whatever that, "you know what's actually good? Halloween III?" they would have quickly found themselves upside down in a trash can. 

But times change, right?   

Fans say that they should have just called this Season of the Witch but I get why Universal wanted to brand it, for commercial reasons, as a Halloween film. What I don't get is why they did not do a better job - or any kind of job - of explaining what was going on. 

Sure, there's no mention of Michael Myers in the trailer. There's no Laurie or Dr. Loomis but the Halloween III of it all supersedes that. That III says to audiences that this is the next chapter in the story. Of course they're going to feel burned when they don't get that. 

  

I love that III eventually came to be celebrated. I remember seeing it for the first time on TV while I was in college in the late '80s and thinking "Holy shit, everyone said this sucked but it's pretty awesome!" But I get the initial reaction. When I see documentaries about III on Shout Factory discs or whatever, I always wish that, aside from talking to Tommy Lee Wallace and Tom Atkins and so on that they talk to whoever was working in marketing at Universal back then. That's the story I really want to hear. I mean, really. You can put All-New on a poster and think that covers it but people are still going to look at that and think "Yeah, all new Michael Myers. Got it!" 

Season of the Witch has enjoyed such a surprising rebirth that I sometimes wonder if it could actually spawn its own stand alone remake/reboot one day. I just wonder how they'd decide to sell it. 

 

Retro-Shock Theater: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Upon its release in 1982, Halloween III: Season of the Witch proved to be as welcome with Halloween fans as Tootsie Rolls are to trick or treaters. Few movies were given the bum’s rush so quickly and so few films brought together so many fans in near universal disdain. For years, if you asked horror fans how they felt about Halloween III, the stock response would be that they hated it.

So how is it that it’s become practically fashionable to like – even love – Halloween III? Plenty of films see their reputations improve over time but the turnaround in opinion on Halloween III to the point where some fans now call it the best of the Halloween sequels is nothing short of miraculous.

The unlikely road to redemption for this once-despised film comes down to three points… One, bringing back Michael Myers wasn’t such a hot idea. HIII was reviled for having the temerity to let Michael Myers stay dead but as each subsequent Myers-themed sequel, remake and so on did little but sully the legacy of Carpenter’s classic, the more taking a second look at HIII started to look like a good idea.

I mean, I really love Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers but when it comes down to it I could’ve lived without it. Similarly, I know that H2O has its fans but wouldn’t you say that the world have done without it? I think so. But now ask yourself if the world could go without Season of the Witch.

Think real hard. Think until the answer is “no, it freaking couldn’t!” then you’ll be right.

Why? Because there’s nothing else quite like it.

That’s the second reason that HIII has found an audience over time. It stands alone. Not just in the Halloween franchise but in the company of horror films in general. It’s just an odd, stubbornly goofy, little movie.

Horror fans have seen every plot told and retold from a hundred different angles so anything that throws even the slightest curveball is going to – sooner or later – earn some love. Every element in H3 isn’t 100% original in and of itself but the fact that so many quirky, divergent components – Stonehenge! Celtic magic! Catchy commercial jingles! Killer robots! An evil toy maker! – all exist in one film gives it the advantage of being something different.

How much of H3’s story came from the original scripter, the legendary Nigel Kneale, and how much came from director Tommy Lee Wallace’s rewrites is irrelevant. All that’s important is that none of the weirdness got scrubbed out along the way.

The third and final – and perhaps the most important – reason for H3’s ascension: Tom Atkins. When H3 was released, Atkins was already a familiar face in genre films but he hadn’t quite achieved the beloved status among fans that he enjoys today.

The fact that H3 gave Atkins one of his few leading man roles makes it hard for Atkins junkies to resist – even more so given how complicated and unique (at least among horror protagonists) his H3 character of Dr. Dan Challis is.

The horror genre is host to many classic heroes – everyone from Abraham Van Helsing to Laurie Strode to Clarice Starling. But Dan Challis is cut from a much different cloth. He’s a middle-aged dad (who doesn’t seem to be all that attentive to his kids), divorced, alcoholic, and something of a lecher.

Atkins’ innate likeability helps disguise Challis’ many unsavory qualities but yet he is undeniably skeevy – which is exactly what makes him such a memorable protagonist. Atkins had already played a borderline letch in The Fog where he exchanged fluids with Jamie Lee Curtis’ character before they even exchanged names but in H3, this (at the time) nearly fifty year old took it to the next level by getting Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), the barely legal daughter of a slain shop owner, into the sack while they’re on the trail of her father’s murderer.

To be sure, Challis is not a guy with a shiny halo around his head. Aside from his appetite for bedding young women, Challis also has a insatiable thirst for booze. Before he and Ellie even hit to road to investigate the murder of Ellie’s father, Challis makes sure to make a packy run first. And when he and Ellie first arrive in the town of Santa Mira, home to the ominous Silver Shamrock Novelties factory, Ellie is eager to start digging around for clues about what happened to her dad but Challis’ immediate response to that is “Whoa! It’s getting late and I could use a drink!”

In what must’ve been a perversely deliberate move on the part of Wallace and Atkins, Challis is shown repeatedly to fail to act in a traditionally heroic fashion and when he does make the effort, he comes up (one channel) short. By coincidence, in David Cronenberg’s Videodrome – released just a few months after H3 – James Woods’ character of Max Renn was just as morally muddied as Challis, and like Challis, Renn is also thrust into the position of saving the world from deadly televised transmissions. The two films make an unlikely but interesting double feature.

Challis’ personal complexities take a back seat to action as the last third of H3 is little more than a series of chases, fights, and desperate escapes but on the other hand, you get to see Challis in a zany death duel with a decapitated killer robot so it’s all good. Thirty years on, this one-time franchise killer has earned its place as an October essential. The Captain Kirk mask may have been retired in this entry, much to the consternation of fans, but Season of the Witch still boldly went where no Halloween had gone before.

Originally published 10/30/12 at Shock Till You Drop 

Season's Greetings

Here we are at the end of October - the fastest 31 days of the calendar year! To celebrate the occasion, the latest Retro Shock Theater column is devoted to the dark horse of the Halloween franchise - 1982's Halloween III: Season of the Witch. For anyone old enough to remember the reception that SotW recieved back in the day, it's kind of mind-boggling to see the (still growing) fan following it commands today.

SotW was a movie I had skipped seeing for years, simply because it had such a toxic reputation, but when I finally saw it on TV in the late '80s, it really jumped out at me as being a cool little movie with a funky sensibility. The bait and switch by Universal was truly kind of bullshit but over time the movie has had a chance to be judged on its own merits.

Even with its improved reputation, however, the love for SotW is by no means universal. Some fans are still pissed that this doesn't have Michael Myers in it. Seeing as there's been, like, seven movies since SotW with Michael in them to still be upset about the one movie that didn't include him seems, um, I don't know - deranged, I guess.

Anyhow, I really dig the movie. I hope you do too.

And in honor of the insidiously addictive Silver Shamrock commercial, I'm posting some of my favorite retro Halloween spots.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Having burnt Michael Myers to a cinder at the end of 1981's Halloween II but feeling pressured to not let the brand name go unexploited, producers John Carpenter and Debra Hill decided to fulfill the pragmatic demand for more Halloween movies by continuing the series as a Halloween-themed anthology.

With an original script by Quartermass scribe Nigel Kneale (who requested his name be removed due to the gratuitous violence that was later inserted - the sole writing credit going to director Tommy Lee Wallace) involving a malevolent mask maker and his schemes to inflict mayhem in the name of Halloween, Season of the Witch was the promising launch of a new Shape-less direction but whatever ambitions that may have been behind it, upon its 1982 release Halloween III: Season of the Witch was roundly rejected as a colossal cheat. Where was Michael Myers? Where was Laurie Strode? Where was Dr. Loomis? And where, in the name of Samhain, was anything that fans would recognize as part of the Halloween mythos?

Rather than a thug in overalls slaughtering promiscuous teens, Season of the Witch instead offered up a certifiably zany plot involving no less than Stonehenge, pagan magic, killer robots, and Halloween masks with frigging laser beams. Far-fetched? Hard to swallow? Bat-shit insane? Yep, Season of the Witch is all of that.

As Debra Hill said at the time, this was more of a 'pod' film than a 'knife' film, in reference to the sci-fi elements of Season of the Witch (the film itself explicitly references the 'pod' terrors of Invasion of the Body Snatchers by naming its small town Santa Mira, after the one in Body Snatchers). But that doesn't even begin to describe the endearingly dopey hijinks that make Season so nutty. It may be too over-the-top to ever be convincingly creepy but this odd-man-out Halloween sequel is a fun ride filled with moments of cool menace. It has the virtue of not only being unlike any other Halloween sequel but being unlike few other films at all (although it shares an intriguing connection with 1983's Videodrome in that both films involve television signals that initiate fatal bodily mutations).

Carpenter regular Tom Atkins (The Fog, Escape from New York) stars as Dr. Dan Challis, a middle-aged medic who while on the job witnesses the grisly demise of a store owner clutching a Halloween mask ("They're going to kill us all!" the doomed man warns prior to his death), and soon after Challis stumbles onto an outrageous plot by the world's leading mask maker - Conal Cochran (played with avuncular evil by Dan O'Herlihy) - to exterminate as many people (mostly children) as possible by sending a signal on Halloween night through TV ads for his line of Silver Shamrock masks (a witch, a skull, and a pumpkin - collectively known as "The Halloween 3") to activate electronic chips embedded in the masks (each containing a small piece of Stonehenge!) to make the heads of every punk kid wearing them to erupt in an unholy burst of beetles, snakes, and assorted other creepy-crawlies. And as this ghoulish glory is brought about, so will Halloween be rightfully returned to its dark roots.

Is this ambitious, genre-bending fun or just completely unhinged? I'm not sure on what side Season of the Witch really falls. All I can say is that it works. I love the eerie atmosphere of the small town dominated by the Silver Shamrock factory, with its loud-speaker announced curfews and too-cheerful townsfolk all indebted to their benefactor. And most of all I love Tom Atkins as Dr. Challis.

As much as fans today lament the teen-ification of horror, the situation was every bit as bad twenty-six years ago in the wake of Friday the 13th and the original Halloween. So to have the pushing-fifty Atkins in the lead here was already a plus. Even better was the fact that Challis is one of the most morally bankrupt heroes to be featured in any genre film. Atkins' Challis is a womanizing drunk as well as a coward with a taste for jailbait. And to that I say, "how could anyone not love him?" Atkins had already played a borderline letch as Nick Castle in The Fog where he bedded the much younger Jamie Lee Curtis in about as much time as it takes to tie your shoes. But in Season of the Witch, he takes it to the next level by getting Ellie (Stacey Nelkin), the barely legal daughter of the slain shop owner, into the sack all while being on the trail of her father's murderer!

It's during the consummation of Challis and Ellie's affection that we best see what a sorry excuse for a hero Challis is. While they're going at it, in the next motel room over a woman inadvertently causes a Silver Shamrock chip to fatally misfire in her face. Ellie immediately voices her alarm at the sudden sound ("What was that?") only to have a preoccupied Challis mumble into her breasts with all the indifference he can muster - "...Who cares?".

If there was an Olympics for apathy, Challis would handily take the gold. It's this chronic aversion to sticking his neck out that makes Challis a very different hero than the obsessed Dr. Loomis. Then again, who can be bothered to fight evil when they're busy keeping a buzz going? Above all else, Challis likes his booze. Before they even hit to road to Santa Mira, Challis makes sure to bring a six pack for the ride. And when he and Ellie arrive in Santa Mira, Ellie is eager to scope out Cochran's factory for clues about what happened to her dad but Challis' response is "Whoa! It's getting late and I could use a drink!". For Challis, it's always Happy Hour somewhere in the world. And as soon as they catch on to the fact that something seriously sketchy is up in Santa Mira, Challis' immediate question to Ellie is not to figure out how to root out what's going on but to ask her "You wanna leave?".

Unfortunately, Challis' personal complexities are set aside once he and Ellie fall into Cochran's hands. The last third of the movie is little more than a series of chases, resourceful escapes (And improbably resourceful ones, too. Note the scene where a bound Challis manages to throw a mask from across a room to land over the lens of a security camera hanging on the wall - not bad for a drunk!) and expository (if well-delivered) dialogue from O'Herlihy.

But resorting to a few conventional action beats can't undo the undeniable quirkiness of Season of the Witch, with its alcoholic anti-hero, its sci-fi weirdness and its arcane menace to the world's children. While it'll never be the pride of the pumpkin patch, this one-time franchise killer has outlasted its initial controversy to earn its place as an October essential and a Halloween staple.

Tom Atkins!

The news that Tom Atkins (The Fog, Escape from New York and Night of the Creeps among others) has been cast in the upcoming remake of My Bloody Valentine has made my heart swell just a little.

I love Atkins and miss his once-regular presence on the genre scene. I don’t know what role he’s been cast for in MBV but I hope it’s more than just a glorified cameo (if this sticks close to the original, I'm guessing that he'll be the old bartender who tries to warn all the young kids about Harry Warden). Before this announcement, I had just assumed that Atkins had simply quietly retired from acting (after all, the guy is pushing 80 by now) but it’s great to find out otherwise.

My favorite Atkins role remains that of Dr. Dan Challis in Halloween III: Season of the Witch. As the only man on Earth with a chance to avert the mass slaughter of the nation's children on Halloween night, this divorced, drunken dad makes for a profoundly unlikely hero. I've never read any interviews with either Atkins, director Tommy Lee Wallace, or producer John Carpenter in which they discussed their thoughts behind this character but I love the fact that they thought that portraying Challis a womanizing, alcoholic coward was the way to go.

While the affable Atkins has no problem making Challis likeable regardless of his actions, the character is almost never shown rising above the level of slime. For starters, he really likes his booze. That's not a crime (thank God!) but it's just not the kind of thing we're used to seeing in horror movie heroes - especially when there's so much at stake. For another, Challis hits the road to sinsiter Santa Mira and the Silver Shamrock toy factory with Ellie, the barely legal daughter of a slain shop owner, in order to investigate her dad's mysterious death and once the door closes on their motel room, the nearly 50-year-old Challis shows no hesitation in getting Ellie (played by Stacey Nelkin) into bed. Atta boy, Challis!

Even better is that during the throes of passion, in the next motel room over a woman inadvertently causes a Silver Shamrock chip to fatally misfire in her face. Ellie immediately voices her alarm at the sudden sound ("What was that?") only to have a preoccupied Challis mumble into her breasts "...Who cares?".

And as soon as Challis and Ellie catch on to the fact that something seriously sketchy is up in Santa Mira, Challis' immediate response is not to figure out how to root out what's going on but to ask Ellie "You wanna leave?". Yep, that's definitely my kind of guy.

When push comes to shove, of course, Challis does do the right thing. And if he doesn't quite succeed in saving the day, well, you can't win 'em all. As long as he can get his ass to a bar stool, it's understood that Challis will find a way to get over it. To paraphrase Atkins' loutish Creepshow character, "That's why God made Happy Hour, babe."