31 Days, 31 Screams: A New Beginning- Day 31 (Halloween III: Season Of The Witch)

Boo.

WOOOOOO! HAPPY HALLOWEEN! The night of terror, of danger, of children in masks asking for your candy! With equal parts fun size potato chips and mini Chips Ahoy, I did my part to live the little ghosts and goblins their treats. I saw one kid as a Mario with a like inflatable Yoshi around his torso. Adorable. Very few actual masks though. The spooky kind, not the safety kind, I mean. This is probably for the best since according to Halloween III a spooky mask will MELT YOUR FUCKING FACE INTO BUGS AND SNAKES. Maybe I didn't ease you into that one gracefully enough. We're finishing a journey that lasted two years on the blog. In 2018 I had to watch a Halloween movie, but this wasn't available digitally and the 2018 Halloween movie had like... just come out in theaters that I'm not near. I had to settle on Halloween 4, of all things. 2019 let me watch the previous year's Halloween film, and it was pretty good. For 2020, a year which went to hell in such a way that the sequel to the 2018 Halloween film has been delayed to next year? I finally bit the bullet and ordered a Blu-Ray of this sucker. Here, at long last to close out the spooky marathon... is Halloween III.

Oh, to live in a universe where this idea took off. Turning Halloween into an unpredictable genre-changing horror anthology with every entry. You can almost see how it would have worked. Horror at the core, but different flavors every time. Like Final Fantasy. What should have been the Final Fantasy VII of movies instead is the Zelda II of movies. That analogy is going to fly right over the head of anyone without intimate knowledge of old video games. I blame Halloween 2 for immediately following up on the Michael Myers stuff. Really I blame Halloween 2 for a lot. Maybe next year we'll tackle that sucker and take it down once and for all. Anyway, that left poor Halloween III going the anthology route without any ties to Michael Myers. Then Halloween lay dormant for half a decade, and they started right back up with Michael Myers slashing the teen girls and... we're still here. Oh, what could have been. The Final Fantasy VII analogy is still apt, though. Not in a "this is the greatest movie of all time" sense, but in tone and theme. VII departed from the fantasy trappings to go in a futurist techno-fantasy setting. That's Halloween III.

Hell, the opening even mixes the two. Scanlines over the credits forming the image of a pumpkin. Technology circa 1982 melded with horror. Whereas the last two Halloween movies were slashers, Halloween III meshes sci-fi with the occult to create a techno-thriller mystery. Instead of mask-wearing knife guys lurking in the dark, we have men in suits with incredible strength who can snap your skull in half or rip your head off with their bare hands. They're rather like Myers in that they never talk and are emotionles killers, but the effect is still jarring. The central mystery of the film is just what the hell is up with this Halloween mask factory in this creepy town. Shit clearly isn't right, as bums are getting their heads ripped off and a woman's face melts when she pokes a microchip with a hairpin. I can only imagine how Halloween III hits when you don't know what in the fuck it's leading to. If you're one of those people, for the love of god stop reading me and fire up the movie. Don't let me ruin it for you, I'd love to hear your reaction to going into this sucker blind. For the rest of you, now I'm going to blab about the antagonist's grand plan.

Technology and magic, melded together in a dark pagan ritual of vast proportions. Our boy Cochran runs the mask factory, and he's also some sort of paganist looking to serve the power of Samhain. According to him the planets are in alignment for another mass sacrifice, and so his grand scheme. He's stolen a piece of Stonehenge, put little chunks of it in microchips, affixed them to his masks, and then hyped the utter shit out of the masks via a marketing campaign. HEY KIDS, PUT ON YOUR MASKS AND WATCH THE TV AT 9 FOR A BIG GIVEAWAY! Cochran got his start in the business by making prank toys and other things, and this is the ultimate "trick" in trick or treat. Broadcasting a signal on TV at 9 on the dot that will activate the microchips in the mask and melt the head of any maskwearers watching, turning their heads into bugs and snakes and shit. We get to see this shit happen to some poor kid they test it on, who also happens to be the son of the best mask salesman in the country. Good job making me money, Buddy, here's your bonus! I TURNED YOUR SON'S HEAD INTO RATTLESNAKES! JOKE'S ON YOU! It's absolutely ghoulish, a gonzo mix of high-tech and pagan magic. Speaking of high-tech, those guys who rip people's heads off are super-advanced robots. A totally wild twist, but a welcome one in fitting with the movie's weird themes.

The climax starts in a wild way, with our hero tied up and forced to watch TV with his mask on... and what's on the TV before the commercial? It's Halloween. The original movie. It's fictional in this world, but it's so odd to hear the ominous score for Halloween as Laurie walks to a crime scene... in a totally different tense scene in another movie. Our hero gets out, scattering those death microchips everywhere and knocking out all the robots. This also creates an energy circle, not unlike a magic circle, all around a ring of computers. Literally the theme of the movie plopped right there in front of your eyes. The ending itself is an ambiguous bleak thing that doesn't let you know if the death broadcast which will melt the heads of every kid in America got through or not. I like the ambiguity. It's just vague enough to make you question, just intriguing enough to make you theorize. I slept on this movie a little when I first saw it, but I have to say it grew on me more rewatching it for this. It should have done better. Who knows what kind of gonzo genres and mashups Halloween could have gone in? Ah well. It did what it did, and it exists as its own historical curiosity. So, too, does this marathon. It's done. The long dark November is ahead, and more writing beckons. Not just NaNoWriMo, but Symphogear. I've got a lot of cooking ahead of me. You, though? You all have a good Halloween. Be seeing you when I see you.