Revisiting HALLOWEEN III, Unmasking HALLOWEEN (1978), and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: Season of the Switch
- Image of the Week: Alternative Art
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The States of Horror: Connecticut + Delaware
- Things We Love: Halloween Autopsy
HORROR HISTORY: SEASON OF THE SWITCH
By Joshua Lyon
For decades after the 1982 release of Halloween III: Season of the Witch, it was considered pretty uncool to admit liking the film. But despite its woefully low Rotten Tomatoes score, the stand-alone is finally evolving from one of the most maligned franchise follow-ups into a cult classic must-see.
Long before Ryan Murphy turned anthologies into a cultural phenomenon, John Carpenter and Debra Hill wanted to move away from the Michael Myers mythology. They had the brilliant idea to release a different Halloween-themed movie every year, with each film exploring new characters and a new plot centered on the holiday. The only problem was, nobody told audiences about this new direction. Fans arrived at theaters expecting a slasher, and instead got androids and a druid using tiny bits of Stonehenge to melt children’s heads via micro-chipped Halloween masks in an effort to usher in a new era of witchcraft. You can’t blame ticket-buyers for feeling cheated.
In order for the nefarious plot to work and disintegrate as many kids as possible, the villain Conal Cochran uses his cover company, Silver Shamrock, to whip up a marketing frenzy for his death-rigged products — jack o’ lantern, witch, and skull masks. Nonstop television ads marked the countdown to Halloween with an earworm jingle to the melody of “London Bridge,” instructing everyone to tune in Halloween night, when Cochran planned to release the trigger signal over the airwaves.
Too bad Universal didn’t do the same sort of media blitz for the new anthology idea. Theatergoers had no idea what was going on, the film bombed, and several years later Myers returned to slash his way through several sequels and remakes.
Thanks to cable television and VHS rentals, Season of the Witch slowly grew a loyal following, and now occupies a soft spot in many genre-lovers’ hearts. (This writer even formed a horror movie club in the fifth grade called Silver Shamrock). The conventional wisdom goes that if Season of the Witch not been saddled with the Halloween name it would have been much more successful. The movie has genuinely horrifying moments — an errant mystical laser blowing a woman’s face off, a creepy animatronic knitter, and a young boy who dissolves into a mass of insects and snakes that then kill his parents. Not to mention that wiping out hundreds of thousands of children is way scarier than offing a handful of horny teens.
The film’s trio of masks has become iconic in their own right, and a horror Easter egg favorite — they get a brief wink in the new Halloween, make an appearance in 2015’s The Guest, and regularly pop up in Universal’s Halloween Horror Nights mazes. If you’ve missed (or dismissed) the film in the past, put this one on your need-to-watch list. It’s worth it for the Silver Shamrock song alone.
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Alternative Art
Artist Christopher Shy is the master of the alternative movie poster, as proven by this one, which reminds us how much better it would have been had Season of the Witch been released as a stand-alone film, rather than the third in the Halloween franchise.
TINY BITES
DRACULA‘S BACK, CREATURE‘S CREATOR & MORE
Drew Goddard says his goal with Cabin in the Woodswas “to set the record for most movie blood ever used.”
XKCDcan’t quite understand why we love horror movies …
… but science is here to tell us how horror gives us a safe place to be scared.
Meanwhile, an historian explains how nearly all horror movies are really about World War I.
John Carpenter shared a track from the newHalloween, and explained why the original movie’s score worked so well (even though he had only three days to do the music).
A neural network analyzed 78,000 horror movie titlesthen tried to come up with killer titles of its own. (We’d pay good money to see The Return of Bob.)
Wrong Turn creator Alan McElroy is rebooting hisWest Virginia cannibals.
Sherlock creators Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss are making a three-part Dracula miniseries for the BBC and Netflix.
Here’s the demonic first trailer for the exorcism-gone-wrong movie The Possession of Hannah Grace.
The Hollywood Reporter explores how slasher movies are making a comeback.
A new book says only one woman was ever given the chance to design an iconic movie monster. Her name was Milicent Patrick, and the monster was The Creature from the Black Lagoon.
Here’s the the most popular horror movies in America, broken down by state. (We got Psycho. We’re cool with that.)
Newsweek explains why Night of the Living Dead isstill so influential.
It’s time to rethink Rob Zombie’s “risky, divisive, and elevated” Halloween movies.
If ghost movies are your thing, check out 50 of the best.
Finally, meet the world’s most ancient monsters.
THE STATES OF HORROR: CONNECTICUT + DELAWARE
Today’s States of Horror are decidedly East Coast, one a perfect place for lyrical New England nightmares and the other, the home of two of indie horror’s most exciting contemporary filmmakers.
Connecticut: Let’s Scare Jessica to Death
John Hancock’s ’70s gem is so much more than one of the great horror movie titles of all time. Set in picturesque small town Connecticut, where busy New Yorkers often dream of running away from it all (or convalescing after psychological breakdown, such as this film’s lead character), Let’s Scare Jessica to Death uses its dreamy atmosphere to nightmarish effect. The beauty of its New England gothic eerily and quickly transitions from quieting and peaceful to paranoid and unreal for the teetering Jessica. For bonus points, see how the spirit of Jessica lives on in AD Calvo’s Connecticut-made and set Sweet, Sweet Lonely Girl, which nails the hazy uncanny of Jessica, as a young woman darkly slips thanks to a possible supernatural influence.
Delaware: I Can See You
Another tale of city folk escaping to the country, only to be mentally and psychedelically broken down. This time, young ad execs escape to the forest of Delaware, home state of writer-director Graham Reznick, an audio master and thrilling filmmaker of the hallucinatory sort. Reznick is best known as the sound designer of Ti West’s breakouts like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers (two more Connecticut faves). Here, he mines the rural atmosphere of his base for an underrated Lynchian freakout. West, who’s also a Delaware native, did the same with his simmering Trigger Man.
THINGS WE LOVE: HALLOWEEN AUTOPSY
Halloween Unleashed is a stylishly produced, legitimately insightful deep dive into Halloween that’s a must listen for horror fans. The eight-part podcast examines how John Carpenter’s childhood in the civil rights era South influenced the creation of Michael Myers, talks with Jamie Lee Curtis about what it was like to join her mom — Psycho’s Janet Leigh — as a scream queen, and interviews everyone from film critics and serial killer historians to comedians and horror rappers about why we’ll never get enough of Halloween.