Wallace also added a number of nods to a film he considered a primary inspiration, Don Siegel’s classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers, even shooting much of the film in the same little town where that was shot. Both Carpenter and Wallace reworked the script, adding among other things the film’s most annoying and memorable element-the Silver Shamrock commercial jingle, which plays countless times throughout the picture and is guaranteed to get stuck in your head for years afterward.

The lead, Tom Atkins, had been in The Fog , and there were even small roles for Jamie Lee Curtis and Dick Warlock (an appropriate enough name), who played Myers in Halloween II. In fact the entire project became a family affair, as most of the crew had worked on Halloween, The Fog, or both. But that’s just me.)ĭante soon left the project and was replaced by longtime Carpenter collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace. Now that I actually had a Kneale script, I suspect him of lifting from Larry Cohen. (Normally when I encounter a unique and intelligent science fiction/horror film, I suspect the screenwriter was ripping off Kneale. Halloween Timeline Explained for Wild Horror Movie Franchise By Daniel Kurland Instead of Michael Myers with a butcher knife, the core idea of the film would be “witchcraft meets the computer age.” They brought in Joe Dante ( The Howling, Gremlins) to direct, and hired the remarkable Nigel Kneale (the Quatermass films) to write the script, which focused on modern-day Druids practicing Halloween in the old old-fashioned way. Carpenter and Hill charged ahead, hoping to reclaim the anthology idea with Halloween III. Unfortunately, the blandly traditional Halloween II had gone into production about ten minutes after the original opened, so it was too late to do anything with the anthology idea. 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. Instead of traditional repetitive sequels, they’d turn Halloweeninto 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.

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.įollowing the mind-boggling success of the 1978 original, John Carpenter and Debra Hill had a clever idea. 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. “ Eight more days til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween…Eight more days til Halloween…Silver Shamrock!“

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