No matter how undeniably great a film the original Halloween was, by the middle of Halloween II some of us—seven or eight of us anyway—were already pretty bored with the idea of watching Michael Myers carving up even more teens. That’s why for that small handful, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, no matter how different and unexpected and strange it was (and precisely for those reasons), came as a blessed relief.
Following the mind-boggling success of the 1978 original, John Carpenter and Debra Hill had a clever idea. Instead of traditional repetitive sequels, they’d turn Halloween into an anthology series: each year a new film would come out whose only connection to the previous films would be that it centered around a Halloween theme. As far as holidays go, Halloween was as rich with stories as Christmas, right? The clever angle was that not only would it keep the franchise alive and fresh, but any one of the entries could in turn become a franchise in its own right, spinning off its own sequels. It sounded like a studio’s dream… read more >
