Season of the Witch has no happy ending, and that’s what really keeps the film standing tall after all these years. From people having their eyes gouged out, their heads ripped off, and their faces blasted open to the mere fact that the movie has no problem with killing children – sometimes a touchy thing to show in film, depending on who you ask – there’s no shortage of material meant to appease horror fans, but it’s really the idea that many of these characters are merely reaping what they’ve sown that’s more horrific than any amount of gore thrown up on screen. Whether it’s Dan losing his family when he finally decides to give them the time of day to the nation enthusiastically falling for Cochran’s plan, believing a corporation like Silver Shamrock is something worth trusting simply because it releases cute masks and promises rewards.
It’s not without faults, though, which I mentioned at the outset of this defense. The pacing of the first half of the film can often feel slightly languid. The reliance on certain special effects, like electricity bolts and a large fire at the Silver Shamrock factory, is something that hasn’t aged gracefully, the love story between Ellie and Dan, aside from being plain weird, isn’t helped by the fact that it’s rushed and needless, and even a late-film twist involving an android Ellie goes on for too long, with four consecutive jump scares that grow comically exhausting.
That said, Season of the Witch has so much going for it that it’s hard to use those faults as a weapon against it. It’s also easy to understand how and why people were confused about its Michael-less existence back in 1982 without the benefit of our modern ease of access to information. But Halloween III deserves to be lauded for striving to be different and working to evolve a franchise that could’ve – and ultimately did – fallen victim to the type of diminishing returns that come with the familiarity behind retreading old ground again and again, particularly in the slasher genre, as we’d see with franchises like Friday the 13th and A Nightmare on Elm Street as the 1980s rolled on.
It’s a film that was an ambitious first step towards something much grander, and it’s unfortunate that a lack of acceptance about what it wanted to be chopped Halloween‘s future as an anthology series at the knees before it ever had the chance to truly begin. Michael Myers is my favorite of the slasher icons, and I could never lie and say that I don’t enjoy a number of the films that his return to the series brought about, but it’s hard not to wonder what the franchise could’ve become and what types of stories could’ve been told within its larger seasonal framework had Season of the Witch been met by a more receptive audience. All one can do now is ponder the possibilities, though, as Halloween III is but a blip in the legacy of the Myers franchise, but what a wonderfully entertaining blip it is.
