Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)
(I defy anybody who has ever seen this film to tell me truthfully that they didn’t just read the Silver Shamrock jingle without reading it to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down.)
The times were changing. The Halloween franchise was heading in a different direction. Or, at least the direction it was intended to go in the first place. Ironically, the film that kicked off the eighties craze of holiday themed slasher movies was never planned as a series. Or not as a continuing series, I should say. Halloween (1978) was originally scripted under the title of “The Babysitter Murders”. The plan was that a film would be released every year around Halloween, and the recurring theme would be Halloween itself. No continuing characters, no cliffhangers, no sequels, just a series of standalone films different stories, different characters, ultimately forming, over the years, an anthology series set around the actual day.
After the runaway success of Halloween, and its imitators, the studio pressured and eventually persuaded John Carpenter to write a sequel, which he took as the opportunity to kill off Michael Myers, so he could carry on with his original vision, and this is the result.
So, we have no Michael Myers, apart from the original Halloween being the main attraction on the horror movie marathon being watched on TV on the evening of October 31. (But hey, that’s a clever way of including him, right?) What we have instead is a slice of sci-fi/horror with an ingenious concept from none other than British sci-fi legend Nigel Kneale, the writer of the four Quatermass TV serials. But you’d never know it, because although commissioned to write the screenplay, he became dissatisfied with the adaptation of and amendments to the script and demanded that his name be removed from the film.
The first two Halloween films featured the camera closing in on a Halloween pumpkin during the titles. As we’re in science fiction territory this time, the Halloween pumpkin remains, but we’re what we’re seeing is an electronic graphic in close-up, which is a nice touch.
We open at night with a man on the run. On the run from two suited individuals, who chase him to a yard. Cornering the man, one of the suits starts to strangle him but is crushed by a car, and the would-be victim makes his escape. Arriving at a filling station, he pleads for help, and is obviously in a bad way, clutching a rubber Halloween mask. He is taken to hospital.
Doctor Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins) is a recovering alcoholic, divorced, with a very strained relationship with his ex-wife (Nancy Loomis, last seen as a corpse in Halloween 2) who has successfully gone from teenaged victim to shrewish ex-wife in the space of three films. Challis is very much an absentee father, not only because of his drinking, but also because of his devotion to his job at the hospital. And as soon as he arrives to see his kids, he’s called away because of the new admission. But not before they’ve shown off their Silver Shamrock masks, bought by their mother.
At the hospital, the mystery man on the run is still holding on to his Silver Shamrock Halloween Mask and is resting, when one of the suits walks into his room and literally gouges both the guy’s eyes and tears his skull apart from the sockets. He then calmly walks out and douses himself in petrol in the drivers’ seat of his car and sets himself alight.
We find out more about the poor victim when his daughter Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) shows up to identify the body the following morning. (Though how she can identify him with his face literally torn off is anybody’s guess. Now, I’m sure Stacey Nelkin is an accomplished actress – I haven’t seen her in anything else, but she has a pretty long IMDb listing – but her range here is limited to two modes. There’s wide-eyed startlement, and there’s the rarer wide-eyed bewilderment. She has no other expression throughout the film.)
Both Challis and Ellie decide that as Ellie’s father was last seen placing an order at the Silver Shamrock factory in Santa Mira, then that’s where they should start investigating. (If that name seems familiar, I’ll explain it towards the end.)
Santa Mira is a factory town, populated by creepy Irish people. Not that Irish people are creepy, but these are Irish people by way of central casting, in a horror movie so they’re kind of off-kilter. Everybody works for Silver Shamrock in one way or another, and they all adhere to a six o’clock curfew, which I don’t quite get. There’s no law enforcement visible, tough there are CCTV cameras everywhere. Sure, CCTV is common now, but not so much back in 1982, when this film was produced. The founder of Silver Shamrock is revered almost as a God. Yup, there’s a whole lot of forelock tugging happening when Conal Cochran (Daniel O’Herlihy) shows up. (And veteran actor O’Herlihy really revs up his creepy Irishman vibe, practically stealing the show.) Cochran takes charge as a benefactor when an accident happens, causing a lady to lose half her face. In reality, she was tampering with some micro circuitry on a manufacturers logo that had fallen off a defective mask. Technicians whisper to Cochran that it was a “misfire”. They mystery deepens.
Security is tight at the factory, but Challis manages to get in with Ellie (in more ways than one, the dirty old devil) and join a tour of the facility. All is not what it seems.
Taken prisoner by Cochran’s suited henchmen who are actually robots, and have earlier taken Ellie, Challis is made to watch as a test of the tech takes place with the obnoxious family who are Cochran’s unwitting victims. The child is wearing a mask, as the ad that will be played at 9:00pm on Halloween is played. The boy begins to convulse as hordes of insects and snakes seep out from under his mask. He dies, as do his parents. Cochran explains;
“I do love a good joke, and this is the best ever: a joke on the children. But there's a better reason. You don't really know much about Halloween. You thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy.
It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands, and we'd be waiting in our houses of wattles and clay. The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in to sit by our fires of turf.
Halloween... the festival of Samhain! The last great one took place three thousand years ago, when the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children.”
He’s referring to rituals of sacrifice and witchcraft. Cochran is an ancient warlock, and has stolen one of the huge blue stones from Stonehenge, using it to create microchips with which to transmit this fatal sacrificial spell, now the planets are in alignment. Ingenious. When the TV ad is played at nine, all those chips will be activated and the kids die. (Wow! Microchip witchcraft! It’s been 40 years since this film was released, and I’m still blown away by the sheer originality of that concept.)
Challis breaks free and causes the computers to blow by retransmitting the ad and throwing a boxful of the loose chips at Cochran and the technicians. Presumably, this turns the spell on them. Rescuing Ellie before the whole factory goes up, they leave the own of Santa Mira – but there’s more horror in store. Ellie has been replaced by a robot (Nelkin’s method of acting finally fits a role) which attacks Challis repeatedly, despite losing a head and an arm. She’s like a petite Terminator.
Challis finally makes it to the filling station Ellie’s father ran into at the beginning of the movie and phones the TV networks at the stroke of nine to pull the ad and stop transmitting.
He gets through to all.
But one.
Happy Halloween indeed.
Okay, Santa Mira- I promised an explanation. In the original film of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the (fictional) town of Santa Mira is beset by an invasion of replica people who have no emotions. The spread is caused by alien pods. People are replaced and we’re never quite sure who is “real” and who isn’t. The one person unaffected is…a doctor. At the end, the doctor is frantically trying to warn everybody what’s happening – but it might be too late – and the ending is left largely open. So ultimately, this film also serves as a homage to that classic from 1956.
Sadly, this entry was deemed a box office disappointment, though largely from an audience member’s point of view it was refreshingly original at its time. Even more sadly, much worse was to come under the name of Halloween.