October 31: Halloween III on the Big Screen

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It’s early on Halloween for me to feel tired, but I do! I’ve been doing a lot of Halloween things. Most of my work day was Halloweenies, which was way busier than I was expecting, given it was a Friday, and then I left at noon to get a coffee and do some notebook writing.

Then I went to see Halloween III: Season of the Witch where it was playing at one of the theaters. I was sort of uncertain about going but I’m glad I did! The movie held up very well and it was worth seeing on a big screen.

I think I actually liked it more than I did the first time… I really didn’t know what I was watching then and I only really started to appreciate it after I’d watched the whole thing and could sort of think of it as a whole.

It does start a bit slow, also. I don’t think it really captures the attention until the characters get to the company town. Also omg that romance was shoe-horned! I’m all for a slow burn with sexual tension but there’s no slow burn or sexual tension. They’re just being normal people who’ve barely met and are on a quest together and then all of a sudden they’re like ‘only one bed? Let’s fuck.’ Plus, I’m not, like, bothered by age gaps, but that dialogue explicitly points this one out strikes me as weird. We really didn’t have to go that route at all!

A small complaint though.

This movie is so fucked up and it’s so weird. And honestly it does things a lot of horror even now won’t do–I mean targeting kids in particular.

The jump scares, not that there are many, hit way harder on the big screen. The misfire scene in particular made me literally jump. I also think seeing the hypnosis stuff, especially right after the credits but also at the end, in the theater hits different. Made me feel a bit more like a target.

I kept thinking, and I know I thought this the last time too but it was on my mind again because of that review I read that talked about Blumhouse expressing interest in rebooting it, about what this movie would look like set in 2025. Because its concerns with commercialism and persistent advertising have only been proven extremely well-founded with the passage of time. I mean an annoying jingle on the TV or radio that comes on a lot is one thing. But a popup that you can’t get rid of on your phone? A prevalent ad when you carry an Ad Showing Machine in your pocket at all times? And then beyond that, there is the ever-present surveillance of the town, and the anxiety of fairly new (or utterly science-fictional) technology being leveraged and combined with magic and mysticism to create entirely new, violent, large scale horrors, also feels… relevant. The town itself was particularly terrifying to me this time: it’s open and empty but has a claustrophobia about it, in the utter domination of the factory, the surveillance (again), the curfew, the powerful and silent and literally inhuman enforcers, the inability to connect to the outside world, and, of course, the inability to leave. Something something fascism.

I also think a lot more could be done with surveillance, in a 2020s context. And it was interesting to me that the surveillance is important to keeping the town under the villain’s control, but it isn’t really important to his master plan? Because again I think the smart phone (and the Alexa, and the ring cam, and and and) would make nefarious surveillance very easy to incorporate now, but–perhaps this is a dumb question–for what purpose?

I don’t at all hate his stated villainous purpose, I actually kind of love it, but I was thinking that another way of playing out the evil plan would be that he does actually want national domination: create a tragedy, then fill the power vacuum that arises in the aftermath of grief and anger. But also somehow still witchcraft and human sacrifice, too.

The ending still totally fucks, of course.

Anyway, I’m tired and hungry (and unwashed :/ ) so I don’t know if any of this is coherent, but–just a few thoughts anyway.