My feelings about the slasher genre are constantly changing. For instance, when I went through the Friday the 13th franchise last year, I was pretty negative about Part V, which is the entry in which Jason was a copycat. I wanted the real Jason. Yet as I went through the Halloween series, especially the most recent film, I found myself not giving a fuck who was behind the mask, or even if the mask was in the movie at all. Maybe it’s just that I don’t hold the Halloween franchise in the same regard as Friday the 13th. Who knows? I bring it up because Halloween III: Season of the Witch is one of my favorite movies in the series. But that wasn’t always the case.
The first time I watched this movie was because the How Did This Get Made? podcast covered it. I found it annoying more than anything, and I thought it was completely ridiculous that Michael Myers wasn’t in a Halloween movie. This time around, however, I appreciated how batshit crazy this movie is, and I’m not alone. This film’s reputation has improved over the years because once you accept that Myers isn’t in it, you can have fun with it.
The crazy plot still cracks me up. It has taken me three viewings over the years to figure the plot out (that fucking Silver Shamrock song getting stuck in my head each time doesn’t help), and I’m still not sure I completely understand it, but here goes: an Irish maskmaker is attempting to please the old Druid gods by selling every child in America a mask with a Stonehenge-infused microchip that, when activated, kills the child and makes snakes and bugs and shit come out of their head. Yeah. And the only person who can stop him is a drunken, horny Tom Atkins.
Tom Atkins plays a divorced doctor who’s never there for his kids. For instance, instead of making time to be with them for Halloween, he runs off with a deceased patient’s daughter to play detective. Why would a doctor suddenly do this? Because he wants to bang the patient’s daughter, of course.
I can see how all of this would have pissed off Halloween fans when it was first released, but looking at it now, it’s a refreshing change of pace. John Carpenter wanted to be done with Michael Myers after the first film, much less the second. So this was his chance (as a producer) to turn the series into a yearly anthology, featuring a new spooky story each time. He just underestimated how much people just want to see the same shit over and over.
As I pointed out in my last article, I find the Michael Myers character to be the murderous Shape that he’s credited as. There’s nothing there, really. So a Halloween movie without him is more interesting than infuriating. I’m aware I’m in the minority when it comes to Myers, and most fans like this movie only because they now know Myers would come back. I would’ve been okay if he had stayed dead.
This series would be much more interesting if shit completely changed up with each movie, but no one wants that, as evidenced by the tonal and story shifts of the most recent trilogy. Fans of this series cannot be pleased en masse, which is what Carpenter realized with this, leading to his disassociation with the series for decades after this movie.
The series would go on to bend over backwards to justify bringing Michael back from the dead, and when that got too stupid, they started ignoring sequels, and when those got too stupid, they rebooted the whole thing, and when that got too stupid, they went back and decided to ignore everything except the one film everyone agreed was great. Season of the Witch was the only film with the balls to move on from Michael, and that somehow makes it one of the best Halloween movies. But unfortunately, you can only keep an iconic slasher down for one movie…
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