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Halloween III: Season of the Witch

Entry updated 19 January 2017. Tagged: Film.

Film (1983). Dino De Laurentiis. Produced by Debra Hill, John Carpenter. Directed by Tommy Lee Wallace. Written by Wallace (but primarily by Nigel Kneale, uncredited). Cast includes Tom Atkins, Stacey Nelkin and Dan O'Herlihy. 98 minutes. Colour.

Not at all a true sequel to the "stalk and slash" Halloween films, this is a horror film with an sf rationale. Crazed Irish entrepreneur Cochran (O'Herlihy), infuriated by Halloween's commercial degradation, plans to restore to it its proper mystical significance. Using microchips manufactured from a stolen Stonehenge monolith, he manufactures and sells huge numbers of Halloween masks that will hideously destroy their child wearers when triggered by an electronic pulse relayed through television advertisements (see Advertising). Kneale had his name taken off the credits, disgusted at this becoming more and more like a Splatter Movie, but a true eeriness remains to balance the physical horrors (not all of which are merely arbitrary), especially in the dark-suited, polite Android killers and in the menacing sleepy streets of the company town. Directed by a Carpenter protégé, this film has the enjoyably grisly flavour of Carpenter's own. [PN]

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