I didn’t watch a horror movie on day four, but I had
a good excuse: I went to see the metal band
Kreator in concert instead. The show was
part of their Phantom Antichrist tour, and they played several songs from the
new album, which was the Cabinet’s Metal Album of the Week several weeks
ago. The songs’ dark themes combined
with the stage effects that included smoke machines and backdrops with images
of zombies and the antichrist from the album cover gave the performance elements
of horror. But it still wasn’t a horror
movie, so I’ll have to work in a double feature to make up for this missed day.
Tonight, I watched “Halloween III: Season of the
Witch” (1982), a very odd entry in the “Halloween” franchise that I had been
meaning to watch for years. Although it’s
called “Halloween III,” the only connections between this movie and the other
Halloween movies are that it was produced by John Carpenter and that he wrote
the music, but it’s not the instantly recognizable score from the other movies
in the series; he wrote completely new music for this one. Michael Myers and Laurie Strode aren’t even
mentioned although the original “Halloween” is playing on TV screens in one of the
movie’s key scenes. The subtitle is also
misleading as there’s no witch in the movie either. However, when viewed on its own terms, “Season
of the Witch” is a very enjoyable horror movie that presents a unique take on
the Halloween theme.
An Irishman named Conal Cochran is responsible for the horror. He wants to reclaim Halloween from Americans and return it to its European roots. Cochran complains that Americans have turned it into a night for children to beg for candy, whereas Samhain, from which Halloween was bastardized, was a night of blood and sacrifice when the barrier between the worlds of the living and the dead became blurred. Cochran runs a company known as Silver Shamrock, which specializes in popular Halloween masks. He has stolen a pillar from Stonehenge and ground particles from this pillar into his masks, giving them special powers. At 9:00 on Halloween night, a television commercial will activate this secret ingredient killing anyone wearing one of Cochran’s masks. A week before Halloween, a man discovers Cochran’s plan, but is soon killed by one of his minions. The man’s daughter and a doctor who tried to save him attempt to stop Cochran.
“Season of the Witch” begins with a pixilated computer image of a Jack-o-Lantern, recalling the opening shot of “Halloween,” which slowly zooms in on a real Jack-o-Lantern. However, I soon stopped thinking of it as a Halloween sequel and realized that it was instead an effort by Carpenter to allow the franchise to move in a much more interesting direction. Rather than showing Michael Myers stalking his victims yet again, writer/director Tommy Lee Wallace explores the horror of Halloween night from a different perspective. It left me wishing that Michael Myers had stayed dead in later sequels and that they had continued to examine the many different kinds of horror associated with Halloween.
The later sequels are mostly a mess. I always wondered if the druid angle that pops up in them (in IV or V Micheal is kidnapped by a druid cult near the end) was an attempt to move the series into a different direction, that perhaps some vague tie-in with the stonehenge thing in this movie was in the works. But then the next sequel seemed to totally forget it. One thing you can say about Nightmare on Elm Street is that even when the movies were terrible (like II) the series had some continuity; the same is not true of Halloween.
ReplyDeleteOn another note, we watched another John Carpenter movie last night, The Fog. I'd never seen it. It's ultimately forgettable (for me anyway; Shasta may be scarred for life). But it's essentially a slasher movie disguised as a ghost story.
I've never seen "The Fog" all the way through, so maybe this month would be a good time to watch it. What will "The Fog" be balanced with tonight?
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