Halloween III: Season of the Witch
This week the From Below Microcinema presents *Halloween III: Season of the Witch *(1982) on Thursday, October 3, at 7 pm.
Here is the link to reserve a seat. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’re starting the movie at 7:10!
There isn’t any other movie we could possibly have chosen to inaugurate the first October in the From Below than this one. Á la our debut feature screening, *Streets of Fire *(1984), the discovery and establishment of our mutual appreciation for *Halloween III *is another ur-ingredient in the glue of the friendships that stick the From Below to existence.
A radical departure from the Michael Myers slasher character of *Halloween *(1978) and *Halloween **II (1981), *this third installment is a supernatural thriller about a sinister, small-town Halloween mask corporation that has harnessed ancient powers for their evil Halloween plans. The bonkers plot will of course carry you along, but the vibrancy of the film really lives in the light and sound. The pulsing, beeping, moody synth soundtrack laid down by Alan Howarth and John Carpenter gets coupled with the singularly most effective commercial jingle in cinema history. It’s an autumnal mystery, diving into the low-boiling anticipatory fervor in the lead up to Halloween, lit with crisp, dying Fall daytime light juxtaposed with headlights and the glows of TV screens at night. It’s a fantastic film that’s a ripping time with a crowd, and it might even be a profound inquiry into the transformative nature of masks and masking, the role of the mask as an enduring element of the horror genre, a self-reflective critique of the franchise itself through the symbol of the commodified mask, or a satire of moral hand-wringing over the deleterious effects of TV and genre films. *Halloween III *offers a final wistful peek into a lost, beautiful world where the franchise was brave enough to bloom into an anthology of annual installments of loosely Halloween related hallucinations.