Only a few more days to Halloween.. silver shamrock.
This YouTube video is a conglomeration of scenes from HALLOWEEN 3, the Season of the Witch.
I fondly remember old times gone by, gathering together with friends in a house of our choice, firing up the colortini, and watching the waves of Halloween flow through the air.
Actually, what we did was a high-school type version of MYSTERY SCIENCE THEATER 3000. We’d make comments and jokes, mock the film, and laugh throughout.. We did it for more than just Halloween 3, it was for many horror flicks. Our favorite character, as a group collectively, was Doctor Loomis. We coined a term “Loomicide” that would one day go on to become my late 1990s and early 2000s AOL screen name..
Oh, those good old days!
But in hindsight, dare I say, Halloween 3 is sort of a classic. I may have been met with scorn for that comment last century, but I think people are rediscovering the awfulness and also amazingnenss of Halloween 3.
Sure, the acting is terrible.. yes the scenery is awful.. and by all means, the flow of the movie is choppy and sloppy—but isn’t that what sort of makes it good in a sense?
However, think of it this way: Halloween 3 may have been the BEST of the entire series.
Sure, it didn’t feature the SHAPE, Michael Myers, donning the Shatner mask.. and no, it had no mentions of Laurie Strode. There was a scene though where the tied up main star was forced to watch the original Halloween…
There were also some other lessons to be learned from Halloween 3, some cautionary tales to remember..
For instance: Bad parenting. The child who gets his head eaten by snakes and worms had really awful parents, they just seemed to want to be rid of their child.. they were selfish and had little skill in containing their son, who ran wild without attention.
Another lesson: The overuse of television. In that time, the boob tube had antennas. Today, there’s no need with handheld devices and Twittering from all ends of the earth. Maybe, though, the fact that kids were glued to TV and almost slaves to it should be a lesson for all of us.
Something else: How powerful media is. And how many times influential hidden messages can be tucked into our shows. In this movie, kids were told to get home by 9 o’clock too put their Halloween masks on, and then eventually succumb to a massive amount of worms, snakes, bugs, and other things that would eat their brains.. Pretty scary if you minus out the acting of the movie. Maybe John Carpenter was actually trying to show that subliminal messages are alive and well, and that they could maybe make us do things against our will..? That or he just wanted to come up with an idea that was different.
I tried contacting the legend, John Carpenter, for this, but his associate said he was not able to comment on Halloween 3 at this time. Understandable. I think he’s a little busier than me at the moment.
So in that sense, we need to look to past interviews to see what exactly John Carpenter intended on doing in THE SEASON OF THE WITCH. It’s worth remember that Carpenter really didn’t want to do any more Michael Myers related films. They actually envisioned that a fourth Halloween would have been a ghost story. Instead, since H3 flopped, the fourth was the RETURN OF MICHAEL MYERS. And then there was a 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th, 10th, … bla bla bla.. John Carpenter told Aint it Cool news that he didn’t understand why fans of Halloween hated the third installment so much.. He said, “Hey, man, I don’t know. I like HALLOWEEN 3. I like the story, especially weird evil Irish industrialists. It’s hilarious.”
And it was hilarious .. It was awful. Wonderfully awful.
I go back now and think to myself that Debra Hill and John Carpenter touched on a number of themes that are actually quite scary. Yes, teenagers can mock it, just as I did with friends back in sultry summer night parties in the late 1990s… But maybe I have developed a renewed appreciation for this movie..
What could be scarier for a child that having your mom and dad buy you a mass produced mask because you were convinced by a commercial with an annoyingly catchy theme to do it.. and you jump on the bandwagon with millions of other American kids… and you wear your mask, at the same time as them, at 9pm on Halloween night.. and have your brain eaten by bugs?
Now that is scary for a kid.
