The first time my young, horror adverse mind even considered the Halloween franchise was over a decade before I would ever see even a frame of it.
I was with a friend at a video store, as I so often found myself, wandering the aisles and debating on which VHS tape would accompany us to that particular night’s sleepover. Despite my obvious reluctance, he pulled me over to the horror section, admittedly more as a lark given the fact that our parents had made it explicitly clear that PG was as high a rating as they’d be willing to rent.
Dozens of frightening images stared back at me but, for whatever reason, my eye was drawn to a series of cassette tapes, all in a row, baring the same primary title followed by number after number and subtitle after subtitle. On the far left of the row sat a black box bearing a fist swiping a knife, the successive, frozen-in-place motion of which served to create a pumpkin-like face under the large, white, block letters which read simply: Halloween (1978).
I studied each box as though they read in some alien language, unnerving and yet altogether enticing my hesitant imagination. My friend noticed where my attention had wandered and asked if I had seen any of them. I shook my head “no” nonchalantly so as not to betray my complete lack of horror movie experience as though it were some sort of adolescent crime. He nodded and proceeded to give me a rundown of each, calling out his favorites and general story beats as though it were a well-worn fairy tale that most were raised to be familiar with from birth.
In his ramblings, however, I noticed that he skipped past part 3. Far be it from me to question such a clear scholar of the genre, but my curiosity got the better of me. I had to ask.
“You didn’t talk about the third one,” I said. He laughed and picked up the case. “This one’s a joke,” he said, “it’s just a random horror movie that took the title— Michael Myers isn’t even in it!”
He put it down and continued on, unaware that the small tidbit of information he had shared with me about the third entry had piqued my interest more than any other he had described. What did he mean it was a “random horror movie that took the title”? Was that a thing in horror? Did outside movies just swoop into franchises and usurp an entry or two from time to time?
As the years passed I never forgot about what my friend had told me in the video store that fateful day. Halloween 3: Season of the Witch (1982) remained planted firmly in my mind, a bit of horror trivia I was unable to forget and a movie I was always curious about seeing. By the time I finally caught up to it, I was firmly entrenched in the Halloween camp and mentally prepared for the disappointment that had been promised to me all of those years prior.
Then, finally, I watched the movie.
My buddy had been right about a few things— no Haddonfield, Laurie Strode, or Myers in this one (unless you count the brief clips of the original movie airing on TV). Instead, it was something different, a celebration of the Halloween season, crafting a devilish plot built specifically to exploit the commercialism surrounding a holiday that the modern world has all but lost touch with the meaning of. The film is eerie, fun, action-packed, and constructed with gory set pieces that both celebrate and exploit every last trapping of the spookiest holiday of the year.
Immediately the film became a seasonal favorite for me, as integral to my Halloween celebrations as Hocus Pocus (1993) or Disney’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1949). Sure, it deviated from the story proper but a part of me wonders what might’ve been had the franchise allowed for and encouraged such deviations. What manner and number of seasonal classics would we have, all under the banner name of the holiday, all free to explore the customs, traditions, and underbelly of the season horror fans rally their entire years around.
This sentiment is clear from page 1 of Tommy Lee Wallace’s script which opens with traditional text about the holiday, setting a tone that carries through to the story’s bitter end. An untethered vision of Halloween trappings that feels more like a love-letter to the holiday than most of its Michael Myers infused brethren. So many sequences represent this simultaneously affectionate and yet deviously subversive attitude toward Halloween, but, for me, the standout comes in the form of Li’l Buddy’s demise and the reveal of what it is those Silver Shamrock masks are capable of.
As much a culmination of the film’s thematics as it is a devastating promise of the scope of what’s to come in the film’s final minutes, the scene where Li’l Buddy’s head disintegrates into a pile of insects and snakes manages to be chilling while maintaining the same sense of fun, borderline silly sensibility that makes the film so lovable.
While so many once believed this film to be, as my friend once said, “a joke”, over time it has become clear that Halloween 3: Season of the Witch is one of the best October movies out there. A movie that adores, understands, and proliferates the components that comprise the season, I can think of no better film to share the headline of Halloween with the holiday’s definitive villain.
And, if nothing else, it is one I will never skip over when walking through the franchise with a horror novice. Myers canon or not, it’s a movie where Tom Atkins seeks to stop an evil warlock toy maker’s scheme to damn the children of the world with Stone Henge magic by way of the cursed pumpkin, witch, and skeleton masks they’re wearing and, to me, that’s more than worth talking about.
THE SCENE
Buddy, Betty, and Li’l Buddy walk into a small room made up to look like a living room. Li’l Buddy complains and Buddy says they’re there because Cochran is interested in his ideas on a commercial. Cochran watches from a different room with Challis in custody. The Silver Shamrock commercial plays. It invites kids to put on their masks and Li’l Buddy obeys. A pumpkin flashes on the screen. Betty and Buddy laugh. Li’l Buddy grabs his head and squeezes. The mask starts to erode. Li’l Buddy falls to the ground convulsing as insects stream from the lumpy mass where his head used to be. Betty faints. Buddy screams as snakes emerge from the mask. Buddy attempts to escape and is bitten by a snake. Cochran watches pleased while Challis stares on in horror. The entire family lies lifeless in the room, covered in snakes and insects.
THE SCRIPT
Excerpt taken from the script ‘Halloween III: Season of the Witch’ written by Tommy Lee Wallace.
THE SCREEN
INT. SMALL ROOM — DAY
A very plain, small room with three TV sets placed around. In the ceiling is another remote TV camera.
A wide shot introduces the viewer to the room the script sparsely describes. While it is fairly plain, it is dressed in an oddly off-putting but homely manner, reminding of a comfortable, middle America living room without any of the heart that spot typically embodies. While the screenplay offers fairly direct action and dialogue, the film lets the characters exist in the space a bit before moving along. Betty pulls aside one of the curtains curiously, finding only a metal wall behind it and Buddy watches the men in suits walk away through a small window on the secure metal door as the camera pans down to the words “Test Room A” printed there.
While the narrative makes the precarious nature of their situation abundantly clear, it’s the trappings and presentation of the space that sparks cautiousness in the characters in the scene. Much of the dialogue is trimmed down and simplified, still present but less emphasized. Buddy’s complaints about being unable to order the following year’s masks and Li’l Buddy’s whining are instead interspersed with a more prevalent presence of the primary control room where Cochran watches with his henchmen and Challis in company.
The first time we see what the script refers to as “HIGH TECH AREA”, is a bit earlier than scripted. A black space that seems immense if only because its edges aren’t perceivable, it holds Cochran, his silent, suited counterparts, and Challis where they watch silently as the family goes about their business on the many screens before them. In the film, this view is edited seamlessly with the action in the room, hopping back and forth between the two spaces to create a further sense of dread that extends beyond the ominous sensibilities the somewhat clueless people in the room are beginning to pick up on.
This creeping dread comes to the forefront with a tweak in a line from the script. On the page, it’s Buddy that mentions that “Anybody would think this is the last Halloween ever!” in response to Silver Shamrock’s lack of forward-thinking. In the film, the line is given to Betty as a joke, ribbing her husband amidst his complaints, saying with a laugh, “Maybe they’re not going to have Halloween next year!” Tonally, this sets the stage for what’s to come, both in scope and darkly humorous outrageousness.
Suddenly the three TV sets in the room blink on simultaneously.
After the addendum of Cochran saying “roll it” and a faceless worker hitting a few buttons on a keyboard, the television clicks on in the film with the same startling immediacy as it does on the page. Rather than 3 TVs, there is only one, which allows for Li’l Buddy’s image in front of it to feel incredibly familiar, comfortable even, as it is something every kid can remember doing and every adult has seen countless times before.
Hardly wholesome, the image of a child excitedly planted in front of the TV is made so by its relevance made iconic by its commonness. Intercutting between the control room, close-up shots of the TV screen as the shamrock appears glowing before Li’l Buddy’s eyes and shots of the family in the room usher the viewer’s attention to the TV as well. In the same way that people are drawn to prime time television events, so does this seem to be imbued with importance, however cheaply manufactured.
ANNOUNCER
(V.O.; Irish brogue)
Time! It’s time! All those lucky
kids with Silver Shamrock masks,
Move close to your TV screen!
As scripted, the commercial offers direction, in the film more explicitly telling kids to put on their masks and “watch”. In a medium shot, facing away from the TV, Li’l Buddy pulls on his mask as his mother, visible in the background, cautions him presciently not to sit too close, saying “you’ll ruin your eyes.” The film infuses the commercial with more direction as it repeats “watch the magic pumpkin, watch”. Several shots of Cochran in the control room, Buddy’s parents and the TV dance across the frame as the image of Li’l Buddy, transformed into a pumpkin-headed trick-or-treater by his Silver Shamrock mask, leans ever closer to the broadcast unfolding before him.
Again, much of the dialogue in the script is excised, accomplished in fewer words, and rendering lines like “Is this the prize they’re going to give you?” or the parent’s additional banter about Silver Shamrock wanting their advertising advice moot. The pumpkin on the screen flashes on and off while Li’l Buddy sits hunched over slightly, unmoving.
Suddenly the TV screen flashes! A small brilliant light glows!
Then the screen goes black.
And then the glow again, flashing on and off like a strobe light!
Li’l Buddy slowly raises his hands to the mask.
In a slight jump cut to a medium shot of Li’l Buddy, he grabs the sides of his mask and squeezes, the mask collapsing in slightly as he does so. In the background, his mother laughs, unaware that something is wrong with her son and marveling at the exaggerated level of importance put on the repetitive commercial they had been ushered into the room to view.
In the script, Li’l Buddy continues to watch the commercial and pitches forward on the floor. Still, he continues to watch before his mother finally questions him and he rises, His hands up to the mask which is now melting away from his face! His eyes are two blood-red orbs and the skin around them is red, blistered and bursting before he pitches forward again!
The film handles this with some slight variations. After he grabs the mask, the shot cuts back to a straight on close up of the mask face. The mask has eroded, the paint and material melting and withering into something sickly and disturbed. He falls to the floor, still without any notice from his parents behind him, wrapped up in their own conversation whilst their son is under what they believe to be the all too reliable care of the flickering television set.
It’s here that the film cuts back to the monitor room. Cochran smiles in a close-up and Challis watches the monitor in horror. As the scene has progressed, Challis’ expression has transformed from somewhat wooden to deeply disturbed, wearing a look of dark understanding that alludes to the greater implications of what’s happening in “Test Room A”.
Back in the room, Li’l Buddy collapses, chunks of his hair visible through large breaks in the pumpkin mask, which now bears more stretches of pale foam rubber than the rich orange color it so recently displayed. Finally, Betty perks up and engages her son. Li’l Buddy lies on the ground, his hand convulsing before lying still. While the script moves quickly forward, the film hangs in limbo for a moment or two. Li’l Buddy’s parents sit on the couch surveying the situation, the dark reality of the situation barely able to poke through their persistent obliviousness, noting a sad truth about the average parental unit that will soon be corroborated on a nationwide scale when the broadcast airs that evening.
Li’l Buddy lies on the floor in a close-up, his mask torn at the mouth, his face still obscured. While the details about his eyes and skin aren’t represented on the frame as his face is completely obscured by the mask, the general thrust of what was written is horrifyingly realized onscreen.
And then, out of the mouth of the mask, a small, furry appendage. And then another. Until a spider slowly crawls out!
In the script, the creatures escaping from Li’l Buddy’s mouth are spaced out, separated by scene headers and underlined sentences in place to suggest blocking and editing priorities. Onscreen the boy beneath the decaying mask releases a chorus of loud chirping sounds before expelling mounds of insects onto the carpet around him. This is juxtaposed with close-ups of Buddy and Betty, wordlessly horrified, and Challis in the control room, continuing to echo their terror helplessly.
On the page, Betty is attacked by the initial spider as the eight-legged thing stings her, again and again as opposed to fainting as she does in the film. Only a spider, a snake, and a lizard are mentioned in the script and each is given a job to do, other than the lizard. Onscreen, so many insects are released that within seconds they cover the whole of the room. The carpet and furniture are speckled with small, black crawling things, distracting from the real threat of a slithering rattlesnake which too emerges from the gaping hole where the pumpkin mask’s gaping mouth used to sit.
While the script doesn’t go back to the control room before the conclusion of the scene, the film continues to cut back and forth, showing Challis as he closes his eyes, unable to watch. This continues as Buddy stumbles around the room, running from the multitude of snakes that now pepper the floor, before colliding with the rattlesnake which rears and bites, sending Buddy to the floor.
The snake has bitten into Buddy’s leg!
It holds on, it’s teeth sunk way into his flesh!
The scene in the script finishes with Buddy’s demise, but the film takes a moment to pull back and show the room littered with the unmoving bodies of Buddy’s family. The room is a tomb for the suburban family unit, a pleasantly dressed space now marred by rot, decay, and the creeping, crawling creatures that such places would rather attach to nightmares than real life. Meanwhile, Challis stares on in the control room, realization dawning as the men in suits push him away.
Buddy’s family would soon be everyone’s family, Challis’ own family, unless he acted fast. Betty’s observation about the finality of this particular Halloween would be much more than a bad joke.
THE BLOODY CONCLUSION
“Sequels, in general, were a fairly rare concept… but their condition was not a true sequel,” Tommy Lee Wallace said in the commentary track for Halloween 3: Season of the Witch, “this was supposed to be a yearly event, where every year you would do a new Halloween movie about the season. The first in a major anthology…”
Despite my friend’s dismissiveness, it was the strangeness of a middle of the pack sequel wholly unrelated to the franchise around it that hooked me. It was a curiosity I was never able to shake and one that all but ensured my affection when I eventually found my way to watching the movie at hand. While I understand a fan’s desire to return to the familiar when sitting down to watch a series follow up, I can’t help but think that the Halloween season is ripe for a franchise built around celebrating its ideas rather than any one specific story.
As it turns out, Debra Hill and John Carpenter had the same thought when they agreed to create a new entry in their prolific series. Stemming from a concept that Debra Hill came up with, screenwriter Nigel Kneale wrote a script that Tommy Lee Wallace later revised, crafting a Halloween tale where, according to the commentary, “witchcraft meets the computer age”. A love letter to the season, Halloween 3 was by design the first in a long intended series of spooky season outings.
While the film didn’t find its audience amongst a throng of movie-goers who felt cheated out of a new Michael Myers film, time has been kind to Halloween 3: Season of the Witch. Over the years, separated from its placement in the unending saga of the Shape, it has grown to become one of the Halloween movies of the season, an iconic representation of the magic, wonder, and horror ever-present in the jet black beating heart of All Hallows’ Eve.
There is little more representative of the film’s placement in the annals of Halloween history than the image of the boy wearing his bright orange pumpkin mask as he sits excitedly before the TV. It’s a scene that summarizes the threat of the movie and kicks the narrative into full gear heading into its back half.
“It was a little scary because that was a real rattlesnake,” Tommy Lee Wallace said in his commentary, “a poisonous creature on set, it made everybody nervous.” Real snakes aside, the scene also employed real insects, making for a messy, uncomfortable shooting space, but resulting in a final sequence that still chills to this day. Or, as Tommy Lee Wallace affectionately refers to it in his commentary, “horror porn”.
Halloween is a time for myth. Wonder. Impossible things. A time of creative exploration, indulgence and, of course, fear. It’s when we let in all of those things that we might normally shy away from. It’s kids wearing masks, rattlesnakes emerging from decaying jaws and, yes, a witch harnessing the power of Stonehenge itself.
I guess my pre-teen friend had trouble seeing value in all of that when he compared it to the exploits of Laurie Strode’s estranged brother, but, regardless, I’m grateful for even his less than stellar review. While it may not have primed me for an amazing experience, it planted a seed of curiosity that grew into a need to understand. To seek out this “joke” of a Halloween movie and get to the bottom of what it was attempting to do.
While it may not have succeeded in becoming the first of many seasonal expeditions into the horrific unknown, it has and always will offer another take on Halloween storytelling and a hint at what a franchise might’ve been in a more receptive world. Luckily for us Halloween fans, be it the season or the long-running series of films, while we didn’t get entry after seasonal entry, Halloween 3: Season of the Witch packs enough October 31st insanity to fill multiple features to capacity and then some.
I suppose it’s good my buddy didn’t go into too much detail when I really stop and think about it, I don’t think my young, horror-weary mind could’ve taken it.
(content warning: the following video has flashing lights and may pose a seizure risk for those with a history of epilepsy)
