Season of the Witch (1973 USA)
Vista 0004
The story: Joan Mitchell (Jan White) is an unhappily married housewife and mother burdened by sexual and social repression and haunted by dreams of violence and sadism. When her young adult daughter suddenly disappears, Joan’s nightmares become reality, and she turns to the Old Religion to regain some control over her life.

The film: Written, filmed, edited and directed by Night of the Living Dead creator George Romero in and around his stomping grounds of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Season of the Witch is a consistently interesting and intriguing look at the tenor of the times in early 1970s America. With the "anything goes" ethos of the period in full swing and straight America feeling boxed in, Romero’s film investigates the changes in the traditional relationships between men and women fostered by the Women's Liberation movement of the late 1960s.

Joan Mitchell (Jan White) is a woman living through a series of nightmares, real and imagined. The film begins with a lengthy dream sequence that immediately reminds viewers of the opening of Night of the Living Dead, with Joan and her abusive husband Jack (Bill Thunhurst) walking through a wooded glen. Jack leads the way, and as his wife follows, tree branches whip her in the face, foreshadowing a later real life scene of spousal abuse perpetrated by the always on the boil Jack. After traversing the branches, Jan sees her husband eating a hardboiled egg (at a time when the Vietnam War was truly eating America’s young), finds an abandoned baby (hinting at the film’s lost child sub-theme), and meets a young woman on a swing. Her nightmare concludes as Jack leashes her and leaves her in a kennel while he goes on a business trip, announcing to the hip looking kennel keeper that he has “brought her favorite pillow”. Frequent but appropriate use of two favored elements of the ‘70s film lexicon, the fish eye lens and a discordant electronic music score, add to the unease and underscore the unreality of the scene.

Like all good stereotypical ‘70s housewives, Jan visits a psychiatrist (a bearded, bespectacled man with an old-fashioned briar pipe) to discuss her nightmares and unhappy marriage. She also spends some of her apparently copious spare time hanging out at kaffee klatches with the girls, one of whom tantalizes the hen party with stories about her friend Sylvia (Virginia Greenwald), who just happens to be a practicing witch. Soon enough the bored ladies are visiting Sylvia, where a skeptical but curious Joan witnesses a third friend, Shirley (Ann Muffly), receiving a tarot reading. Shirley is Jan’s alter ego, an open-minded woman willing to take some risks, including experimenting with marijuana (actually regular tobacco masquerading as pot in a childish prank) and advising Jan to consider an extramarital affair. The tight lipped and unsmiling Jan --whose demeanor throughout is reminiscent of the three years in the future Stepford Wives -- finally breaks down when her young adult daughter, Nicky, suddenly disappears, and Jan decamps to Sylvia’s house in search of knowledge and power.

There’s a terrific scene set to Donovan’s "Season of the Witch" as Jan shops for witching supplies and a Witchery Primer. Once she’s got the goods, Jan cooks up an incantation with which she intends to seduce Nicky’s college instructor boyfriend Greg (Ray Laine), the cocksure post-adolescent who played the pot trick on Shirley and whom Jan suspects may have the answer to Nicky’s disappearance. Accenting the false promises provided by the supernatural, Jan ultimately ends up calling Greg on the phone, inviting him over, and then claiming he came because she cast a spell on him! With Greg spent and safely tucked into her bed, Jan then attempts to summon a demon -- in one of the film’s few flaws, why isn’t made clear -- who "appears" to her in the form a tortoiseshell cat who has, in actuality, simply crept through an open window to keep dry. The film concludes on a downbeat note as the newly empowered Jan continues to suffer from nightmares of a masked intruder-rapist that eventually cross over into her waking life resulting in a tragic (?) conclusion that echoes that of Night of the Living Dead.

Season of the Witch is a blunt reminder of the wispy hopes and failed dreams of the post-counterculture 1970s. Jan gains a measure of self control thanks to her newly discovered powers of "witchcraft," but they can’t stop her dreams of sexual predation, can’t bridge the generation gap between herself and her daughter, and can’t end the deep-seated feelings of Catholic guilt when she fantasizes about sex -- or acts upon her fantasies. In the end, witchcraft gives her something to have faith in -- the advice of the college-educated Greg ironically plays a role here -- and the sisterhood of the coven grants her a measure of power. Ultimately, however, the detached, emotionless, and medicated Jan lives a nightmare of the real: escape from her everyday horrors is impossible, and hope for the future smothered. It’s a downbeat finale offering little if any optimism, which may explain why the film was a box office failure and has yet to see the light of digital day.

The cast and crew: There’s little to say about the cast, who are uniformly fine but clearly cut from amateur cloth. Smug-looking Ray Laine made his film premiere in Romero’s earlier There’s Always Vanilla (1971 USA), and parlayed these roles into a brief career in ‘B’ movies and TV films. Bob Trow, who has a small role here as a police detective, spent over thirty years patrolling Mr. Roger’s Neighborhood as Bob Dog. Night of the Living Dead’s Bill Hinzmann -- a Romero regular in the early years, and the ghoul in the cemetery at the start of that classic zombie flick -- dons the grotesque mask worn by Jan’s nightmare intruder here, and has since turned his Romero association into a lengthy career spent at Chiller Cons and Fright Fests across the nation. For the rest of the cast -- including the leads -- this was their one and only feature film appearance.

George Romero, of course, needs little introduction, remaining one of the legendary names of horror cinema, though he hasn’t made a great film since 1985’s Day of the Dead. The balance of the crew were either one-offs or occasional Romero collaborators who had worked with him on NOTLD or There’s Always Vanilla. Though he doesn’t get a screen credit, the film was distributed by Jack H. Harris, the man behind genre favorites like The Blob (both versions), Dinosaurus! (1960 USA), and Dark Star (1974 USA).

Nostalgia value: There’s little for nostalgia buffs here. Though the underlying themes of the film are rooted deeply in the societal angst of the turbulent early ‘70s, the film deals with them in the broadest terms, maintaining the story’s effectiveness and timelessness. The grimness of the narrative and the paltry low budget conjure memories of other equally gritty films of the period, including Bob Clark’s Deathdream (coming soon to DVD via Blue Underground)

and Elia Kazan’s The Victims.

The print: Since reissued on a now out-of-print Anchor Bay VHS tape, this Vista release is tolerable -- barely. As always, nighttime scenes are grainy and pitch dark, but the print’s main flaw is a reliance on yellows in interior sequences, with most characters acquiring a jaundiced look set against a buttery looking background. The print is otherwise in good condition, though apparently incomplete, as IMDb lists alternate running times of 130(!) and 104 minutes. There are no glaring cuts here, implying that entire scenes probably hit the cutting room floor. The Anchor Bay print apparently is the same as this one, so whether the longer times are now figments of a fevered Romero fan’s imagination or exist in a film canister somewhere remains an open question. The longest version was initially released as Hungry Wives and then cut to 104 minutes for overseas distribution as Jack’s Wife, with the extant print being further cut down for a 1982 re-release primed to capitalize on the then current Halloween III: Season of the Witch. There are certainly enough unanswered questions and continuity oddities to confirm the existence of longer versions, including a fascinating dream (?) sequence featuring an unctuous salesman introducing Jan to all the benefits of living in a planned community (“the television upstairs has special programming designed to give you ideas…if you don’t have any of your own!”). Shot full frame in 16mm, Season of the Witch doesn’t seem to be missing much, if anything, on the sides of the frame.

DVD prognosis: Excellent, especially if the "missing" footage were to surface. Romero is one of the most important American filmmakers of the period, and this film -- though mis-characterized as a horror film -- deserves to take its place beside the classic fright flicks the director is better known for.

Ratings: Film: A-. For cinemaniacs who appreciate a little subtext, this is a real discovery. Romero fans will appreciate the disquieting and disturbing atmosphere, even though the film may lack the visceral thrills of some of his other work.

Print: C. It needs a lot of work, but I imagine the Anchor Bay tape (which I haven’t seen) rectified most of the problems seen here.

DVD worthiness: A. It’s a safe guess that Anchor Bay has the rights to this one. Perhaps they’re still searching for the extra footage, so we can be blessed with a full-length director’s cut?