I love horror movie sequels, but I distinctly remember scoffing at the synopsis of Halloween III: Season of the Witch when I first heard it as a teen. No Michael Myers? Fuck that! I found out later this response wasn’t uncommon. In fact, that was the reaction most people had to Halloween III when it was released in 1982. Everyone — including 2005 me — wanted to see Laurie Strode evade Michael Myers all over again, and no one cared that John Carpenter and Debra Hill never intended to make another Myers film after that first one (and especially after the second one). Along with their friend and Halloween III director, Tommy Lee Wallace, they hoped Halloween would blossom into an anthology series in the vein of The Twilight Zone or Night Gallery. History shows us that never happened, but at least they got to attempt it this one time.
When I finally came around to Halloween III about a decade after I learned of its existence, I found myself feeling a bit like Carpenter and Hill, wishing Myers never became as iconic as he was then and is now. As much as I love slasher films — and I really do — and some of the Myers films, including the original, I’ll be the first to admit that the slashers that put their mockery of the perceived safety of American suburbia in the forefront just don’t have the same impact on me as they did when I was younger. Growing up watching horror films then becoming a horror fan completely transformed my appetite for them. Teenage me was content with just the simplicity and straightforwardness of the targets of some of my old favorites, but as I got older, I wanted to see different qualities — more artfulness, more nuanced prey, more absurdity, more humor, more pushback against the values our society holds so dear.
Technically, Halloween III isn’t a great film or even a great horror film. It’s ridiculous. It’s gross. It somehow commits the infraction of having practical effects that actually don’t age very well. Its tone is strange and hard to fully pin down. It seems like the work of someone who really wanted to make something original but couldn’t fully realize that vision. There are elements of science fiction and “body snatchers” stories, but they never fully gel together throughout. Our “hero” is hard to root for, and some might argue it’s too mean. But if we think of the original Halloween film as the foundation for what would eventually come, Halloween III constructs a new dwelling on it, making room for more complete criticism of American culture, the power-hungry members of the corporate ruling class and their destructive innovations, and our willingness to give ourselves over to the corporate overlords who quietly run this country in order to quench our insatiable thirst for stuff.
Halloween III begins in media res, the week before Halloween. In Northern California, a man (Al Berry) carrying a cheaply made jack o’lantern mask is running for his life from some highly quaffed men in gray suits. Lucky for him, he’s able to “kill” one of them before he comes up on a gas station attendant (Essex Smith) who’s able to get the terrified man to a nearby hospital. Across town that same night, we meet Dr. Challis (Tom Atkins) as he’s visiting his two children for the first time in a while at their mother’s house. The relationship between Dr. Challis and his ex-wife is pushed so far to the brink — partly because they’re divorced and partly because he’s an alcoholic and workaholic who barely sees his kids — she can barely be nice to him in front of the kids. He brought the kids masks to wear for Halloween, and the kids tell him their mom already got them Silver Shamrock masks “just like the commercial, you know”: “8 more days till Halloween, Halloween / 8 more days till Halloween, Halloween / 8 more days till Halloween, Halloween / Silver Shamrock!” He’s not there for long before he gets summoned by the hospital to come take care of the man with the jack o’lantern mask seemingly glued to his hands. Once there, Challis recognizes there’s something off about the man, but he’s not able to do anything about it before another highly quaffed man in a suit comes in and murders the man with the mask then immolates himself in his car in front of the hospital. When the murdered man’s daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin) visits the hospital the next day to identify his body, Challis doesn’t do much except treat it very routinely.
Then, suddenly, it’s five days later and Challis is drinking at the bar he frequents when Ellie shows up to thank him for coming to her father’s funeral. They get to talking about the weird circumstances of her father’s death, and Ellie tells him he ran into trouble somewhere between taking a trip to the Silver Shamrock Novelties factory in fictional Santa Mira and coming back to his shop in the same town as the hospital. They decide to make a trip there to investigate. As they’re making their way, they learn that Santa Mira — an entirely Irish culture themed town not far from where Challis and Ellie’s dad live — was revitalized by the owner and operator of Silver Shamrock, Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy), when he brought the factory into town. Everything is off about the town: People are weirdly suspicious of outsiders, there are surveillance cameras everywhere, and the town curfew begins at six o’clock every night. Regardless, Challis and Ellie stay the night in hopes of visiting the factory the next day.
When they finally do get to take a factory tour the next day, a series of realizations leads to Ellie being kidnapped that evening. Challis makes his way to the factory where he finds that all the men in suits who work at the factory are actually robots created by Cochran to do his bidding. Cochran’s robots eventually capture Challis, and Cochran explains that every Silver Shamrock mask contains a microchip with a piece of a rock from Stonehenge inside of it which gets activated by a special Silver Shamrock commercial and kills whoever is wearing the mask. Cochran then directs Challis’s attention to a video from a CCTV camera, and Challis watches as the family of three he met earlier that day is brought into a room with couches and TV. The child of the family wears one of the Silver Shamrock jack o’lantern masks as a special Silver Shamrock commercial plays. We don’t see exactly what happens to the kid’s head, but it’s very clear that the mask kills him instantly. As he dies, the mask releases an onslaught of snakes and bugs which target the kid’s parents and kill them right after.
Challis is taken away to a holding room where he’s tied down and forced to wear a Silver Shamrock mask. There, Cochran details his plans to bring back the ancient Celtic traditions of his people. He explains to Challis that on Samhain (the Irish version of Halloween), the hills would run red with the blood of children and animals as a sacrifice to their gods. Cochran wants to replicate that now in a more modern way. Horrified, Challis manages to maneuver his way out of the room, he finds Ellie, and they attempt to stop the broadcast of the Silver Shamrock commercial that will activate all the microchips by setting fire to Cochran, his robots, and the entire Silver Shamrock factory. As they drive away from Santa Mira, he realizes that nothing he did at the factory will stop the broadcast — he has to get in touch with the TV stations directly.
Unlike the slashers that precede it, Halloween III isn’t filled with jump scares, drawn out chase sequences, or even the same level of intimate ruthlessness in its violence. Even though it unravels rather rapidly, the horror here lies in the insidiousness of the mystery being uncovered, and that sense of dread hangs over the whole film. Cochran isn’t a serial killer on a one-night killing spree in his hometown. He’s a rich, sociopathic madman who’s figured out how to make his twisted dreams of Celtic “cultural renewal” come true by preying on one of America’s greatest weakness: our attraction to high-powered product campaigns with catchy jingles and our desire to please ourselves and our families with the cheap, plastic crap being sold to us through them.
In 1982, this might have seemed less relevant than it does in our current moment, and maybe it was. But if we consider the context in which the concept for the film was born, then Halloween III stands as a prescient warning for what was coming as a result of the disastrous decisions of Ronald Reagan’s administration. Some of Reagan’s very first actions as president were in favor of market deregulation and giving corporations and their leaders the right to do business with less government interference. One of the results of this was increased marketing directly to children. Prior to the early 1980s, there were strict regulations in place to make sure children were protected from the kinds of campaigns we see used by Silver Shamrock in the film. After Reagan and his administration came to power, those regulations were quickly diminished, and advertising for children exploded. Everything from Cabbage Patch Kids to cheap movie and TV tie-in toys from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Star Wars to Coca Cola were now being advertised directly to children in fun, catchy, and colorful commercials as they watched their Saturday morning cartoons.
As we see in Halloween III, the thing about direct-to-children advertising is that it’s also dependent on the parents’ readiness to fulfill their children’s desires. The adults are fooled by this kind of advertising just as easily. Silver Shamrock isn’t a new novelty brand, but it’s insinuated that not many people knew of their products before they started making these masks and paying to have that damn jingle played everywhere all the time. This creates a false intimacy with the product that helps ensure the parents will give in when the kids ask for those ridiculously cheap-looking masks without thinking too hard about it all. If everyone’s buying this shit, why shouldn’t they? Right?
The gullibility here doesn’t make Cochran any less evil. Like all horror films, he is identifiably the “bad guy” and the unsuspecting children and their parents are the victims of his madness. Herlihy’s portrayal of him isn’t over the top, because it doesn’t have to be. Once he you see him treating his robots as if they’re real people, talking about stealing a large piece of Stonehenge and reviving his understanding of the pagan traditions of his people, and killing an actual child and his family with glee, the cartoonishness of his villainy is apparent. It might seem counterintuitive for a CEO to kill off thousands of his consumers, but that’s just the start of the plan. When the mystery is finally revealed, you can easily begin to put the pieces of Cochran’s plan for world — or maybe just California — domination together. Yes, he’s going to kill everyone, but that’s only so he can turn them all into robots, robots that will become completely mindless consumers for whatever it is Cochran wants to sell them…forever. As it is in real life, the hope of Cochran’s incessant ad campaigns is to create a population of people obsessed with consumption who are easily pleased by inexpensively made bullshit. This is brought home even further earlier in the film when Challis encounters a homeless Santa Mira resident who lived there before Cochran came rolling into town. The guy explains to Challis that Cochran was never interested in employing the locals and insisted on bringing in his own “people.” Like the CEOs and members of the corporate ruling class of the U.S. today, Cochran’s intentions were never to make anyone’s life better or easier. He just wants them to keep buying whatever he’s selling — and it works. Because why wouldn’t it? It works in real life, too.
If we take a look at the world that has been created in the wake of Reagan’s administration, what we can see most clearly about our culture is exactly what is reflected back to us in Halloween III. We are living in the age of unrestrained capitalism and constant commercialization, and although it might seem like we are individuals with agency free of the kind of influence Silver Shamrock has in the film, that’s simply untrue. Everywhere we look, there are new reasons to stop carelessly creating and buying new things — the fast fashion graveyard in Chile, the gadget-fueled violence and genocide in the Congo, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, the e-waste poisoning our soil, the environmental impact of AI, etc. etc. — and yet we do not stop. Progress is marked by our ability to grow, grow, grow and buy, buy, buy. And it has taken us to a place where many people do not have the basic decency to avoid buying a new iPhone or to stand in solidarity with striking workers out of the fear of inconvenience. We’ve been told to spend and consume freely by people who exploit us every day, and what have we purchased? A fate not so different from the one of the test family in Halloween III.
Don’t worry, I’m not saying we’re all to blame here. As in the film itself, there is a very clear “bad guy”: the Cochrans of the world who orchestrated and continue to conduct this symphony of destruction, who make it so nothing we buy now will last longer than two years, who help throw us into a period of mass inflation just because they want to, who make us dependent on them for not only these things but also the mechanisms of survival in this system they’ve constructed. The Cochrans of the world don’t care whether we live or die, even if they don’t make it to see us do either. Their tricks are so old and so time-tested at this point that they know the system they’ve created will have no problem getting someone else to take our places. They are the villains in the real story that inspired Halloween III’s creation, but the film reminds us that a villain doesn’t become one without some level of participation from those who surround them.
Aside from the Silver Shamrock factory burning down, the rest of the ending of Halloween III is inconclusive. Challis is on the phone with the final TV channel he has to call to get the Silver Shamrock broadcast off the air. They’re not listening to him, they don’t understand why he’s telling them to pull the plug. The broadcast begins playing and he grows so desperate to get it to end that he just resorts to screaming “Stop it!” over and over again. We’re left with that final image of Challis, looking directly at the viewer, screaming “Stop it!” at us.
HORROR IS SO GAY is Autostraddle’s annual celebration of queer horror.
