Good mourning 💀

All ghoul things must come to an end. The truth is I’m running a little late publishing this, but based on the traditions of Allhallowtide, Samhain, Día de los Muertos, etc., I think we can safely say I’m actually right on time with Halloween celebrations. So let’s keep this spooky train rolling!

Speaking of traditions, Terence Towles Canote writes about the Halloween scene in Meet Me in St. Louis, which depicts how the holiday was celebrated back in 1903 all while being filmed at a time (1944) when modern customs like trick-or-treating were only just starting to go mainstream in America.

A brief intermission 🍿

I’ve linked to animator Lee Hardcastle’s work a few times over the years and this year I’m featuring his short film from 2011 titled Pingu's The Thing (aka. Thingu). As I’m sure you can infer, it’s a minute-long recreation of John Carpenter’s The Thing starring Pingu, the Swiss-German children’s cartoon character, all in gory claymation. Yes, there is a spider-head.

Now watch this 👀

If you haven’t caught on by now, I’ve been slowly diving into the Halloween films sequentially, once a year, in an ongoing series titled “A shape without form.” So far we’ve touched on:

• The original Halloween, the story of Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis), an innocent girl who happens to survive Michael Myers’s random killing spree on “the night he came home,” and

• Halloween II, which picks up right after the ending of the first film, focusing on the aftermath.

The first is a bona fide classic, while the sequel is a worthy though flawed followup.

These are indie films that grapple with the breakdown of community. They have thought and empathy. As I previously wrote:

This is what I think is the true horror of “Halloweens I and II.” Not the big scary man, but the obliviousness, the indifference, the ineptitude, and the cowardice of the entire town. It’s easier to lock your door and draw the blinds than it is to help someone in need. It’s an intangible force of bullshit, a monolith to selfishness, something you can see and recognize, but is far too big to wrap your mind around. Michael Myers may be called The Shape, but the true horror of these films is a shape without form.

So naturally the next film in this successful storyline is about a company that manufactures Halloween masks for children that somehow use computer chips to harness ancient Celtic magic to melt their faces off.

It should probably be said that, just as there is no Michael Myers in what you’d think is a Michael Myers movie, there are also no witches in the movie titled Halloween III: Season of the Witch.

It’s a silly little movie with silly little moments, panned by critics at the time but has somehow gained a cult following in recent years. I’m not even sure how much more of the plot I need to say beyond what’s already been said, so I’ll just say it again to really hammer things home: it’s about a company that manufactures Halloween masks for children that somehow use computer chips to harness ancient Celtic magic to melt their faces off.

It starts off with another silent stalker, except this time it’s some corporate drone dressed in a business suit. He eventually catches his prey — a desperate, sweaty man who clearly holds a big secret — and crushes his skull with his bare hands. Then he lights himself on fire like some sort of finance bro seppuku.

Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins, The Rockford Files) is left to sift through the aftermath and eventually gets swept up in a conspiracy alongside the victim’s daughter, Ellie (Stacey Nelkin). One of many absurd moments is when her father’s corpse is not even cold yet but she gives a little smirk and asks, “Where do you want to sleep, Dr. Challis?” At one point in bed he asks her how old she is. Fun fact from Stacey Nelkin’s Wikipedia entry:

According to Nelkin, Woody Allen’s film Manhattan (1979) was based on her romantic relationship with the director, whom she met when she was 16 on the set of Annie Hall. Her bit part in that film ended up being cut, and their relationship began when she was 17 years old and a student at New York’s Stuyvesant High School, and Allen was 42. Allen has said that they dated for a time, but that Nelkin was not underage.

So anyways a fun bit in the film is when Dr. Challis throws one of the Halloween masks onto a surveillance camera to try to block it out, but it has this neat effect of briefly making all of us Michael Myers as we see the camera’s perspective through the mask on a TV screen. You could probably make some kind of argument about masks throughout the Halloween series, like how the killer hides behind a mask in the first two films but this time it’s the victims who wear masks, their doom brought upon them by the masks themselves.

In fact these movies take place in entirely different universes. It’s established in this one that Halloween is just a movie being advertised on TV; Michael Myers is just a fictional character. Later on Dr. Challis is tied up and forced to watch Halloween, a much better movie than what he’s currently in unfortunately.

But maybe I’m being a bit unfair. Like I said it’s a silly fun movie and it’s got great special effects at times, plus classic John Carpenter music (he doesn’t return to write or direct this time, only produce). And though it was a failure commercially and critically, it still stands as a beacon of what could have been, an alternate universe I would have preferred. If you remember from last year, I mentioned how Carpenter didn’t even want to make a second installment, let alone a third. He felt the original was a haunting, self-contained story. With this entry, he wanted to transition Halloween to an annual anthology series showcasing different stories, actors, and filmmakers. That all fell apart when Season of the Witch bombed. Oh, what could have been…

But what I appreciate the most is that it still continues the themes of the first two films, touching on that community breakdown we’ve witnessed again and again. Set in a company town blanketed with surveillance cameras, it’s a prescient look into our own present. In this case the townsfolk willfully look away or even actively participate; it’s actually the natural progression from the previous films. Paranoia and self-interest are the name of the game here as they are ruled under the iron fists of the aforementioned corporate drones.

We encounter a few more of those guys throughout the movie and they all clearly possess some sort of superhuman strength; at one point they pull a man’s head clean off. But they’re always silent, always emotionless, dead-eyed and obedient in service to some higher authority. I can’t help but relate these town dynamics to recent examples of cowardice in the real world.

** cough Washington Post **

** cough cough Los Angeles Times **

As Jonathan V. Last writes in that piece:

One of Timothy Snyder’s rules for resisting authoritarians is that “most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given.” People surrender preemptively much more often than you might expect.

Thank god we have an alcoholic doctor advocating for the children’s right to not have their faces melted off by ancient Celtic sci-fi evil.

Happy Halloween! 🎃