2022 A month of Halloween movies -- October 22nd

Season of the Witch/Hungry Wives (1973) [Kanopy]

It has witches.  Does that make it a horror/Halloween movie?  It's written and directed (and shot and edited) by George Romero, he of the zombies and Creepshow and other icky things.  Does this make it a horror/Halloween movie?

Enh.  Not so much.  No more than it makes it a porn movie (it isn't a porn movie) despite the efforts of a distributor (per Wikipedia) to bait-and-switch it as one (hence the "Hungry Wives" alternate/original title and poster, see the accompanying illustration).

I was dithering about what to watch tonight or whether to just go back to a re-read of Harrow the Ninth in preparation for reading Nona the Ninth, out last month; the Halloween music playlist we left running downstairs when we came upstairs tonight conjured up Donovan's "Season of the Witch" (which makes an appearance in Romero's Season of the Witch) as I was scrolling through Kanopy's offerings and scrolled across this one in Kanopy's Horror collection (which perhaps should be in quotes, "Horror" collection); ah, well, I've long had an inordinate fondness for Mr. Romero and I hadn't seen this one so why not?

And it's actually a solid little film.  Romero was a bit genius at coming across with a solid movie on no money, and this one is frankly better acted than quite a lot of his movies and isn't demanding on the SFX front, so there aren't any issues about whether the blood seems too red or the guts too stretchy.

But it also isn't a horror film, unless you want to talk about existential horror.  Joan Mitchell (played by Jan White) is a modern housewife, "modern" in this case meaning ca. 1973, whose Catholicism isn't filling the spiritual hole in her life and whose husband is a drag when he isn't being physically abusive in a traditionally nuclear familial way; whose daughter has turned into a stranger living under her roof; who finds the endless rounds of suburban neighborhood parties full of catty, gossipy, bored, drunk fellow-housewives an endless slog, so she becomes a witch, like one does, and has an affair with a much younger man, like one does, and (spoiler) murders her husband near the end of the movie, like one does, and seems likely to live happier-ever-after.  In the meanwhile she has lots of surreal nightmares that are the nearest the movie comes to being a horror film and by the end she's joined a coven.  (She also is naked at her coven induction and there are some flashes of nipple here and there along with some buttocks when she's carrying on her extramarital hijinks; this is only worth mentioning at all because of the distributor's aforementioned baiting-and-switching attempts to market this as a softcore film on its initial release, and Wikipedia suggests some reviewers at the time of the movie's initial release were a bit baffled by the marketing of Hungry Wives as a softcore film without anything really rising to the level of softcore unless you're the Mike Pence type).

Romero (and more astute critics) consider Season of the Witch a feminist film, and it is.  The patriarchy has made Joan a miserable shell of a human being and becoming a member of a sorority that rejects the patriarchal oppression of her husband, her church, and her ostensibly hippie-ish free-loving paramour opens a door to what may well be a happier, more fulfilling life.  And here we have, perhaps, the real source of my inordinate fondness for George A. Romero.  It's all well and good to love a filmmaker who makes the most of having no budgets to speak of to make fairly effective movies throughout his career, and that would be enough to like him a lot; but Romero was also, dammit, woke before the word existed and unashamedly, unabashedly leftwing and goddamn proud of it and put that part of himself into his work.  Night of the Living Dead is a bitter mirror held up to anti-civil rights crackdowns of the '50s and '60s; Martin an assault on religious fundamentalism; Dawn of the Dead a scathing anti-capitalist/anti-comsumerist parable; Day of the Dead a satire of Reagan-era militarism; Land of the Dead acid poured over George W. Bush's America; Season of the Witch is a movie about sisters gotta do it for themselves and don't let men stand between them and self-actualization because they will if given a toe (or penis) in.  Bless George Romero for that.  We live in an era where idiots will talk about genre films needing to be apolitical to pacify assholes who don't want their vapid amorality held up to the scrutiny it can't survive, and it's a goddamn shame we don't have as many guys still around who, like George A. Romero, were more than happy to extend both middle fingers to a studio system afraid of offending anybody and a fascist-leaning right eager to take offense.  George Romero was unapologetically, happily, exuberantly working-class left-wing and there's been a hole in the culture since his death in 2017.

Idiots on the right will often yawp and moan about how "Such-and-such a movie couldn't be made today," by which they inevitably mean that a movie these days can't be callous and offensive without deservedly being called out for it.  Ironically, not infrequently, they'll refer to a movie that was offensive for the purposes of satirical social commentary; Blazing Saddles is a frequent nominee, because Americans are generally bad at satire and right-wing Americans just the worst at it, and they're especially the sort who caused Dave Chappelle (when Dave Chappelle was still cool) to quit Chappelle Show when he realized people were laughing at the wrong bits (thinking, for instance, it was funny that Chappelle was dropping n-bombs and riffing on stereotypes and missing the real joke at their own expense--that he was using language and stereotypes to make fun of racists, not race).  Season of the Witch probably is a movie that couldn't be made (or couldn't be distributed) today; it was a movie that could hardly be made (or distributed) in 1973, when producers unsuccessfully lobbied Romero to turn it into a sexploitation flick and nevertheless tried to market it as one when he refused.  These days, a movie whose moral is basically, "Everything kinda sucks today so you might as well take a lover, become a pagan, and kill your husband because you won't be any unhappier and it might be a little more fulfilling than raising a family and drinking all the time" would leave any red-blooded American capitalist trying to sell movie tickets in Utah just a little wee bit cold in the extremities.

I liked this movie watching it.  I think I fell in love with it writing about it.  Thank you, George.  I miss you, Mr. Romero.