Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

directed by Tommy Lee Wallace

Steven Casimer Kowalski

I’ve watched Halloween III: Season of the Witch nearly every October since 2004. I’m proud of that streak. And I’m proud of the amount of people I’ve dragged into a viewing along the way. Many of those screenings were held with groups of friends. Some of those friends I would find out already loved the movie. Others would come to love it. Some did not care for it (this makes sense). Some Octobers, people text me because they saw H3 on TV or because, for better or worse, their brain refuses to forget the Silver Shamrock jingle.

Halloween III: Season of the Witch is the one without Michael Myers. The idea was, Halloween II concluded the Myers story, so now, every year, a new Halloween movie would release with a totally new storyline. I like that idea. I think it could have worked. It certainly works in 2019  with TV shows like Fargo and American Horror Story. I sometimes daydream about a world that has seen 27 consecutive Halloween movies released to date. What might that world be like?

Alas, that is not what happened. Halloween III was not successful at the box office. Halloween III was not successful critically. Halloween III was not successful artistically. In place of those successes exists a deeply strange but compelling movie. It is highly watchable. And sure, watchability may be the softest of complements. But the reality of fractured media in 2019 has me dying for simply watchable content. I don’t need things to be great. I just need them to be good enough for me to ignore while I do another thing in the same room.

That might seem like a very low bar. But so much of the content pushed by streaming services fails at this most basic of tasks.

So sure, Halloween III is watchable. I’ll get to why I think it is compelling later. But first, one thing needs to be established. No, this is not the best Halloween movie in the franchise. Look, it can be difficult to get attention on the internet. One way around this difficulty is to start telling everyone “The Bad Thing is Actually Good.” People will disagree. And disagreement is a kind of attention. And so  the hot-take industrial complex was born.

Sure, once in awhile, a forgotten film is rediscovered and given its due. It’s a Wonderful Life is maybe the most famous example. But Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a movie that features a child being murdered by a Halloween mask in front of his parents, is not one of those films. H3 asks entirely too much of its audience. For starters, our hero is a womanizing, alcoholic doctor. Nothing says “guy you can root for” more than a drunk who puts innocent lives in jeopardy every single day...

So no, this isn’t the best in the series. It may not even be worth revisiting. But I do revisit it. Almost every year. And in examining the question of why, I’ve identified two things that keep me coming back. The first is how much the movie differs from the first two. Because never in our lives will we see a sequel like this again. I know the plan was to move on from Michael Myers for this third installment. But Halloween III doesn’t just move on. It takes any previous assumptions about tone, style, emotion, or dramatic stakes in the Halloween series and boots them to the goddamn moon.

The first two Halloween movies are about a murderer who murders for some reason. They take place over the course of the same night with mostly the same people in the same town. They succeed on creepy atmosphere, reserved but brutal violence, and tension. Conversely, Halloween III is about...strap in...a Celtic Warlock who owns his own Halloween mask factory in California (stay with me), who steals one of the stones from Stonehenge (stay with me), and then puts tiny pieces of the stone into microchips (he really does this), and then puts the microchips inside the Halloween masks he makes (still going) so that when kids wear the masks AND watch the commerical for the mask on Halloween night (almost there) they fucking die.

When it came time to abandon previous tropes for the third movie, they could have easily made another movie about a thing that kills. Or they could have worked more familiar territory, maybe a Twilight Zone morality play or a “The call is coming from inside the house” type thriller. But no, they went with Evil Willy Wonka vs. The Boozy MD. I love that. It is a story without precedent provided with little to no context. Ultimately, it doesn’t work. But when you turn on Halloween III you’re getting an original piece of storytelling. That originality is more fitting and common in serialized tv. Which makes sense, because the insane people who made this movie figured they would make more.

And more Halloween movies would be made, but Halloween III was such a disaster that it derailed the franchise for most of the 1980s. When it returned in 1988, so did Michael Myers. The anthology idea was gone. Disappointing in retrospect, but the decision makes perfect sense. Commercial slasher movies were at their absolute peak in the 1980s. From 1982 to 1988, the six years starting with the release of Halloween III and ending with the release of Halloween 4, America ponied up cash to see four Nightmare on Elm Street movies and five Friday the 13ths. By the time Halloween 5 was released in 1989, all the familiar tropes were locked in.

Which brings me to the other reason I return to Halloween III year after year. It’s just so bizarre. Dr. Daniel Challis, Ellie Grimbridge, Conal Cochran, Marge Guttman, Buddy Kupfer and his son Little Buddy, these are the names of the characters in the movie. Say them out loud. Imagine how one could be named Tom Price or Eric Stanley but isn’t. Choices were made.

Our Stonehenge thieving villain, Cochran, builds human-like automatons to do his bidding. They all look like Gary Newman. And when they are wounded, what looks like nacho cheese pours out. One of them burns up and the coroner who examines the remains is like, “this is so weird I found no human remains but oh well I register no suspicion.”

Everyone finds Dr. Challis sexy, which would be fine except his character is not sexy. It makes no sense even if you assume “garage dad” is a fetish. Ellie Grimbridge goes on maybe a two-night road trip with Dr. Challis and brings full-on Fredrick’s of Hollywood lingerie. Dr. Challis goes out one night for booze and on the way back he runs into a homeless man who innocently asks if he can have a drink from Dr. Challis’s bottle, and Dr. Challis does it! Maybe that’s a level of trust from a bygone era. Like how people used to hitchhike and stuff? Look, I have uncles who hitchhiked. They tell some pretty interesting stories about it. But none of those stories include, “Hey, after my successful hitchhike I went into town to buy booze and after I did I let a total stranger have a drink right from the bottle! Oh I do miss the ‘60s.”

There’s more. So much more. I don’t want to give it all away. You should watch it. Just like I will. And you should invite some friends, just like I will. But don’t, at any point, think this movie is good or deserving of your time. It is not good and you could do far better things with your 98 minutes. Watch it because there is nothing like it. It represents a bold and crazed decision to abandon a proven moneymaker to do something weird and different. That will never happen again. And you owe it to yourself to see it happen once.

Steven Casimer Kowalski lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. He is currently playing Warframe on the Nintendo Switch and reading The Luminous Dead by Caitlin Starling. His favorite scary movie is John Carpenter's The Thing.