What If ‘Halloween III: Season of the Witch’ Had Been a Success at the Box Office?
What To Know
- Halloween III: Season of the Witch was poorly received by both critics and audiences in 1982, largely due to the absence of Michael Myers, a fan-favorite character.
- The film was intended to launch an anthology-style franchise with different stories in each installment, but its lackluster box-office performance led producers to abandon this concept and return to Michael Myers in future sequels.
- If Halloween III had been a success, the franchise might have continued as an anthology series, potentially ending Michael Myers’ storyline.
In 1982, I was one of the first to see Halloween III: Season of the Witch in theaters. I saw it on opening night with a group of friends, and after the movie, each one of them complained vehemently, as only teenagers can do, about how stupid the movie was. All of them wanted to know where the heck was Michael Myers?
Unlike my friends, however, I enjoyed the movie, and I like it even more now. Unfortunately, back then, critics, who weren’t disgruntled 18-year-old teens with movie mayhem on their minds, were equally disenchanted with the franchise’s third outing.
Film critic Roger Ebert called the movie “a low-rent thriller” and gave it a mere one and a half stars. Miami critic Bill von Mauer called the film a “scrape the bottom of the barrel movie” that wanders into the realm of science fiction and becomes utterly lost. Later on, he declares that the movie just wasn’t exciting enough.
Truthfully, I think Roger, Bill, and many other critics, like my buddies, just missed Michael Myers, which is easy to understand. Michael is a crowd favorite. In fact, Entertainment Weekly ranked him at number five on their all-time best horror villains list. Only Norman Bates, Frankenstein’s monster, Hannibal Lecter, and Count Dracula best him on the list.
I, on the other hand, loved the movie’s Twilight Zone feel. It was as if Mr. Rod Serling himself had stepped into the writer’s room, tossed out anything that would have tied the movie back to the first two, and then said, “Let’s blow their minds with a completely different story.”
And that’s exactly what producers John Carpenter and Deborah Hill did. They were done with the story of Michael Myers and originally envisioned a movie franchise that was anthology-based. And Halloween III, which was written and directed by Tommy Lee Wallace, was the perfect script to kick off the anthology premise.
Instead of Michael Myers, we’ve got a maniacal businessman by the name of Conal Cochran, played to perfection by Dan O’Herlihy. His homicidal tendencies go far beyond terrorizing teenagers. He dreams of the wholesale slaughter of innocent trick-or-treaters on Halloween night, and this twisted soul, well, he knows exactly how to do it.
Universal/courtesy Everett Collection
You see, his novelty company sells the number one line of Halloween masks in the United States: Silver Shamrock. In-house testing of these masks and what they will do at precisely 9:00 PM on Halloween night has been wildly successful. Kids who tested these masks lost their heads over them. Literally.
You know, I could go on and on about the plot of this movie, but instead, I’d rather spend the remainder of this article speculating about what would’ve happened to the Halloween movie franchise if this film had been successful from a box office perspective.
While the movie wasn’t a complete financial disaster, it wasn’t the blockbuster hit that Universal wanted. And as such, the idea of having a different story within a shared universe was quickly cast aside. But if the movie had been successful, we might never have seen Michael Myers ever again. And while there are a couple of later Halloween movies that are all right, I’ve got to say that outcome might not have been the worst thing in the world. Halloween Ends, released in 2022, promises that we’ve seen the last of Michael Myers, but do I really believe it? That would be a big negatory, Ghost Rider.
Everett Collection
But that doesn’t mean that we couldn’t have seen Jamie Lee Curtis again. Whether she was playing Laurie Strode or a completely different character, I believe that Jamie Lee would have been there. In fact, on multiple occasions during Halloween III, her voice makes a cameo appearance. I’m not going to tell you where, but if you ever choose to watch the movie, listen carefully, and I bet you’ll figure out where and how Jamie participated.
It’s also quite possible that John Carpenter may have decided to be a more hands-on creative force if the franchise had opted to go the route of The Twilight Zone after that second movie. Carpenter didn’t mince words about how sick he was of Michael Myers, and films like They Live and even Vampires would have fit in perfectly if the franchise had become an anthology series. And maybe, just maybe, we would’ve gotten a follow-up movie with Halloween III’s villain, Conal Cochran. Quite frankly, he seemed like a more charming version of another one of my favorite horror villains, the Tall Man from the Phantasm series. And, just like the Tall Man, I suspect that there is so much more to this character’s backstory that we could have discovered.
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