I’m on a hunt for the scariest movies of all time! I’ll be looking at films of any era, from any country, and then reviewing them based solely on how terrifying they are.

If you have a suggestion for a horror movie, please let me know on Twitter.

Please be advised, spoilers may lie ahead!!

Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982)

Director: Tommy Lee Wallace

Starring: Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin

Generally speaking, horror movies are weird. The notion that we actively seek out content intended to shock or distress us goes against the base survival instincts we possess as human beings.

Even with this fact in mind, Halloween III: Season of the Witch is weirder, still. Despite carrying a title that suggests it will continue the legacy of the dreaded Michael Myers, it is a completely unrelated tale that focuses on witchcraft and corporate misdeeds. It does take place around Halloween season itself, so it’s not entirely misleading. But it’s still a bizarre fucking choice, regardless.

Apparently, it was the belief of series creators John Carpenter and Debra Hall that the franchise could transition into an anthology of sorts, where each entry was a self-contained scary story not unlike the kind told around a campfire. It’s a sound idea in theory, but it really had to be the second movie for it to work; we had already been conditioned to anticipate Michael, and anything less than that would be seen as a betrayal of our expectations.

It didn’t pan out commercially, so the concept was hastily scrapped, leaving Halloween III as a curious outlier. But it still has the pedigree and the backing of the people who made this franchise legendary, so surely it’s a worthy successor to the bloodthirsty Halloween throne, right?

…Right?

Season of the Witch takes place in a sleepy region of Northern California, where a womanising sleaze-bag of a doctor, Daniel Challis (Atkins), receives a patient one evening in late October. The man is clutching a Halloween mask in his grasp, making outlandish claims about some wicked forces that want everyone dead.

Unfortunately for the beleaguered fellow, hospital security is nonexistent and the halls are barren, leaving him defenceless as those very forces arrive in his room to finish him off. Damned limited budget, just a few extras could have saved his life!!

When the man’s daughter Ellie (Nelkin) comes the next day to identify the body, she implores Dr. Challis to join her on an investigation to track down her father’s killers. What takes place from there runs the gamut of emotions from bewilderment to repulsion. In the echelons of B-movies, this one can be considered a B-.

It becomes apparent early on that we are not going to approach the rarefied air of the slasher classics, with many of the villains being made up of emotionless, suited thugs. Unless you owe money, suited men are just not frightening in the slightest.

Worse still, the “musical” score from Carpenter and Alan Howarth is a crippling misfire. It consists chiefly of off-key stings from a synthesiser, including a particular note whenever the suited antagonists appear on-screen. There is a time and place for the synthesiser in the horror genre, with its unnatural tones making for appropriate accoutrements to an unnatural threat — such as when a cold, hulking Arnold Schwarzenegger is methodically stalking Sarah Connor in the Terminator.

Here, however, it is juvenile and distracting, removing you entirely from whatever emotion you were supposed to have at the time. It’s like an octogenarian playing the organ for the first time at a little league baseball game.

When you aren’t being accosted with these high-pitched squeaks, you’ll likely be treated to a mind-numbing (yet somehow rather catchy) jingle from the Silver Shamrock Novelties commercials constantly playing in the background. These ads count down the days until Halloween, and come courtesy of the leading supplier — or perhaps, from what we see, the only supplier — of Halloween masks in America.

Daniel and Ellie’s investigation takes them to the home of Silver Shamrock, a timelocked burgh where all of the residents are very evil and very Irish. It’s ridiculous, of course, but so much fun for all the wrong reasons.

Here, they meet the company’s founder, a legendary prankster named Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy, who delightfully chews the set in every single moment he’s on-screen). He seems to run the town as well, and if you’ll pardon the spoilers, he has a terrible surprise planned for Halloween night.

What is this surprise? It’s a little hard to distinguish, actually, but as near as I could tell, he intends to murder children who wear his merchandise by filling their heads with bugs and snakes. When pressed for a reason, he chides whether he even needs one, before deciding that he’s merely playing the ultimate prank on the children.

I mean, sure? It’s a pretty ambitious prank, though I would have to believe it’d be incredibly bad for business.

I don’t often go into such detail about the storyline in this column, but I think it’s important if you want to understand how scary Season of the Witch is; which is to say, not at all. Not only does it stray away from the mystique of Michael Myers, it downright flees in the other direction before sitting down to tell the narrative equivalent of a kid quietly eating glue in the corner.

Nothing about this film has presence beyond ironic hilarity, whether it’s the plot, the performances, or even the payoff. In order to boost the body count, the protagonists come across various other folks staying at the same hotel who are also caught up in the Silver Shamrock debauchery. They can only be described as wacky, including a salesman and his family — who evoke airs of a cheap Honeymooners ripoff — or the hapless Marge Guttman (Garn Stephens). Marge’s exposition-laden introduction defies belief, and it is very apparent that she will not be surviving this movie for long.

Putting the lunacy of its premise aside, where Season of the Witch under-delivers most, is with the stinginess of its brutality. One promising death via a nasty-looking drill is delivered entirely out of our view, and because of the masks, you don’t really get a good look at the results of Silver Shamrock’s masterplan. It might be jarring to some to see a glassy-eyed corpse with a rattlesnake slithering out of its mouth, but I want all of those nasty details before my sick, sick eyes.

At the very least, old Marge Guttman is an MVP in this department, as she gets her face obliterated by a laser beam. It looks gnarly as fuck, and once again, it is surreal and hilarious. Thanks for taking one for the team, Marge.

Alas, the visual of her dismantled features is the closest Season of the Witch ever gets to achieving scariness, as the remainder never ventures any further beyond pure silliness. From a filmmaking standpoint, this movie falls short of even the low bar set by Pet Sematary Two. And yet, I had a wonderful time enjoying this fever dream of cinema, which is a lot more than I could say for motherfucking Resident Evil: Extinction.

Were it not for the Halloween branding — which proves a detriment more than anything else — this could have been the template for a lot of ludicrous fun, and it’s a shame that the anthology idea was scrapped. At the very least, Season of the Witch holds everlasting cult status, with its ability to bemuse across the generations.

I recommend giving it a watch, in the hope you’ll have as many giggles as I did. And remember, it’s only eight more days ’til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween…

Final Verdict

As long as you know what you’re in for, you’ll surely be able to stir some amusement from the farcical events transpiring in Season of the Witch. It’s achieved cult status among Halloween fans as a loveable black sheep, offering a change of pace and little else to the overarching franchise.

It’s about as scary as a Twilight Zone episode, except without the biting wit or satirical message. Unless this legitimately was intended to be satire, in which case the prank was truly on me.