SEASON OF THE WITCH (1973)
(Anchor Bay DVD special
edition)
After
the huge success of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, George Romero was keen
to show he wasn’t just a writer/director of gory horror films. His follow-on,
the ‘romantic comedy’ THERE’S ALWAYS VANILLA sank without trace, disparaged by
Romero due to problems with undercommitted funding by wayward backers and
distributors. Together with his wife Nancy as producer, he then made a film
that dealt with witchcraft in modern-day suburbia and and also, unusually for
this genre, placed great emphasis and
sympathy with female characters and the fuflfillment of their needs. In fact,
it was pointedly Romero’s take on women’s liberation, very much a new hot topic
in the zeitgeist then. This was to be a double-edged sword - yielding artistic satisfaction but
frustratingly to no avail at the box office.
Joan
‘Joanie’ Mitchell (no relation to the singer) played with commitment by Jan
White is a bored suburban housewife who finds herself plagued with disturbing
dreams filled with hallucinatory symbolic images: her domineering husband Jack abusing
her, a lone baby in a field (a reference to her deceased child, unexplained in
the script) and others more inexplicable. She goes to see a therapist who muses
while sucking his Meerschaum pipe that “The
least qualified to understand a dream…is the dreamer”.
Clearly,
that was why she was seeing him but since he isn’t going to make himself
useful, Joan must seek solace elsewhere. She is intrigued to discover there is
a witch, Marion, living in the
neighbourhood so she and her friend Shirley go over and receive a Tarot
reading. Later they return to Joan’s house and she meets Greg, a student
teacher who is sleeping with Nikki, Joan’s daughter. Gregg has a dark secretive
air about him which initially repels Joan. This is heightened when he cruelly
tries an experiment on Shirley to trick her into believing he has given her pot
instead of a regular cigarette. This is an interesting and vaguely unsettling
scene as Shirley appears to veer from blissed-out to freaked-out, all entirely
from auto-suggestion of what she images such forbidden psychoactoive substances to do to her. Joan
rids the house of Gregg, but after taking the hugely embarrassed Shirley home,
she returns to hear Gregg and Nikki having sex. This awakens Joan’s own sexual
frustration and she touches herself alone in her room.
After
Jack goes off on a business trip, Joan’s loneliness compels her to activate her
interest in witchcraft. She goes to a shop to buy herbs, books and other spell
tools and creates a spell that attracts Gregg to her so they begin an affair.”You’re not bad in the sack” he tells
her. Fortunately his physicality seems to console her more than his verbalisms.
Her daughter Nikki goes missing but is then reportedly found by the police. She
cuts off her affair with Gregg.
Gradually,
Joan’s increasing absorption into the occult manifests nightmares involving a
masked intruder in black who attacks her at home, dredging up her
vulnerabilities to the fore. The night Jack returns, in a shock scene
reminiscent of the ending of NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD, Joan blasts him to death
with a shotgun. It seems accidental as he is not clearly seen, but this
motivation is clouded as she willingly joins her friend’s coven in a ritual
after she is acquitted of blame and at a later party she states simply and
enigmatically to a friend that she is a witch.
She smiles with inner contentment for the first time as the film ends…
SEASON
OF THE WITCH is certainly a worthy exploration within the field of a welcome,
rare female-centric plot. The women not only outnumber the men, but their
issues of role fulfillment and relationships with self-centred men are the main
focus instead of merely being passive victims or flamboyant monsters. What it
lacks for me is the payoff of what appears to be the promise of sex mixed with
the occult. There is the tasteful suggestion of both but little that is graphic
enough to hold continual interest, so what we’re left with is neither a domestic
drama exactly nor a horror movie but something falling and failing between the
two.
The
circumstances of the making and release seem to have been largely responsible
for the uncertainty of the film’s tone. The original script, called JACK’S
WIFE, was off-putting to Jan White when she was first offered it. “ There were all these nude scenes in it. I
really don’t wanna do a porno.” She told the Romeros. George assured her
that it was only written so explicitly to gain the funding. He and Nancy were
so keen on White, a local ex-soap opera actress, that they agreed to get her a
body-double on the days requiring nudity. As it turned out, she became so
comfortable during the actual shoot that she said she would have done the
scenes herself but didn’t feel brave enough to voice changing her mind
on-set.
White
also mentioned some spooky phenomena during the shoot which she attributed to
the occult nature of the film, despite unusual events always being a
possibility by law of averages in a creative environment of many people over
time. The most interesting one concerns the scene in which she writes the
Lord’s Prayer backwards. This had to be shot multiple times as the first two or
three versions were sent to the lab for processing and each time failed to show
up on the print.
The
30th anniversary reissue by Anchor Bay on DVD is a print that is
slightly grainy yet the colour scheme really pops, distracting so much that at
times it almost looks like a black and white film that’s been slightly tackily
colourised. The attention deficit caused by the lack of driving action caused me
to be inadvertently side-tracked by the lurid blue and red couch, not to
mention the oddly jarring blues, greens and purples of the women’s clothes. To
be fair, the period seems not to have been a high-point for such things; the
ladies at times visually resemble the trashy 1970s’ mistresses satirised by
Scorcese in GOODFELLAS.
The
taint of ‘adult porn entertainment’ lasted through the planned original
release as the title was swapped from
JACK’S WIFE to the more misleadingly exploitative HUNGRY WIVES on its first
run. Eventually it became SEASON OF THE WITCH which also referred to the
titular groovy Donovan song used in the film. Producer Jack Harris also turned
a deaf ear to Jan White’s plea to put Romero’s name above the title to
capitalise on his international reputation in horror earned by NIGHT OF THE
LIVING DEAD. Sadly, this meant that the new film’s attempt at mature
progressive themes within the genre never earned an audience. This is not to
denigrate or patronise the risk that Romero willingly took as a maverick
operating outside the system. He later felt that like THERE’S ALWAYS VANILLA,
he was severely hampered before the release of this film by money men jumping
ship part-way through the process. However, he would be on surer tonal ground
wth his next pure horror movie – THE CRAZIES….
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