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

The first two acts of the film may have some occasional pacing issues, but the third act more than makes up for it. Once Challis sneaks into the Silver Shamrock plant, the film goes full-tilt bonkers and it is all the better for it.

Whereas the previous Halloween films and most of the subsequent ones to follow after this remain fairly grounded, Season of the Witch's plotline takes off like a bottle rocket for the finale. Cochran's a mad scientist through and through whose henchmen are all robots he built, he's going to use the masks and the Big Giveaway broadcast to kill anyone wearing the masks by making snakes and bugs crawl out of every orifice, and he's doing it all through dark magic conjured by a stolen piece of Stonehenge(!?!).

The last thirty minutes of this film are less minimalist slasher and more high-concept science fiction of the 1950s, which is fitting since those are the films that got Carpenter into horror filmmaking in the first place. Tommy Lee Wallace has always been very open about the fact that he crafted the film as a love letter to the 1956 version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, ending homage included.

So while the rest of the horror genre was busy imitating the first Halloween in the early 80s, the Halloween franchise delivered this slice of 50s paranoia that was much more indebted to films like Invasion of the Body Snatchers or Howard Hawks' The Thing from Another World.

Absolutely bonkers in all the right ways.