10 Things You Learn Rewatching Halloween III: Season Of The Witch (1982)

Back in 1982, just one year after making the second wildly successful horror film about the knife-wielding, masked killer Michael Myers, Halloween creators John Carpenter and Debra Hill decided to shake things up in ways nobody could ever have imagined.

Believing another Michael Myers-centered movie would be overkill (having also already killed him off in Halloween 2), the duo formed an audacious plan to change the saga into an anthology series, which would release new and completely unrelated standalone films, each one exploring an aspect of classical Halloween folklore through the lens of modern horror films.

The first of these planned films was Halloween III: Season of the Witch, a creepy and unusual horror film that purposefully existed as far away as possible from the slasher sub-genre it had helped birth.

Unfortunately, the filmmakers underestimated the audience's attachment to Michael Myers' usual 2-hour killing spree and without him, the movie flopped. But in recent years, it has amassed a steady cult following that indicates it perhaps deserves a reevaluation.

Let's see if we can explore the reason why the trailer for the new Halloween movie even makes references to it...

The opening credits of Halloween III serve as a pretty perfect opening salvo, preparing audiences for what is to come.

Once again we're looking at a jack-o-lantern, but this time the opening shots are of flickering bits of static as Carpenter and Howarth's all-new Main Title theme cues up, and orange lines begin to fill up the frame. After several shots of this, the camera pulls back to reveal that the entire time, viewers were witnessing a jack-o-lantern being digitally constructed on a computer.

Not only does this specific digital jack-o-lantern wind up being of great importance later in the film, it offers a meta-riff on the original while doing something distinctly new and different, much like the film itself.

We're definitely not in Haddonfield anymore...