It was that aspect that drew Wallace to the project. The decision to omit Myers from the film was one taken by Halloween creators John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who envisioned the sequel as the first in a series of anthology series centered around a different story linked only by the fact they played out over Halloween night. “All I can say it’s very gratifying all these years later to have a movie that’s perennially popular and seems to be attracting more and more fans and younger and younger fans all the time.”Ĥ0 years on from the film’s release, he’s ready to look back. I think an ad campaign that would have explained what we were up to, that we were trying to start something new, really laying it out for the fans, might have helped. “I knew we’d made a good movie and just felt we’d stumbled badly on its release. Wallace describes the reappraisal of Season of the Witch as “healing” noting that the original reaction to the film “hurt” him at the time. “Instead, there’s lots of enthusiasm and fun and kids, of course, gobble it up. “Halloween has turned into quite the obsessional holiday involving lots of candy and props yet not a lot of time is spent looking into the history of it or self-reflecting,” he says. In recent years, it’s become a regular part of the spooky holiday season for many horror fans, something Wallace attributes to the film’s underlying critique of the commercialisation of Halloween. It’s a wild, inventive ride full of eye-popping (or in one case eye-gouging) practical effects, genuine scares, with an unpredictable story carried by a compelling central cast and a killer John Carpenter score. There’s none of the increasingly complex lore that began to bog down the later Halloween films and none of the repetitive stalk and slash aspects of the genre as a whole. Today, it stands as an outlier from the more predictable Michael Myers-led sequels and is all the stronger for it. However, as time has gone on and the Halloween sequels have continued apace, Season of the Witch has steadily built a cult following and, with it, significant reassessment. Roger Ebert dismissed it as a “low rent thriller” while Jason Paul Collum from Cinefantastique magazine called it a “hopelessly jumbled mess.” While Season of the Witch was a success at the box office, the film drew a negative response from fans and some critics. “An awful lot of people were disappointed, even outraged, that Michael Myers didn’t show up and that there was no knife and no Jamie Lee Curtis,” Halloween III writer and director Tommy Lee Wallace told Den of Geek. It was a bold move and one that didn’t sit entirely well with fans. Challis, along with Ellie Gimbridge (Stacey Nelkin) the daughter of one of Cochran’s previous victims, stand in his way.īlending elements of witchcraft with technology to terrifying effect, the film’s central conceit also served as an unsettling takedown of television, advertising and wider corporate America. Using a stolen chunk of Stonehenge, Irish company owner Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy) intended to, quite literally, rot the minds of America’s young by having them wear one during a special broadcast across all the TV networks. Daniel Challis (Tom Atkins) a physician who stumbles upon a disturbing plot to kill the children on Halloween using a series of microchipped masks containing an ancient evil, which are being manufactured by a sinister Irish toy company called Silver Shamrock. Released back in 1982, the film centered on Dr. Yet far and away the boldest take to emerge from the 1980s came around the start of the decade with Halloween III: Season of the Witch. There are exceptions to the trend, of course, most notably in the 1980s heyday of the slasher genre.Ī Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors offered an inventive spin on the Freddy Krueger formula, aided by a game cast and script penned by Frank Darabont while writer and director Tom McLoughlin’s Friday the 13th Part VI provided a comedic, self-referential take on the masked killer that would be fleshed out further in the Scream movies of the 1990s. The result is a series of largely repetitive follow-ups that crank up the gore to cover for the lack of creative spark.
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