In discussing a genre such as horror, there are endless discussions of whether or not a given work should be included. Is something a thriller or a horror movie (can it be both)? Can it be horror if it isn’t scary (I’d say yes)? Can it be horror if there’s no element of the supernatural (of course)? These conversations often feel like pointless hairsplitting at best and mean-spirited gatekeeping at worst, but they also feel inevitable (I’ve spent at least one post going down that rabbit hole myself) – how can you really talk about something in any meaningful way if you can’t even agree on what it is?
But sometimes, it’s quite clear: the film was directed by one of horror’s most influential directors; it has both scenes of squirm inducing discomfort and sequences of stalking, home invasion, and assault; and it revolves around one of the all-time most classic “monsters” – witches. Very obviously, the film in question is not a horror film. More of a domestic drama. But one which I think a fan of the genre is well served by considering.
All of this is to say that this week, we’ll be looking at George Romero’s 1973 low-budget, feminist, occult drama, The Season of the Witch. As usual, there will be spoilers, so be forewarned.
The Season of the Witch (1973)
I’ve been trying to put my finger on what it is about this movie that I like so much. As described above, it is a real stretch to consider it horror (more of a drama with intimations of the occult). Furthermore, while I absolutely appreciate the film’s socio-political position, it is more than a little on the nose, with what it lacks in subtlety made up for by being really, really blatant. On top of that, it’s fairly slow and not all that much actually happens, and while some performers stand out, it is clearly peopled by the regional talent that Romero had easy access to in Pittsburgh (nothing against “the city of bridges,” but some of these players would not have gone far in NYC or Hollywood). Finally, it was riddled with production issues, with the producers more than halving the budget and chopping Romero’s original cut down by more than 40 minutes (and tossing the negatives, such that most of that is fully lost). And yet, somehow, the result feels so idiosyncratic, independent, deeply watchable, and rather moving. It is not Romero’s best work, but one can easily see him in it, and I have enjoyed revisiting it from time to time over the years.
Originally titled Jack’s Wife, this is a story of a woman trapped by her role – mother, wife, homemaker. The original title suggested how utterly she is discounted by the world around her – not a person, but a relationship, a possession. The distributer felt that name wasn’t going to sell tickets and retitled it Hungry Wives!, marketing it as a softcore sex film. The fact that there is very little sex shown and none of it is remotely explicit meant that the target audience left cinemas pretty unsatisfied. Eventually, it was re-released as The Season of the Witch (after the Donovan song that plays in a key sequence), meaning that now many horror fans would leave unsatisfied, but some, such as myself, have found it to be a lovely, little gem.
Joan (Jan White) is the stay-at-home mother of an adult daughter. Her husband is out of town on business more than he is home. She has no vocation and no one really needs her to do very much. She spends much of her time idly drinking, gossiping, or playing cards with the other neighborhood wives (who are, to be fair, a real hoot!), but the whole time, however done up her hair is, or how perfectly she keeps her home, she seems distant, clearly unengaged, unfulfilled, with a gentle smile that never reaches her eyes. I wrote above that the film lacks subtlety, but White deserves credit for bringing genuine nuance to so much of her screen time. She communicates a great deal with very little and it is easy to immediately feel for her.
The film opens with a long dream sequence in which she follows behind her husband in the woods as he reads the paper, drinks tea, and eats breakfast, all the while leaving branches to whip her in the face, before he finally puts a collar around her neck, leashes her, and leads her into a kennel where he gives instruction for her care during the week he’ll be away for work. As I’ve said – not exactly subtle, but it is an effective, odd opening. Throughout the film, we spend a lot of time in her dreams, frequently unsure whether an event is real or imagined. We inhabit the space of her anxieties and dissatisfaction; the things she desires seemingly inexorably tied to those she fears: the violation of her home/cage, a threatening, magnetic male presence, and a dangerous, disruptive wild, dark power.
Through a friend of a friend, she encounters some materials on witchcraft and, her husband out of town and her daughter having run away from home (more on that later), she begins to explore the dark arts, edging closer and closer to reckoning with and owning her own will, and acting to have it done. Along the way, she has a fling with a younger man (an irritatingly trollish, but charismatic guy who had been intermittently seeing her daughter), burns a lot of incense, summons a devil (or maybe just lets a cat into her basement), and (accidentally?) shoots her husband. In the end, we see Joan again at a neighborhood party, but now her reserve, similar to that shown at the beginning, clearly implies a self-satisfaction that makes her the center of attention (even if she is still labeled in the final line of the movie as “You know, Jack’s wife”).
On the horror movie of it all, as Romero does again in his later film Martin (1978), it is never clear whether anything supernatural has actually happened or not. In Martin that question is central to the story and the horror – either the protagonist is a tragic vampire or he is a dangerous psychopath – the ambiguity is key. In this case, however, the film doesn’t concern itself with even questioning whether or not Joan’s magic has any effect. Perhaps Greg comes to her because she cast a spell under moonlight, or maybe he comes because she called him on the phone – in a way it doesn’t matter as much as simply seeing her ask for his presence (to the spirits or via technological means) – seeing her become a willful agent. But still, that uncertainty does add a taste of mystery to the proceedings that brings it somewhat closer to a horror film.
And of course, Joan’s plight is a horrific one – and all the more so for how unnotable it is. Suffering from what Betty Friedan termed “the problem that has no name” in her 1963 text, The Feminine Mystique, Joan finds herself in an empty existence, fulfilling the roles that had been set out for her (and the rest of her neighborhood housewife coterie), surrounded by the creature comforts promised by 50s era Madison Avenue and women’s magazines that glamorized homemaking and helped lure women back out of the workforce after the war. At one point, she has a dream in which she is being shown the house by some sort of agent, and it feels as if she is both being given a nigh endless list of “nice things” and being bound to a dreary responsibility, tied to this building and these objects; the scene is a bit funny, but also haunting.
There is an interesting contrast to be had with her daughter Nikki (Joedda McClain). As a young woman in the sexual revolution of the early 1970s, she has a totally different relationship to sex, relationships, independence, and willfulness than her mother. It’s not clear exactly how old she is, but it’s implied that she’s in college, such that she is in a casual relationship with Greg, an aggressively superior, yet smarmily charming student-teacher there. Still, for all of her freedom and steady self-confidence, she is treated by both her parents and society as a kind of a child. Following a falling out, she leaves home and is considered a runaway, the police called in to search for her. I can only assume that this wouldn’t have happened had she been a 20 year old boy.
The most striking scene in the film features this mother-daughter relationship. After accompanying her friend, Shirley, to visit a “witch” for a tarot card reading, the two of them end up back at Joan’s where Nikki and Greg are hanging out. In an increasingly uncomfortable episode, the four of them drink together, and Greg needles the older women, especially Shirley, targeting her insecurities of growing old, of being undesirable, attacking the hangups that stop her from doing whatever she wants and suggesting that sad, repressed people like her are ‘what’s wrong with this country.’ Nikki apologetically makes half-hearted attempts to reign him in and Joan makes some effort to cut him down for his cruelty, but at the same time, there seems to be a spark between them – antagonistic, but intriguing. Ultimately, she is complicit in Greg’s tricking Shirley into thinking that she’s just tried pot (it’s just a normal cigarette) as he proves a point about the susceptibility and power of the mind and viciously pushes Shirley to an emotional breaking point to reveal just how unhappy she actually is beneath her veneer of happy, square, middle-class housewifery. I mean, he’s not wrong, but he’s also a mean prick.
After driving Shirley home, Joan returns to find that the young couple is still there, sounds of laughter and sexual pleasure coming from her daughter’s room. Visibly unsure what to do, Joan creeps down the hall to her own room and closes the door, but she can still hear them. She buries her head in the pillows, but can’t block them out and is soon physically turned on herself, and disturbed by that fact. But is she so upset because it feels wrong to be so aroused by hearing her daughter’s moans or because she is jealous of a pleasure and a freedom that feel completely lost to her? She ends in tears shortly before Nikki bursts in, disgusted to realize that her mother had been listening the whole time. This is what prompts her to “run away.”
In the next scene, her husband is furious with her and even strikes her for doing nothing, for not stopping their daughter from “being balled in the next room,” for somehow failing as a mother in letting this 20-something young woman leave home. Notably, Joan is not worried about Nikki at this point – not really. She doesn’t explicitly say this, but Nikki is a confident and self-sufficient adult who can make her own decisions and deal with her own mistakes (something Joan, in contrast, has trouble doing). Rather, Joan is worried about herself – what she wants, what she no longer has the ability to put up with. Soon after, on a Donovan groove, she heads into the city, buys a chalice, a knife, and some herbs, and starts reciting the Lord’s Prayer backwards before bed.
She also starts dreaming about a masked intruder breaking into her house and attacking her (in sequences that could have found a place in a more traditional horror movie). Does this dream figure represent the threat and attraction she feels from and towards Greg, the danger of her own unchecked desire running wild, the risk of tampering with dark, occult forces, or just a dangerous maleness, as much her husband as patriarchal society writ large? Later, as these dreams blur into reality, all of these possible interpretations will come to a bloody head.
In recent years, I’ve heard many female led horror films described as “good-for-her” films. Whether Thomasin in The VVitch, Dani in Midsommar, or Dawn in Teeth, there is often a specific and characteristic satisfaction to seeing some woman or girl, whom we have seen marginalized by the people in her life, if not society in general, rising up and taking her place of strength, even if that means engaging in bloody acts. Even if they end up complicit in murder, if not murderers themselves, it’s hard not to nod with a kind of bloody minded approval and think, “good for her.” Romero’s Joan is decades ahead of this curve, shooting her husband in the final reel (possibly accidentally, thinking him the dream intruder, possibly not), this act and its immediate aftermath intercut with her initiation into the local coven of witches.
In that ceremony, a rope is looped around her neck and she is led to kneel, echoing her kennel dream at the opening of the film. Does this suggest that she has just traded one cage for another? I’m not sure why, but in choosing this binding for herself, it doesn’t feel that way. As the film ends, she seems so much more alive. In its bundle of will, magic, the power of the mind, desire, and the mysteries of attraction, Romero’s film presents this woman coming into her own, coming to life, and it is an engaging and touching journey.
While only nominally a horror movie and not the strongest piece in his catalogue, this artifact of early Romero (his third film, after Night of the Living Dead and a romantic comedy I haven’t seen called There’s Always Vanilla) pairs interestingly with both The Amusement Park (also 1973), a recently resurfaced public service short he made about the horrific way the elderly are discarded, and the abovementioned, excellent Martin (also, I assume it must be a direct influence on the rather enjoyable Jakob’s Wife (2021), a story of a dissatisfied housewife getting her groove back after being bitten by a vampire – I wrote a short bit about it here). There could be a valid discussion of how much Romero succeeds or not in engaging with difficulties that were clearly not his own lived experience, but he does so with earnestness and real heart, while bringing some cinematic flair to this grainy, bleak setting. People complain sometimes these days about horror “being too political,” about “virtue signaling” trumping storytelling. Those people should avoid this film – they would hate it. But if you can give it the time, if you can make some allowances, you may find The Season of the Witch the small delight that I do.