The Pitch: Halloween
is a feeling, not a character?...Right?
Halloween is
a weird franchise. It's been sequelled, rebooted, resurrected, and redirected.
There's no definitive Halloween timeline. Installments cherry pick which
source material they build from. It's sort of a glorious mess, and Season of
the Witch still stands out as the oddest duck in the family. It belongs to
no other timeline in the Halloween universe. It actually exists in a
world where the first Halloween movie is a movie. It doesn't even have
Michael Myers: the connective tissue every other installment is built with.
Frankly, it shouldn't even be a Halloween movie by the current logic.
But what if we looked at this through an American
Horror Story lens? The Halloween franchise could've been a lot
different had Season of the Witch been a success. Instead of just being
the next Michael Myers story, Halloween could be marked by a style or
collection of producers and filmmakers. People could go into a Halloween
movie not knowing what to expect but sure they would be scared in some way.
That potentially eliminates the problem with most horror franchise. Once people
know the tricks, the scares are harder to come by. That's why Jason, Freddy
Kruger, Ghostface mask killer, etc. end up becoming caricatures of themselves.
If the threat can change in any movie, that makes it more interesting.
In that respect, I like Season of the Witch
more for what it could've been than what it actually is. The movie is fairly
lackluster. I had a hard time rooting for the protagonist. He's a cheating
husband and absent father who falls into bed with the young daughter of a
patient who was killed. Even by early 80s standards, it's not like he's a hunky
late-40s. At best he's "upper-middle class, just started working out after
hitting his mid-life crisis but still eats way too much steak" attractive.
He was a bad POV character.
I like how utterly bonkers the whole conspiracy is.
It's sort of a horror movie ad-libs plot:
A company uses microchips with pieces of Stonehenge in them to kill children as a sacrifice to witches. Their remains then turn into insects and snakes. Everyone else the company turns into robots.
I don't know that I was ever scared, but I was
interested to see what the movie would come up with next.
Verdict: Weakly Don't Recommend
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