You could just tune in to TCM this evening for a fine line-up of Hammer Frankensteins: Curse of, & Revenge of, Created Woman & Must Be Destroyed. But in honor both of the holiday & of Christine O’Donnell, candidate for U.S. Senate next Tuesday in Delaware, I would direct you to 1972’s Season of the Witch, one of George A. Romero’s lesser-known efforts.
It stars the impressive Jan White as Joan Mitchell, a bored, horny upscale-suburban housewife. Neglected by her big dull dope of a husband, Joan drifts, somehow quite plausibly, both into an inappropriate relationship with her daughter’s casual boyfriend (Ray Laine), a creepy academic, & also into witchcraft. Romero doesn’t clarify whether the terrors which ensue are psychological, supernatural or a bit of both. The focus is as much on then-trendy bourgeois alienation as on fright; it’s almost like a horror picture that John Cassavetes might have made, except with community-theatre actors.
Romero’s best film, apart from his classic 1968 debut Night of the Living Dead, is probably Martin, his harrowing take on vampirism from 1977. Season isn’t quite on that level, but it’s still pretty good. It certainly, you should pardon the expression, casts a spell—an eerie, upsetting atmosphere of unwholesome eroticism which reaches its peak when poor Joan, unable to escape the sound of her daughter having sex in the next room, writhes around on her bed, on the verge of engaging in that activity of which Candidate O’Donnell so disapproves.
The Anchor Bay DVD edition of Season of the Witch also includes a bonus movie, Romero’s even-more-obscure 1971 drama There’s Always Vanilla, about an Army vet’s wistful love affair with a model. Romero has reportedly called this arty effort his worst movie, but he’s quite wrong—just off the top of my head, I’d call it better than Land of the Dead or Diary of the Dead. It’s an amusing little artifact.
RIP to James MacArthur, aka “Danno” from Hawaii 5-0, passed on at 72.
here's a fun story of halloween synchronicity: on halloween, we stayed home, and don played a bunch of spooky rekkids, including the classic "the witch," by german band the rattles.
ReplyDeleteso then last night we were finishing up watching this bbc miniseries called "the long firm," which stars the awesome mark strong as a mad gangster, following him from 1964 to 1979 through the eyes of various characters around him. there's a party scene in which the final episode's eyewitness picks up a younger chick. and the song that's playing is ... "the witch"!!
anyway, here's a video from youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKd8zm-q6OM
Amazing! I'm always pretty sure that synchronous stuff like that means something--the trouble is, what would that be?
ReplyDeleteI listened to "The Witch," by the way--superb!
glad you liked it!
ReplyDeleteif you (like me) are interested in synchronicity, check out andras jones's radio8ball: http://www.radio8ball.com/index.php. fascinating stuff. i think these moments have to do with patterns emerging, patterns that exist but we don't always see. although the more you look, the more you see! i don't know what they mean; perhaps they simply mean one is paying more attention to the universe. as andras sees it, they are open to interpretation, like everything i suppose.
anyway, i wrote about radio8ball as a stage show years ago and have attended a couple of these events when he held them in l.a. great fun, and often weird patterns/links would emerge.
i first heard "the witch" in college, and it made me think of oz and the wicked witch. something about those swooping strings made me think of that evil green lady and her flying monkeys. when i was a little girl and they showed "the wizard of oz" on tv, i used to really be terrified of the monkeys. like, hide-my-face-in-sister's-lap-type terrified! ahaha. good times!
Ha ha! As a full-blown superstitious head case, I have to be very careful with oracles of that sort! But it's very cool.
ReplyDeleteThe Witch might make a nice companion piece to the Welsh band The Automatic's "Monster," no?