George Romero’s ’70s feature Season Of The Witch might feature witches, and might not
Film history isn’t a highlight reel of universally agreed-upon classics. It’s an epic story. But some chapters of the story draw more attention than others. Secret Cinema is a column dedicated to shining a light on compelling, little-noticed, overlooked, or faded-from-memory movies from years past. Let’s talk about the films nobody’s talking about.
1997 saw the release of the Ang Lee film The Ice Storm, an adaptation of a Rick Moody novel that looked back to life in early-’70s Connecticut from the distance of a couple of decades. Both film and novel portray how some of the changes of the ’60s, a decade filled with radical breaks with tradition, evolved and adapted as they moved from campuses and big cities to the suburbs. Sexual liberation became a commonplace idea. Drug use became a part of everyday life. As self-help books, once out of style and supplanted by other trendy takes on New Age philosophies, were recycled as sale items at church fundraisers, the hippie principles they contained were recycled back into the culture as well. The new ideas proved viable, at least in the short term, even as some of those who adopted them become collateral damage. Attending a spouse-swapping key party, Ice Storm’s Joan Allen throws herself into a casual dalliance with a neighbor with the abandon seemingly demanded by the times, receiving only frustration, tears, and some of the least-erotic post-coital commentary ever put to film: “That was awful.”
Around the same time The Ice Storm hit theaters, Anchor Bay Entertainment, a company that used to be in the business of unearthing and restoring classic, half-remembered, and little-seen cult films, released the 1972 George Romero film Season Of The Witch to the home-video market. Viewed back-to-back, the movies seemed to be having a conversation about the way times change and the ways not everyone changes with them. The two are, in many respects, markedly different films. For starters, The Ice Storm features no witches, unless I’m missing something buried deep in the subtext. Furthermore, Romero’s film is much less accomplished than Lee’s, and a step down from his own work. Romero’s second horror film, made after Night Of The Living Dead, Season Of The Witch looks significantly less impressive than its predecessor. Where Night Of The Living Dead sandwiched some undistinguished, talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill between the zombie horror, Season Of The Witch is nearly all undistinguished talky bits featuring actors of widely varying skill. Frankly, it’s kind of a slog. But it also preserves the same turning point in suburban life The Ice Storm so memorably reproduces.
If you want to know what a time and place really looked like, look to its low-budget movies. Where projects like The Ice Storm and Mad Men reproduce the past, often brilliantly, through meticulous reconstruction, films like Season Of The Witch usually have to take what they can get by shooting on locations that remain much as the filmmakers found them. (Between Witch, the crumbling Pittsburgh that serves as a backdrop for Martin, and the contrast between urban decay and shopping-mall opulence offered in Dawn Of The Dead, Romero’s movies double as a history of life in ’70s Pennsylvania.) The ’60s Haight-Ashbury of the popular imagination, for instance, is all sunny days and flowers, but the location footage of Psych-Out, a cautionary, Richard Rush-directed (and Dick Clark-produced) B-movie shot in San Francisco at the height of the Haight-Ashbury scene reveals a grungier-looking place.
They’re also invaluable for portraying what people thought and how they talked to each other about those thoughts. And if nothing else, Season Of The Witch is filled with thoughts and conversation. Released as both Jack’s Wife and Hungry Wives for various markets, it makes no attempts to hide what it’s about. Night Of The Living Dead earned praise for addressing, opaquely, the upheaval of the times. For his follow-ups, Romero got more specific. The Crazies, which followed Season Of The Witch into theaters, drew specifically on images of protest and social unrest. Season Of The Witch is Romero’s film about feminism in its Women’s Lib phase. It’s loaded with references to the occult, but owes as much to Betty Friedan as Anton LaVey.
Jan White, an East Coast soap actress and commercial model sought out by Romero for the lead role, plays an upper-middle-class homemaker named Joan. She’s defined herself almost entirely as a wife and a mother, but those definitions have started to lose their meaning. Her husband (Bill Thunhurst) is often away on business, and her college-age daughter (Joedda McClain) doesn’t pay much attention to her. Staring down middle age, Joan starts to wonder who she is, even though her dreams provide an answer she doesn’t want to hear.
Romero opens the film with a nearly eight-minute dream sequence that’s strangely effective, despite trafficking in symbolism that would make the editor of a high-school literary journal call for revisions. Led by her husband, whom she sees only from behind as he reads a paper and ignores her, Joan walks along a forest path as creepy electronic music plays in the background. Her husband carelessly lets branches hit her in the face as they walk past a crying baby and toward a large home, where he hands her, now leashed, over to another man, who puts her in a kennel. From there, the dream shifts to her own home, where a man introduces her to all its features, as if trying to sell her on the life she already leads. It doesn’t work. When she looks in a mirror, she sees only a nightmare vision of the old hag she fears she’ll become.