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Fresh Meat: Discovering HALLOWEEN III and the Horror of Consumerism

By. Pleatherface

My first foray into the horror genre is part of an IP that needs little introduction. The Halloween franchise started in 1978 with Halloween which introduced the world to Michael Myers. The original film’s director John Carpenter did not intend him to be a ‘leading man’ for a franchise and has insisted his original vision was for an anthology series centered around the eponymous holiday (he has talked about it at various conventions, including the fact that his participation pretty much ended after HALLOWEEN III. Here is a great compilation of the man (John Carpenter on Halloween III: Season of the Witch). According to what some would call research, I call googling, producers pushed for the silent killing machine to return once more after the success of the first film; it seems audiences had connected far more with a blank slate murderer than with Jamie Lee Curtis’s heroine.

A brief synopsis, the movie tells the story of an evil CEO technology genius – who uses artificial beings he has built through his work in mechanics – who uses children’s consumerism as a vehicle to spread ancient evil through masks that contain fragments of a stone stolen from Stonehenge. He is apparently thwarted but the film ends with in a manner that suggest the forces this corporate mogul had set in motion could not be stopped by the one man who knew of his plan. If this seems like it could happen today, it was not something I went into the movie predisposed to reading. My limited knowledge of the film did mean I was aware of the consumerism angle, but Dan O'Herlihy’s Conal Cochran while played with cartoonish delight offers a deep well to explore. While the supernatural element is a key to aiding in his plan’s completion, this is very much a grounded villain in the sense that he uses technology as the stitching to hold it all together. It does not take much effort to see how a foreign-born, rich CEO who is adored by those who use and who profit from his product to an almost cult-like level; someone who is called by many a genius and who has re-invented mechanical contraptions; I do not think of another time when this type of figure has been as ubiquitous as it is today.

As a viewer of the present, there are also many limitations that while very different from our own present offer a form of parallel that would enable this same type of plan to ultimately work in the way which Cochran had hoped. Spoilers here: in the end, the hero tries contacting the 3 major networks in hopes of stopping the transmission that triggered the masks. This ending is left ambiguous as he can stop 2 of them but is unable to reach the third in time. While we could argue that today media is much broader, the concentration of the various channels and other outlets in just a small group of holding corporations would make a plan like this much easier to deploy and also make it even harder to stop. Another concept this film is the mixing of technology and witchcraft, which director Tommy Lee Wallace says came from Carpenter collaborator Debra Hill – with whom Carpenter wrote the first Halloween and many other of his horror classics.  We stand today on a precipice of a moment where the boundaries technology pushes and the opacity with which corporations operate can seem to blend into a form of witchcraft, and this is something that is being constantly used against us in efforts to push our behavior as consumers via feeling versus via rational thought.

 One last idea that hit me as I watched the film is the way in which the town, Santa Mira, encapsulates two ideas that play out today. On one end you have what is clearly a stand-in for the factory town, one that is entirely dependent on a single corporation but that has also been decimated by it, and on the other you have California as the epicenter of technology – Santa Mira is positioned in the northern end of the state, where the Bay area exists still as a sort of tech hub.

On the other side we have the troubled hero in Dr. Daniel Challis, played somewhat unevenly by Tom Atkins. There are a few threads to the character that seem to be abandoned, but they do try to paint a picture of a flawed man who will probably fail. There is also the forced romantic subplot with Stacie Nelkin’s Ellie Grimbridge, which seemed to exist only for the possibility of giving viewers the 70’s and 80’s seemingly required boob shot. This is where I feel the film really shows both a haphazardness and its age. Ellie is a character who with much less screen time than Daniel, shows herself to be a much more resourceful protagonist as well as much better audience stand-in. While the choice of the complicated and morally suspect Daniel as protagonist may be defendable in various ways, it feels that it was ultimately more of a go away from the female lead of the first two films.

An interesting tidbit about the movie itself, being a contemporary film viewer it feels we are trained to find connections to a larger shared universe I found myself looking for signs or references to a larger, shared universe. There are some of course, in the form of snippets of the original film being shown on random televisions. This ingenious resource offers the potential for interpreting the film as existing in a parallel world to our ‘real’ world. It also serves by adding the holiday connection too. This minimal connection is in my view a great choice, showing us this past were film watching did not require homework. This further strengthens the concept that Carpenter had on the holiday itself being the center of the franchise idea instead of a shared world or a character-based model. This takes me to what I feel is one of the best choices made by the film’s makers in their use of television throughout the movie. The TV is a constant presence, reminding viewers of the holiday but also as the medium for delivering destruction in conjunction with the masks.  

Some stray thoughts I jotted down as I watched included the scoring of the film which used a lot of synth ambient music that served to create a sense of creepiness and emptiness at the same time, the effects have aged poorly but it was not something I felt detracted from the film (it is also rather light on the gore from a modern audience perspective with just a couple of scenes with truly graphic deaths), I originally thought the motives for Cochran to be unclear but this fit in with the idea of an anthology series where the holiday and evil were at the center (I came to think of the idea of evil as something disconnected from rationality, and in that way Myers and Cochran can be seen as similar), and that by going with a completely different style of villain (even one animated by a similar ‘evilness’) the film creates a fascinating and much scarier villain in Cochran. I would go as far as saying I enjoyed this film much more than the idea I had of the original Halloween (which may make a viewing of that different for me, maybe by going at this from the perspective of a stand-alone film I gave it a better chance to succeed).

Up next I will take on George Romero’s DAWN OF THE DEAD. Thanks for reading!