George Romero's Intriguingly Odd Season of the Witch is a Horror Movie Without Horror and a Softcore Romp Without Sex
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George Romero’s legendary 1968 directorial debut, Night of the Living Dead, grossed something in the area of thirty million dollars worldwide on a budget of just over one hundred thousand dollars.
It was a surprise blockbuster and the Big Bang of zombie movies. Although it wasn’t the first movie about the undead, it was so important that the subgenre can usefully be divided into two discrete periods: pre-Night of the Living Dead and post-Night of the Living Dead.
Romero roared out of the gate with a zeitgeist-capturing masterpiece that powerfully conveyed the confusion, fear, and exhilaration of the late 1960s and a counterculture that promised to change everything.
In the aftermath of The Night of the Living Dead’s extraordinary success, Romero should have had Hollywood bigshots flying en masse to his Pittsburgh home to beg him to make generously budgeted, high-profile fright flicks for them.
For reasons I do not understand, that did not happen. Romero followed The Night of the Living Dead with an even cheaper movie, 1971’s There’s Always Vanilla. This was his only romantic comedy and a flop he considered his worst film.
There’s Always Vanilla was followed by a 1972 movie that began production under the title Jack’s Wife. It was renamed Hungry Wives as part of an unsuccessful attempt to market it as softcore pornography.
Romero’s oddball opus received its third and final title when it was re-released as Season of the Witch after the critical and commercial success of 1978’s Dawn of the Dead.
I would have sold Romero’s strange, misunderstood orphan as a terror tale from the man who rocked the world with Night of the Living Dead rather than a lurid celebration of the unclothed female form.
Season of the Witch presented a challenge for distributors in that it’s ostensibly a movie about witchcraft from one of our greatest horror filmmakers, but it’s not a conventional horror movie.
A strong argument can be made that it’s not a horror movie. There’s very little violence and no gore. Season of the Witch doesn’t even attempt to be scary most of the time.
It’s more interested in commenting on the uncertainty and anxiety of upper-middle-class life in the early 1970s than in scares.
It’s similarly frustrating as an exercise in sexploitation. The distributor wanted Romero to up the sexual content and include explicit sex scenes, but he refused. So, while there is some sex and some nudity, the movie isn’t particularly interested in titillation.
Romero wanted to comment on society. That’s why it didn’t make any goddamn money and was more or less politely ignored upon its release.
The gorgeous and ice-cold Jan White stars as Joan Mitchell. She’s a 39-year-old housewife amid a low-grade existential crisis.
Her 19-year-old daughter has left home for college, and her businessman husband Jack is perpetually away on business.
Joan floats aimlessly through life like a ghost. As the film’s original title attests, she’s someone’s impossibly put-together trophy wife and someone’s mother more than she’s her own person.
The world is changing, but Joan remains locked in a 1950s realm of conformity, respectability, and conventional gender roles, where the husbands are providers while wives look after children and maintain the home.
It’s a lifestyle and a mindset that bores Joan to tears. She’s haunted by dreams of her husband controlling her and being attacked by a sinister figure in a mask. Joan’s life is a boring blur of dinner parties and social obligations.
Though she does not realize it at the time, her life changes when she meets Gregg Williamson (Raymond Laine), a student teacher at the college where Joan’s daughter matriculates.
Gregg is having casual sex with Joan’s daughter. She’s supposed to be concerned, if not outraged. Instead, she’s intrigued.
Her daughter’s lover is a huge asshole. He makes a special point of tricking one of Joan’s housewife quasi-friends into thinking that she’s smoked marijuana and lost her mind.
Gregg looks like a sexier version of The Gong Show host Chuck Barris. He’s Sam Rockwell, basically.
Out of a combination of boredom, curiosity, and horniness, Joan buys a book about Witchcraft that’s essentially the 1972 version of Witchcraft for Dummies. In case you’re wondering, yes, a book titled Wicca & Witchcraft for Dummies exists, and yes, it is an official part of the For Dummies series.
Joan uses the dark arts to lure Gregg to her home for sex, but she’s such a beautiful woman, and Gregg is such a horny young man that he’d have raced over to make the beast with two backs even if witchcraft was not involved.
Gregg is not the kind of horndog who would turn down sex with his hot teenage lover’s equally hot 39-year-old mother.
Joan is generally in the business of doing what other people want, particularly her husband. A dalliance with the dark arts empowers her to start chasing her fantasies. It allows her to pursue her desires instead of fulfilling the dreary requirements of wifedom and motherhood.
Witchcraft gives Joan agency. It allows her to be sexual. She stops drifting through an aimless existence and begins using witchcraft strategically.
Like the better-known and superior Martin, Season of the Witch is a moody character study of loneliness and yearning in the ghoulish guise of a moody modern monster movie.
Martin is about a man who thinks he’s a vampire due to mental illness rather than a bite on the neck from a Transylvanian bloodsucker. Season of the Witch is similarly ambivalent about whether Joan is a real witch or if her supernatural powers are all in her head.
Season of the Witch isn’t near as satisfying as Martin, partly because Romero, who served as cinematographer in addition to writing and directing, did not have the resources to realize his tricky vision.
Season of the Witch is a wounded beast of a would-be cult film. Romero expressed a desire to remake it. The future director of Creepshow (which I write about in my Stephen King series over at my Substack, Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas) felt that his film never realized its potential due to a microscopic 100,000 dollar budget and post-production meddling that cut forty minutes.
A 130-minute runtime was whittled down to 89 minutes. It is safe to assume that much was lost in excising for nearly forty minutes.
Season of the Witch is a curious proposition, a horror movie without horror and a sexy romp without much sex. It’s a mood piece more than anything else and an intriguing exploration of Watergate-era ennui from one of our most important horror filmmakers.
Romero had much more on his mind than fright when writing and directing Season of the Witch. It’s an unusual terror tale, particularly for its time, in that it’s very much concerned with the complicated inner life of the kind of woman movies have historically had zero interest in.
Season of the Witch makes for a fascinating double feature with Martin and The Amusement Park, a lost and then found Romero movie from this era that’s similarly less concerned with plot or scares than mood and humanity.
This illustrates what made Romero such a fascinating and important filmmaker, even as it is far from his best work.
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