Over at my place of business you may (or should) have read Emmalea Russo’s essay on Halloween Ends and the good and the bad of the greater Halloween franchise. It is well worth your time on its own, but I’d like to reference it here to fill you, who are clearly still in need of Halloween content this deep into November, in on a significant but understandable omission in the piece: Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Halloween III is a relatively controversial entry in the franchise for two reasons. First because it ditched the Michael Myers plot line completely, as part of a wider concept that failed then but which would certainly have flown high today on any streaming service: a feature-length anthology series. And second because it also ditched the original, and very likely more sophisticated, script by Nigel Kneale (of Quatermass fame) in favor of something schlockier, and what one reviewer described as being “anti-children, anti-capitalism, anti-television, and anti-Irish all at the same time.”
The film made a profit when it was released forty years ago, but it has since slipped into a legacy somewhere between forgotten curiosity and willful cultural misfire. Any film with such an ambiguous fortune will have its dogged defenders howling from the depths of a wider indifference. Without having to stoop to howling from any for sort of depth, I still count myself as a sympathizer; indeed, an admirer.
The plot of Halloween III is roughly this: Tom Atkins plays a divorced, borderline-alcoholic ER doctor who takes in a patient clutching a Halloween mask for dear life. When the patient ends up dead and his killer self-immolates, he and the deceased’s daughter (Stacey Nelkin) conduct an investigation on their own that leads to a rural California town built around a Halloween mask manufacturer Silver Shamrock, (the extremely annoying commercials for which are a constant refrain in the film), populated entirely of Irish people, and protected by well-concealed androids with superhuman capacities. The town is overseen by Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy), the gregarious Cork-accented factory owner, and apparent master of the practical joke, who seems to have escaped from the darker corners of Roald Dahl’s nightmares.
Compounding the already wild premise is the revelation that Cochran is a sorcerer of the ancient Celtic mold who managed to steal a whole chunk of Stonehenge. He extracts supernaturally charged particles from the stone and puts them into microchips attached to the otherwise unremarkable masks. When mask-wearing children watch an especially mesmeric version of the Silver Shamrock commercial, the chip goes into effect, killing the wearer—or if we’re going to be PC about it, “sacrificing” them. If that doesn’t seem like sound business practice, it’s all part of the plan, you see.
“You don't really know much about Halloween,” Cochran villainously opens. “You thought no further than the strange custom of having your children wear masks and go out begging for candy.”
It was the start of the year in our old Celtic lands. … The barriers would be down, you see, between the real and the unreal, and the dead might be looking in ... to sit by our fires of turf. Halloween ... the festival of Samhain! The last great one took place three thousand years ago, when the hills ran red with the blood of animals and children.
“To us,” he adds, “it was a way of controlling our environment. It’s not so different now.”
Okay, so Halloween III isn’t going to win any accolades for cultural sensitivity. I doubt ancient Celts sacrificed children any more than they torched virgins in giant wicker concoctions. Certainly the Romans, Glenn Danzig, and even a smattering of Gaelic scholars were always more than happy to make those claims for their own reasons. Even so, I hardly see how this film is more offensive than performative binge-drinking, runic tramp stamps, IRA idolatry, Metallica’s cover of “Whiskey in a Jar,” U2 hacking everyone’s iPod, or the city of Boston.
I didn’t think much of it for years and only watched it within the last one. As it turns out it is one of those films I can rewatch in responsible intervals; easily enough done as Halloween III streams intermittently. And there are actually a few perfectly conventional ways in which the film distinguishes itself within horror, to the extent that it might have fared better in the ensuing four decades if there was no Halloween connection at all. It is well paced, and attentive to character development in a way that the other Halloween films have not been. Its frightening imagery relies on surreal special effects rather than on gore and mutilation and remain effective even now.
But the film’s greatest asset is O’Herlihy, who makes the most of the material (which he didn’t much care for) and plays his antagonist role like the most infernally tuned organ, going easily from sinisterly comic to comically sinister to sometimes just sinister, as above. Moreover, the “anti-Irish” qualities of the film have their own worth.
A neat quirk of the Celtosphere is how even the crudest stereotype accentuates the unique spirit of each culture, surviving successive waves of outwardly imposed civilization. The Welsh have a fine accent to match their childlike lunacy flights of fancy. The Scottish have a grating accent to match their poetic self-loathing self-awareness. The Cornish exist. The Plain People of Ireland are exceptional, though, for having quite a few vulgar characteristics, though the one Halloween III hits on is their profound, depthless capacity for grudges memory.
Think about it: where else on earth does anyone even remotely remember let alone care all the much about Oliver Cromwell? And who but the Irish would chant “Lizzy’s in a box” at football matches before the body of the most inconsequential British Monarch in recent memory, at least to all things Ireland-related, was even cold? You may also apply this mindset to some of Ireland’s confirmed masters: Flann O’Brien’s and James Joyce’s art were driven by it; even partly or wholly Anglo-Irishmen like Burke, Swift, and Hubert Butler acquired the genius for taking things well beyond the point of reasonable dispute. Burke with his fruitless, multiyear Warren Hastings impeachment, Butler with the Croatian puppet fascists and the Irish Catholic hierarchy that made excuses for them, and Swift with too many things and people to count.
Sure, many of you could say that Ireland has, for the most part, moved on and more or less caught up with the rest of civilization, having thrown off the shackles of orthodoxy and repression in favor of a kind of EU model-studenthood. (An achievement Scotland doubtlessly looks down on with iron-melting envy.) And I get it. I was awake for most of Normal People; I’m not an idiot. But you must also admit that a great portion of Halloween III’s power rests in elevating Eire’s art of the eternal grievance to new and culturally appropriate levels of imaginative power.
Cochran is embittered at the denigration of his ancient heritage. Like anyone with a long-festering chip on their shoulder, he takes it out on the least-deserving people. Though the grievance has merit. Halloween was introduced into the United States with mass Irish immigration resulting from British technocrats turning their westward neighbors into Malthusian guinea pigs. It is tempting to consider what could have turned out if an empire decided, this one time, not to have behaved so imperiously. Many of us, myself included, would either not exist or exist in a very different manner. Most of the diaspora would be diverted perhaps to Canada or Australia in more typical, reduced numbers. The Irish impression in the United States would emanate instead from the perpetually clenched sphincters of Ulster Protestant descendants like John C. Calhoun and Andrew Jackson. They will be concentrated in the rustic regions rather than in the cities. The Civil War would have erupted five years earlier and lasted 20 years longer. Meanwhile, October 31 and November 1 will be calendar dates signified by exuberant yet tactful street processions of Episcopal parishes across the nation absolutely nothing.
But history turned out otherwise. And Cochran’s solution to that history combines a bit of ancient druidic sorcery and a whole lot of modern R&D, the result being something approaching Hibernofuturism, about as close to Black Panther as we are likely to get. His “joke on the children'' has all the marks of Irish excellence: at once brilliant beyond the measurable human scope and well past the point of usefulness, but pitch-black in its mordancy.
So while Halloween III may not be very considerate toward Real Irish people, it is a monument to the Irish-American in a morbid but very substantial way. It is in a similar vein as the wider Catholic American1 backlash against Sinéad O’Connor in 1992: a testament to our demonstrable progress from bad guests in a hostile land to a collective social force. And in refusing to leave polite society’s couch, we’ve cultivated a special center of influence: Halloween. I’ll never change my mind on this no matter how many John F., Bobby, and Rosemary Kennedy commemorative plates you throw at me. Nothing else has made so irreparable an indentation on our cultural legacy in this country as this most bastardized and polarizing yet impish and delightful holiday. Cochran was right, in a spiritual sense, to be so averse to it. It is my our rightful possession and I we carry it always with me us like a participant’s ribbon granted by the firmament while paying no heed whatever to the pedantry of calendars. Halloween goes on even after every dumb yard skeleton comes down and after the streets are riddled with pumpkin corpses like a village in Come and See. The Halloween spirit perpetuates even as the Spirit Halloween recedes into its cyclical oblivion. And the closest end date available, for those so concerned, is “no time soon.”
Happy Halloween, until further notice.
Though it seemed to be Italian Catholics—Madonna, Camille Paglia, and Joe Pesci against and Bob Guccione, Jr. in favor—who made up the most vocal participants. My highly qualified knowledge leads me to assume most Irish-Americans at the time nodded solemnly at the TV where they didn’t argue vociferously amongst themselves. My highly qualified knowledge also informs me that there are no other Catholics in America.