You Don’t Really Know Much About Halloween 3: The Real Life Season Of The Witch

Readers of this blog will know of my unabashed, un-ironic adoration for Halloween 3: Season Of The Witch. I’m not one of these post-modern reassessment guys either. I saw it back in 1984 or so on TV and loved it from the starting gate, much more than the Michael Meyers vehicles, which I actually didn’t see till I was in college. Traditionally, after taking the kids out trick or treating, I sit in the quiet living room with whoever’s awake and put on Halloween 3 to close out the holiday, knocking back peanut butter cups and Butterfingers till the sweetness overcomes me. I look forward to it every year.

Season of The Witch, if you don’t know, and I’m gonna spoil it here, involves a plot by an insidious witch coven masquerading as a practical joke and gag company to sacrifice the children of America on Samhain night by plunking them and their candy buckets in front of a special TV showing of John Carpenter’s Halloween (followed by a big giveaway!) and pumping out a pseudo-scientific/mystic signal that will cause the chips of a Stonehenge triptych imbedded in a chip in the back of their Halloween masks to activate, causing vermin to erupt from their heads.

Pretty out there? Yeah.

A ludicrously complex plot depending on a set of unlikely and uncontrollable variables that could never hope to line up? Well……except for the Stonehenge bit (“You’d never believe how we got it over here”) maybe not!

Recently, reading some people nitpick the movie on Facebook, a couple criticisms jumped out at me and got me thinking and reminiscing about Halloween in the south Chicago suburbs in the 80’s.

Somebody remarked that The Silver Shamrock corporation had this huge factory in Santa Mira just to churn out three Don Post Halloween masks, the skeleton, the witch, and the pumpkinhead, and that it was highly unlikely three simple mask variations would catch on that big.

But I think, like most people born after 1975, they never heard of Kooky Spooks.

A couple years ago I brought up the flash in the pan Kooky Spook phenomenon on the Six Demon Bag Podcast and it was only a vague memory to my co-host Jeff Carter.

But, a Googling of the term will yield results.

Like this!

OK it was nine variations instead of three, but these things sold like hotcakes. Almost everybody at St. Andrew The Apostle’s in Calumet City, Illinois wanted or had one of these things.

They consisted of a plastic poncho with some reflective tape, an inflatable vinyl character head that perched atop your own head, and matching makeup. As mentioned, you had one of nine designs to choose from;

Wunkin Pumpkin, Wobblin Goblin, Scaredy Cat, Howly Owl, Spacey Casey, Wonder Witch, and Bone Head.

I was Bone Head. It was the only out-of-a-box Halloween costume I ever had. Usually my mom sewed me something. She must have been relieved when whatever cartoon I was watching ended and that commercial (one of MANY I would see that year) aired, and I breathlessly begged for one.

I have vague memories of wearing it trick or treating. I remember the makeup smeared a lot (I guess it was blackface, though I kinda remember wearing white greasepaint…they upgraded the makeup to a creamier variant the year after release, so maybe that’s when I had one. I would’ve been four or five) and my adult family members thought the bulbous, bobbing plastic monstrosity on my head was hilarious. I believe it sprang a leak before the night was out and slowly deflated over my face, which my mom thought was even more hysterical.

So anyway, yeah. Kids succumbing to Silver Shamrock’s marketing bombardment and those three masks flying off the shelves? Totally could have happened in 1980.

The second criticism of the Silver Shamrock plot I’ve heard – how would you ever get a bunch of kids to rush home early from tricks or treats to plunk themselves and their candy buckets down in front of the boob tube?

Easy as Doc Challis’ bedside manner.

In 1982, same year Season of The Witch was released, channel 32 WFLD in Chicagoland, home to Rich Koz/Son of Svengoolie, the pre-eminent horror host of the Midwest, promoted a special 3-D broadcast of Revenge of The Creature. You could get one of a number of collectible cardboard two-tone 3-D glasses at 7-11 (I had the Old Glory ones).

This was historically the first attempt at a 3-D broadcast in the Chicagoland area.

Like Kooky Spooks, this promotion got its hooks in me almost immediately as a religious viewer of Son of Svengoolie and big fan of The Creature From The Black Lagoon. Remember, in 1982 you couldn’t just watch whatever movie you wanted – you had to catch it on broadcast TV. I don’t think we owned a VCR till a couple years later. I wasn’t even aware there was a sequel to The Creature From The Black Lagoon, so I was crazy to watch this not miss television and I remember it was the talk of the kids as school.

Did Nigel Kneale and Tommy Lee Wallace find inspiration in Chicago’s 3-D television event of 1982? Nah probably not. They came out around the same time, so it’s just a funny coincidence.

But I mean, Son of Svengoolie had specific instructions for us kids. What we were to have on our face, what kind of TV we were supposed to watch, where we were supposed to position ourselves.

Sounds familiar….

So yeah, in 1982, Silver Shamrock could have orchestrated the mass sacrifice of the kids of Chicagoland with far less effort than they put into the Halloween Three (The masks. The Halloween 3 of the title were the three masks, don’tcha know.).

I was fully prepared to be in an ideal position to vomit crickets for a black and white 1955 movie. I didn’t even need a Big Giveaway.

So maybe you’re wondering what happened with all that. The 3-D thing, I mean.

Well, I’m told it was a bust, that the glasses didn’t work at all. I don’t know. I think I fell asleep before the broadcast. My aunt and uncle taped it for me, but I never did get a chance to watch it.

I guess I didn’t need Tom Atkins to save me.

MONSTER EARTH out now from Mechanoid Press

Out now in print and e-formats from Mechanoid Press is Monster Earth, in which my short story Mighty Nanuq vs. The Sea Wolf appears, alongside stories by I.A. Watson, Jim Beard, Fraser Sherman, James Palmer, and Nancy Hansen.

Ah look at that swell Eric Johns cover….

Every once in a while I hear about an anthology that I have to drop everything and write something for. Last year, though I was in the midst of finishing the last Merkabah Rider novel and a couple other projects, Jim Beard’s and Jim Palmer’s Monster Earth was it.

I LOVE kaiju or giant monster movies. When I was a kid in the south suburbs of Chicago there was a show called Son of Svengoolie, where local TV personality Rich Koz (in KISS-like makeup) would stand in a 70’s rock art casket telling goofy jokes and dodging rubber chickens over various classic genre movies like CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON and I WAS A TEENAGE WEREWOLF.

The Son of Svengoolie introduced me to giant monster flicks, via THE GIANT GILA MONSTER, TARANTULA, THE DEADLY MANTIS, THEM!, and of course, dubbed Japanese fare like GAMERA VS. BARUGON, GODZILLA VS. THE SMOG MONSTER, and GODZILLA VS. KING KONG.

When I was a kid bouncing around in the back of my dad’s blue Ford Bronco along country roads at night, I’d imagine the spindly legs of a giant spider dragging its horrendous bulk over the hills as we drove past, and I couldn’t simply disassemble a house of LEGOS without kicking it over and breathing imaginary atomic fire.

So when the Jims announced calls for MONSTER EARTH, an anthology of giant monster stories in a shared world, it took all my willpower not to respond, and when they contacted me personally, I caved like Osaka Castle in an Angirus and Godzilla sandwich.

The premise of MONSTER EARTH is that following World War II, the nations of planet earth became embroiled in a Cold War based not around the proliferation of nucelar arms, but giant monsters. Each country fields its own legendary giant creature discovered and harnessed (in various ways) within its borders. America has an immense sasquatch like creature, etc.

When folks were picking their countries and kaijus, I decided on Canada.

Yeah, Canada. So what?

I had always wanted to write a story about Inuit culture, and combining that with my love for old school 1950’s giant animal attack movies, I came up with Mighty Nanuq, a colossal polar bear that breathes subzero breath and has luminous blue eyes.

Now MONSTER EARTH is not entirely about monsters. To bring it down to a relatable level there’s a human element. Mine is the strained relationship between a young Inuit man of the 60’s counterculture and his uncle, an angakkuq or shaman, who came into his birthright in the 1940’s, at the height of World War II and now works for the Canadian government.

As inspiration for the 1940’s segement of the story (which the uncle relates to his wayward nephew), I used the real life Nazi U-boat landing at Martin Bay in northern Labrador in 1943, a little known incident in which the Germans actually landed in a remote part of Canada and installed a battery powered weather station to transmit radio signals the U-boats and ships of the German navy in the North Atlantic could then use in their fight against the allies. Extreme cold weather killed the station after only three days, and a sub sent out to repair the station (named Kurt after the initial mission leader Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer) was sunk.  The entire event was totally unknown to history until a German engineer researching a history book in the 1970’s wrote to the Canadian government inquiring as to the status of the weather station. As the Canadian government was completely unaware of its existence, the historian provided them with its coordinates (from Sommermeyer’s original notes), and it was discovered intact and now resides in the Canadian War Museum.

Of course, in MIGHTY NANUQ VS. THE SEA WOLF, no mere weather station is going to warrant the intervention of Canadian intelligence or an enormous polar bear, so that was just a springboard I used to depict a giant kaiju battle on the icy shores of Labrador, with Nazis duking out with a Canadian commando in the background.

Another historical event I tweak in the course of the story is the 1969 occupation of Alcatraz Island by the IAT (Indians Of All Tribes), an aboriginal rights group that incuded John Trudell. At the time, Alcatraz Prison was shut down and closed to the public, so citing The Treaty Of Fort Laramie, which stated that unused federal land was to be turned over to the Native Americans, the group seized control of Alcatraz with the intent of creating an Indian cultural center on the spot, as well as meeting other native demands.

Now if Nixon had access to a giant monster, I propose there was no way he would’ve allowed a bunch of long hairs to conduct a sit-in on federal land for nineteen months.

Anyway, all of these seemingly disparate elements come together in MIGHTY NANUQ VS. THE SEAWOLF in MONSTER EARTH from Mechanoid Press.

Here’s an excerpt.

* * *

Hallauk put the field glasses to his eyes and peered to the north.

In an inlet in the rocky shoreline, a great iron boat longer than a whale floated. A yellow bearded kabloonak, almost like the kavdlunait of which his grandfather had spoken, in a black reefer jacket stained with sea salt, and a high necked white sweater and cap, stood atop a tower in the center of the boat, shouting guttural orders to a gaggle of men in dark peacoats hustling to repair a great gash rent in the starboard bow. A group of men armed with rifles stood watch. These had red armbands over their left elbows, with white circles and strange black symbols within. A trio of men in drab grey coveralls were working to erect some kind of long, slim metal apparatus fixed to the side of the tower on which the captain stood.

“They probably ran aground during the storm. As we suspected, the Nazis are using some kind of radio antenna to control their monster. They’ve only just erected it,” said LeDuc, sliding the action on his Lanchester. “Look there off that small island.”

Hallauk swung the binoculars to the indicated area, and saw a huge swell in the sea. Something was circling nearby like an orca, but bigger even than the iron boat. Its huge wake rippled white in the icy waters.

LeDuc patted his shoulder then.

“Wish me luck, my friend.”

“What do you hope to do?”

“Well, after I blow the control transceiver, there’s forty more sailors down in the belly of that U-boat. I’ve got a hundred rounds of ammunition. Maybe I can take ‘em by surprise, if they all line up, eh?”

There was a great cracking sound then.

The submarinal creature, whatever it was, had swum beneath the sheet of ice on their side of the strait, and with a flick of its great head, thrust itself up through the frozen water.

What pulled itself from the hole and onto the shore a few yards north of the U-boat, made both men shudder uncontrollably.

It was a thing of nightmares. A monstrous dripping black wolf head, the jaws lined with fangs each the size of a tall chest of drawers, between which a massive tongue lolled. Two sharp ears like the fins of airplanes protruded from its great black skull, and two unnatural, cloudy white eyes glistened in its horrible face. It looked about briefly, snuffling its black nose, then a pair of long clawed feet smashed through the ice and hooked into the shore, pulling the rest of its bulk out of the water.

The body that followed that terrible head was even more horrendous to behold. It was nearly twice as long as the U-boat, and about midway down its torso its furry canine shoulders gave way to a greenish, scaly fish body that tapered into a serpentine, finned tail. Its two rear legs were scaled and clawed, like that of a dragon in a fairy book.

The hideous monstrosity shook its great head like a wet dog and arched back its neck, eliciting a bone chilling howl loud enough to be felt beneath their feet and in their very bones. When the terrifying cry finally died off, they could hear the distant rumble of avalanches in the Torngats.

LeDuc snatched the binoculars from Hallauk and stared through them.

“It has a collar. That must be the radio receiver,” he observed.

True enough, there was a great metal collar around the creature’s neck, marked with the same bent black crosses as the arms of the German soldiers down below.

“And there’s our monstrumfuhrer on the conning tower,” said LeDuc, pointing to the U-boat as a bespectacled man with a red armband in a green uniform and black jackboots emerged from the depths of the tower. He had a complicated looking metal helmet on, and was shouting at the men adjusting the antenna.

“Wish I had a proper rifle instead of this little typewriter,” LeDuc said bitterly.

“This man thinks you will need help,” said Hallauk.

LeDuc looked at Hallauk.

“It’s good of this man to offer, but unless he’s got a giant pussycat for that thing oversized mongrel down there to chase….”

“This man has something better,” said Hallauk, raising his arms.

From the center of the cluster of the Torngat Mountains a funnel cloud of snow gathered and rose, as if all the cold in the area were drawn towards that faraway spot. In the middle of that maelstrom of ice and snow, a huge shape reared, indistinguishable from the whirling powder but for a faint black spot in the center of its knobby peak, a hundred meters in the air.

There came a thunderous crashing noise, rhythmic and relentless, growing in power and sound, like unimaginable footsteps that sent loose rocks tumbling down the mountainsides as if fleeing its dreadful approach….

PICK UP A COPY OF MONSTER EARTH HERE –

http://www.amazon.com/Monster-Earth-James-Palmer/dp/0615753469/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1358864792&sr=8-1