Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) | 50 Days of Horror, Day 48

Imagine being a horror fan in 1982. You've survived Halloween and Halloween II, you know the rules, you're ready for another night with the Shape, and then Halloween III opens with a weird mood of synthesizers, a dying man clutching a mask, and no Michael Myers anywhere. You can see why people felt betrayed. And you can see, forty-some years later, why the film got its second life. It's the only Halloween movie that doesn't feature Michael Myers, and it might be the one that best captures what October actually feels like.

The idea behind it was bigger than one film. John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who produced, reportedly saw the series as a potential Halloween-themed anthology, with each installment telling a new story, with new characters, on or around the same holiday. Tommy Lee Wallace, who made this one as his first film as both writer and director, has said this was meant to be the first of several. Audiences didn't bite, and Michael Myers didn't return until Halloween 4 in 1988. But the one anthology entry we got is a gloriously weird thing.

The story follows Dr. Dan Challis, played by Tom Atkins with a worn-out, rumpled charm that makes him feel like a man who's seen too many double shifts. After a patient arrives in his hospital clutching a mask and is murdered, Challis teams up with Ellie Grimbridge, played by Stacey Nelkin, to track the trail to Silver Shamrock Novelties, a toy company based in the small town of Santa Mira, California. The company's owner, Conal Cochran, played with silky menace by Dan O'Herlihy, has a plan for Halloween night that involves children, a television commercial, and a fragment of Stonehenge. I'll leave the rest for you to discover, though I'll say it involves microchips, masks, and a level of occult corporate scheming that only the early eighties could have produced.

That's the secret to the film's charm. It feels like a collision of science fiction, folk horror, and a paranoid thriller, and it commits completely. One of the producers' smartest moves was hiring British science fiction writer Nigel Kneale, best known for the Quatermass stories, to write the original screenplay, largely because Carpenter admired his work. Kneale has said his script avoided "horror for horror's sake," and that he asked to be removed from the credits after Wallace revised it, claiming distributor Dino De Laurentiis wanted more gore. That's Kneale's side of the story, and it's worth taking with a grain of salt, but it explains why the film feels like it's pulling in two directions at once.

The masks are practically characters of their own. Don Post Studios made the latex masks: a glow-in-the-dark skull, a lime-green witch, and an orange jack-o'-lantern, with the first two adapted from existing Post designs and the third made for this film. Post reportedly mass-produced them at $25 each afterward. Most of the filming took place in Loleta, California, where a local milk bottling plant stood in for the Silver Shamrock factory. And then there's the sound. John Carpenter and Alan Howarth built the score from synthesizers rather than a symphonic orchestra, replacing the original piano theme and designing it partly to deliver "false startles."

And of course, there's the jingle. The Silver Shamrock commercial counts down the days to Halloween using a public-domain nursery rhyme, and it's one of those earworms that you can't un-hear. It's part advertisement, part curse, and it works because it's so cheerful. It's honestly one of the scariest things in the film, which is exactly the joke.

The box office told a mixed story. It earned about $14.4 million in the U.S., which was a profit but also the poorest showing for the series up to that point, and most critics were negative. The budget is reported differently depending on the source, at either $2.5 million or $4.6 million. Rotten Tomatoes sat at a modest 37 percent at the time one source recorded it, though the film's reputation has since changed from "betrayal" to "cult classic." Over time, people stopped judging it as a Michael Myers movie and started seeing it as a strange, stylish, and bleak little October film.

If you've been following this countdown, you'll know where it fits. It's a tonal reset after the long run of sequels and remakes, like Halloween 5 or Halloween Ends, and it shows the same franchise had room to do something completely different.

So here's what I'm curious about. Halloween III bet that a holiday could be a horror story on its own, no slasher required. If the anthology had worked, and every year brought a new Halloween story, which strange idea would you have wanted to see next?

Part of the 50 Days of Horror series.