Season of the Witch (Romero, 1972)IMDB Link“When I look over my shoulder,
What do you think I see ?
Some other cat looking over
His shoulder at me
And he's strange, sure he's strange.
You've got to pick up every stitch,
You've got to pick up every stitch,
Beatniks are out to make it rich,
Oh no, must be the season of the witch,
Must be the season of the witch, yeah,
Must be the season of the witch.” – Season of the Witch by DonovanDoing a IMDB search for “Season of the Witch”, I noticed a 2010 movie starring Nicholas Cage. Fortunately, or unfortunately, that one hasn’t been released yet, and I haven’t had the pleasure of watching Nicholas Cage fighting against witches. Should be a blast though. Hope future Me enjoys it.
For the meantime, we move back, travelling back through the years and ignore Nicholas Cage, and instead move our camera to George A. Romero. It’s 1974 and just a few years after his zombie classic, “Night of the Living Dead”. After that, he made a little known movie called “There’s Always Vanilla” and after that, another little known movie called, “Season of the Witch”. Here we stop and see the outcome of Romero’s work.
It is a weak movie but not a bad one. Most of its problems are due to the crew, from Romero’s directing, writing, and the actors. It was almost fun randomly clicking on the crew’s name and realizing its either their first gig or second gig after an earlier Romero movie. These guys are not professionals and they don’t act like professionals.
Romero always used horror as a way to talk about society at large. His work wasn’t merely about scares, but similar to early sci-fi stories, it used an outside variable to play around with the norms, to represent something new about the way we behave. In “Season of the Witch”, he hasn’t yet perfected this balance yet. I know his aim. His protagonist, Joan, is a housewife that feels trapped in her life. A husband that is too busy, a daughter that is too old to need her, and a life that seems empty. Some of her feelings are represented by dreamlike sequences, such as being carried around on a leash, to represent her feeling trapped in the marriage.
When she finds about witches, she feels a purpose and appeal in it. I can sympathize, when life feels empty, we need to fill it with something. The question is then, is our new devotion something real and true or are we psychologically fooling ourselves to trade the void in ourselves with an illusion, and is the illusion necessary? We are not sure if witchcraft is real in this film, but we do know that Joan believes it is.
2/5
