Review: Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Rated R

Score: 3 out of 5

This is the Halloween movie without Michael Myers, one where those films as we know them exist in-universe. Since the day it came out, it's been known as the black sheep of the series, the one whose failure caused John Carpenter to walk away and leave the franchise in the hands of producer Moustapha Akkad, his hopes of turning Halloween into a horror anthology series (not unlike what Trick 'r Treat later did) dashed by the fact that, even though he felt that the story of Michael Myers, Laurie Strode, and Dr. Loomis was over and done, moviegoers, critics, and horror fans alike still wanted more of The Shape. Given both the quality of the resulting film once you separate it from its predecessors and the lack of quality from many of the later sequels, I can't help but wonder if Carpenter had the right idea. Because rest assured, had this film just been called Season of the Witch and advertised as "from the creator of Halloween" (Carpenter didn't write or direct, both those jobs going to his friend and collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace, but his fingerprints are visible everywhere), its IMDb score would likely be two full points higher than the tepid 4.9 it has today. It is at times a fairly corny film, but at its best, it's one that deserves the reevaluation it seems to have gotten in more recent times.

The only connecting tissue to the rest of the series is that this film takes place shortly before and during the Halloween holiday. But instead of a masked killer stalking a suburban neighborhood, here we open with a man on the run from a group of men in crisp suits who are trying to kill him. A gas station attendant takes him to the hospital, where he tries to warn people that "they" are going to kill everybody before one of the men in black catches up with him, kills him in his hospital bed, and then sets himself on fire in the parking lot. This arouses the attention of Dan, an alcoholic doctor for whom this is like nothing he's ever seen, leading him to team up with Ellie, the murdered man's daughter who is trying to figure out why these people wanted him dead, starting with the fact that he was carrying a Halloween mask on his person when he was taken to the hospital. As it turns out, Ellie's father was investigating a toy company called Silver Shamrock Novelties, based in the town of Santa Mira and owned by one Conal Cochran, an enigmatic Irishman who has some interesting ideas regarding the holiday once known as Samhain.

Not only is this film's plot sharply distinct from its predecessors, it doesn't play out remotely like them either. This isn't a slasher movie so much as it is a paranoid thriller of that era, the kind about intrepid journalists trying to uncover shady dealings by the government and corporations, only here, you get a bunch of very gruesome murders thrown in for good measure. And its single greatest quality is that it does an outstanding job of building tension. Tommy Lee Wallace took over the writing and directing duties here, and he makes the town of Santa Mira feel like the place where the protagonists, and by extension the viewers, are always being watched. You never feel that you or the characters are safe in Santa Mira, that they have wandered into a place where they are in serious trouble and that Cochran and his "men in black" are watching their every move. It is a small, ordinary factory town corrupted by The Man, one where, even if you know what the bad guys are really doing, still leaves you shivering in anticipation as to what their awful plan is. It is here where Carpenter's influence is most evident; while it's nowhere near as blunt as They Live, this is still very much in keeping with his brand of dark satire of American society rooted in anti-capitalist, anti-authoritarian sensibilities, in this case depicting a world where a major corporation's abuses are taken to the point of the supernatural and abetted by the shallow consumerism that most people engage in. Nobody needs a Silver Shamrock Halloween mask, but thanks to a catchy and inescapable jingle ("Eight more days 'til Halloween! Halloween, Halloween! Eight more days 'til Halloween! Silver Shamrock!"), every kid in America wants one. Urban legends about death and evil on Halloween come together with concerns, already simmering in the '80s among parents, teachers, and child psychologists (the decade when Saturday morning cartoons became half-hour toy commercials), about how marketers and toy companies were treating impressionable children like piggy banks, the demographic whose parents would spend tons of money just to get their kids to shut up.

In front of the camera, too, Tom Atkins didn't necessarily make for a likable protagonist, but he was still one I could root for. Dan is not a good person, and he'd probably tell you this himself; his alcoholism destroyed his relationship with his ex-wife, he sleeps around, and he's been derelict in terms of his duties in seeing the kids as part of their custody arrangement. In other words, a perfect mystery thriller protagonist, one who has enough attachments to the rest of the world to care (for all his faults, he does genuinely love his kids) but not enough to hold him back from putting it out on the line. Atkins plays Dan as a guy who thought he'd seen it all in his job as a doctor, only to find himself in deep over his head as he finds out just how deep the rabbit hole at Silver Shamrock goes. The affair he has with Ellie came out of left field, though, and felt like it was thrown in just to get some obligatory nude scenes in and meet at least some of the expectations people had for a Halloween film. It did little to help the pacing, which was already pretty slow for much of the film. The rest of the cast was all at least decent, with special props going to Dan O'Herlihy as Cochran, his performance making the most of a villain who otherwise made just a few too many dumb decisions for me to buy as a real threat. Cochran's goal felt like it was evil for the sake of it, and he frequently fell victim to all the dumb mistakes you'd expect from a James Bond villain, complete with a death trap he puts Dan into. O'Herlihy, however, still managed to make it work, especially in his final scene where he realizes that Dan has him beat and just takes it in stride.

The Bottom Line

This may not be a "real" Halloween movie, but not only can I appreciate what Carpenter tried to go for, the film more or less pulled it off. It runs on style over substance, but it's still a very watchable hidden gem in the series.